Welcome

to Bitsteam.de, an archive for text, sound and image related to the work of Stephan Mathieu.

You will find a short introduction on what I’m doing at the bottom of this page, please go here for more info about my background.

Apart from posting news I will frequently add infos on my past releases and installations. The Downloads section will follow soon and the Shop will be introduced in October 2008 with, among others, a very special item in a limited edition of 1.

If you’d like to be notified on news and updates, send me a message so I can include you in my mailing list. Messages sent to you will be brief, in plain text and sent out only ocasionally.

Thanks for your interest and enjoy your stay*

- Stephan

- Schafbrücke, August 16.2008

Stephan Mathieu is a musician and sound artist based in Saarbrücken, Germany.

I’m working in the field of digital art, mainly as a self taught composer and performer of my own music. I create audio installations, work as a hobbyist photographer and graphic designer, and taught Digital Arts and Theory at the HBKSaar University of Art and Design in Saarbrücken and as a guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Arts in Göteborg, the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Merz-Akademie in Stuttgart.

During the last decade my music has been released on 16 critical acclaimed CDs, both solo and in collaboration with Douglas Benford, Ekkehard Ehlers, John Hudak, Janek Schaefer and Akira Rabelais on some of the finest electronic music labels worldwide.

My sound is largely based on early instruments, environmental sound and obsolete media which are recorded and transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and software processes involving spectral analysis and convolution, and has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the work of Colorfield artists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.

I have performed my music live around the world, on festivals like Mutek Montreal, Sonar Barcelona, Frequenzen Hz Frankfurt, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in Rotterdam, Fylkingen 40! Stockholm and Atlantic Waves London, in some great venues like Lampo Chicago, Phill Niblocks Experimental Intermedia New York, at Radialsystem V and Volksbühne Berlin, but also in historical monuments like the Aula Palatina in Trier or the Völklinger Hütte ironworks.

Since 1998 I created various audio installations for galleries and museums, a glass-blowing factory, a 17th century garden, Berlin Mitte, a 19th century steel plant, parks, an arrangement of 30 Peugeots, a late antique throne hall and other places.

I’m a collector of 78rpm records from the 1910s and 20s, the era of acoustic and early electronic audio recording. I love the way they transport sound.

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Please go here to read more about my background and there to listen to some of my music.

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“Mathieu shows that that most functional and impersonal of musical instruments, the laptop, is capable of producing work not only of great beauty, but of mysterious and powerful emotion.”

Dan Warburton in Paris Transatlantic

“Mathieu has succeeded to create a sound of his own, unique from anything else I know.”

Frans de Waard in Vital Weekly

“By the way, Stephan Mathieu is considered one of the most important laptop musicians of our days.”

Wired Magazine, San Francisco

Portrait by Akira Rabelais