Mathieu first collaborated with Sylvian at 2011’s Punkt festival in Kristiansand, Norway, when he performed a live remix of Sylvian / Czukay’s ambient classicPlight and Premonition. “I’ve lived with Stephan’s work for many years,” says Sylvian. “After hearing his remix at Punkt I decided he’d be the right person to take an alternate approach to the Blemish files.”
“The recordings have a beautiful clarity about them due to their simple but sturdy frameworks, and their open-ended architecture makes them ideal for a project of this sort.” When Mathieu first heard Blemish, “I was quite amazed by the album, its dark beauty… . When David sent me the files from the sessions one year ago, they were a pool of wonderful material to me, detached from the songs and original album, while very much connected to David at the same time.”
A startling break from Sylvian’s previous work, Blemish is pensive and spare, wrapping a lyrical raw nerve in extended, drone-like song structures. Recorded in a relatively-quick six week burst, Blemish was “cathartic” for Sylvian. An earlier remix album, 2005’s The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter, took the material in varied and lusher directions, but Wandermüde puts it under a microscope. The catharsis of the original is tested and reinvigorated by Mathieu’s treatment, which he performs in real time.
“My work with computers is always live,” Mathieu explains. “I’m feeding selected material into a software process and record the output, which I either take as is, or discard completely. I don’t multi-track, edit or re-arrange, I’m interested in self-evolving sound with all its rough and sometimes faulty qualities. I never use effects like artificial reverb in my music, so what you hear is rather a piling up of spaces that surround the individual inputs used for my processes.
“With David’s recordings I melted them with my instruments, recorded several takes and picked the best ones. While I first processed the recordings quite heavily, it took me a while to notice that I come to better results when David’s performance shines through much more clearly. For instance with the original guitar from Blemish, I only applied a soft processing and made a room recording of playing this version back through two Fender Twin amps.”
A guest from Blemish also makes a return appearance on this album. Guitarist and electronics artist Christian Fennesz contributes to “Deceleration,”. “‘Fire in the Forest,’ just as its sister ‘Transit’ on Fennesz’ Venice album are to me perfect models for what a 21st century song can be,” says Mathieu. “Since he had only a couple of days to work on this, he came up with this rough and very beautiful recording of his guitar playing in the last moment. It was love at first sight for me.”
Wandermüde is exquisitely planned but executed in real time, drawn from old pains but breathing with new life. The title of the album – “tired of wandering” – implies a fatigue, a resignation, and an end; but the music itself crackles with suspense and anticipation, marking a moment of reflection before a journey begins.
STAFF COMMENTS
Barry says: Originally released in 2012, this beautiful mixture of atmospheric ambient and organic drone sees David Sylvian's recordings expertly manipulated by one of the leading figures in ambient music production, Stephan Mathieu. Soaring choral echoes and snippets of guitar break through the hypnotic ambient washes, resulting in a wholly meditative and thoroughly stunning end result.
TRACK LISTING
A1 Saffron Laudanum 08:36
A2 Velvet Revolution 07:50
B1 Trauma Ward 06:00
B2 The Farther Away I Am 11:10
C1 Dark Pastoral 04:05
C2 Telegraphed Mistakes 14:04
D1 Deceleration 05:22
D2 I Can`t Pretend To Care 08:40
