“Le jour, je collecte et capture des images sonores que je retire de leur réalité tangible. La nuit lorsque tout est calme en surface, ces fragments m’apparaissent sous un autre aspect sublimé qui modifie ma perception initiale. Mon attention se porte sur la myriade de micro détails produits par la captation sonore. Je m’abandonne alors à révéler les imperceptibilités de leur structure inhérente. Modélisant cette matière ineffable, je m’efforce de concevoir une architecture du non visible. Hors de toute temporalité, mon esprit accomplit son voyage nocturne.”
“During the day, I collect and capture sound images that I separate from their tangible reality. At night, when everything seems calm on the surface, these fragments appear to be sublimed and changed in aspect, which modifies my initial perception. My attention is set on the myriad of micro details produced by the sound capture. I then abandon myself to reveal the imperceptibilities inherant to their structure. Modelling this unspeakable matter, I strive to conceive an architecture of the non visible. Out of all temporality, my spirit accomplishes its nocturnal journey.”
– Jérémie Mathes, January 2010
Sund (Excerpt):
Marie Céleste (Excerpt):
Reviews
Vital Weekly
Mystery Sea continues to surprise us with new names. Here we have the debut album (or rather ‘his proper significative debut’, which may hint at other releases) of Jeremie Mathes, from France. He studied electro-acoustic composition and uses on this album sea shells, reef, shore, sand, rumbled, insects but also cymbals, candle holder, bass, ebow, horn, various percussions and electronic devices. Not that its easy to tell from what I heard as Mathes knows very well how to transform whatever it is that he uses into five pieces of what is best described as ‘sound matter’. Its not easy to detect some aquatic theme to it, usually required by the label (other than perhaps such titles as ‘Mary Celeste’ and ‘Sund’), but Mathes creates some fine drone like music that goes well with the label’s catalogue (which, come to think of it, taking in account their ongoing release schedule, can be placed along the lines of Drone Records and Taalem, except Mystery Sea does them one at a time). The acousmatic approach used by Mathes is not that of gliding scales of sound going up and down, but slowly building blocks of sound. His music resembles in a way that of Kassel Jaeger, another new name from 2010, that holds promise for the future and in some ways also Main/Robert Hampson comes close. Mathes delivers quite a good debut album. Not really a surprise in terms of ‘new’ music, but its all crafted in a more than excellent way. (FdW) Vital Weekly
On debut Árset French electro-acoustician Jérémie Mathes, a new name to the dream of fields, wields seashells, reef, shore, sand, rumbled (sic), and insects in addition to the more conventional cymbals, candle holder, bass, ebow, horn, percussion and electronic devices. Not that you’d be able to tag them, so transformative is his processing. The MS aquatic theme is titularly signalled (“Mary Celeste,” “Sund”), as Mathes creates a soundtrack to fogbound navigations and dimlit palaeontologies. Using field recordings, improvisation with found objects, he shows a propensity for elaborating organic textures combined with electronic treatments, his compositions carefully sculpted with a certain suggestive resonance.
And nocturnal indeed is the mood and shade of Árset, which finds Mathes exhibiting a command of dark arts and archaeology – dark in the sense of a dense documenting, of rich textural seams, rather than the dulling gloom-mongering exercises of amateur-hour Dark Ambient genre-drabs. Mathes manages to transform fragments of his environs into narcotic scenes haunted with sinister resonance. Witness “Inherent,” whose unmoored drift teems with the particulate matter of his ‘architecture of the non visible’. (Alan Lockett) Furthernoise