This album is far from recent: I don’t know why but somehow it just slipped through.
Stephan Mathieu’s “The Falling Rocket“ was released in march 2013, followed by a vinyl edition in June.
Of all ‘drone’ albums released in 2013, this must be one of the very best. If not the very best.
So I guess there’s no excuse for not mentioning it now, even if it’s almost a year later. Better late than never, I guess..
The sounds on “The Falling Rocket“ were created using a Farfisa Pro 110, Farfisa VIP 233, Hohner Elektronium and Radio. Apart from the short intermission track “Deneb”, which was built from a 1929 78RPM recording of “Fantasy for a Chest of Six Viols”, composed by Thomas Weelkes.
All tracks were performed in realtime, to an almost unbelievable result. No after-processing was done, not even to erase a few moments of clipping.
So, this is nót ‘computer music’, which may partly explain why it sounds so original and ‘different’. It feels as if these sounds come travelling to you from the other side of the universe (which may of course also be induced by the album and track titles).
There’s something strange with the track lengths on this 82 minute album 5 tracks are exact 10’10” in length, the last two tracks are 10’20” and 10’30” respectively, and the album is divided by two shorter tracks (02’10” and 08’10”, together equalling 10’20”).
I wonder what could be the mathematical message behind this?
Sometimes, it’s hard to explain to someone why a drone can be so very fascinating to listen to. (And, of course, there are a lot not-so-very interesting drones floating around currently). But if you just listen carefully to “The Falling Rocket“, you’ll understand. (Or not, but then probably drone music is not the thing for you).
As you may guess, the vinyl is sold out by now, but luckily Stephan Mathieu still has the album available for download (in 24 bit FLAC format!) on his own Schwebung website.
STEPHAN MATHIEU – KEID