Sylvian, David & Stephan Mathieu: Wandermüde (DELUXE EDITION, CLEAR) LP

Maiden vinyl pressing for Stephan Mathieu’s immersive electro-acoustic reinterpretation of a David Sylvian’s experimental masterpiece, transforming its avant-ambient torchsongs into synaesthetically enhanced, starry-eyed thizz and drone bliss - Massive RIYL Akira Rabelais, Fennesz, Basinski...

Originally issued in 2003, David Sylvian’s ‘Blemish’ is a quietly resounding highlight of the erstwhile Japan member and regular Ryuichi Sakamoto collaborator’s oeuvre. Ten years layer, electro-acoustic illusionist and de-composer Stephen Mathieu dissected and restructured that album, resulting in ‘Wandermüde’, featuring its instrumental textures re-sampled, re-amped, and reshaped with a keener attention to timbral and spatial qualities. In the process, Stephen Mathieu renders its spirits more supine and emphasises the music’s sense of wonder, oscillating between introspective and euphoric feelings in an almost out-of-body experience. Most uncannily for anyone familiar with ‘Blemish’, while Sylvian’s vocals are not found on the new recordings, his presence somehow poignantly lingers and bleeds thru in the slow burn candescence and pathos of Mathieu’s reworks with ghostly effect as your memory appears to fill in the gaps. Now repackaged with a previously unheard closing part of smouldering strings in ‘I Can’t Pretend to Care’, the album is, on one level, a resoundingly romantic reminder of Mathieu’s natural feel for panoramic classical music, while on another it exemplifies his technical ability in skewing temporal and spatial proprioceptions, and ultimately transporting you outside yourself. With the flickering light of Sylvian’s vocals vanquished, Mathieu’s revisions encourage participants to operate by sixth and other senses in the metaphoric darkness, as implied literally by the title and aerosolised sensuality of ‘Saffron Laudanum’, and more physically by the reverberating strings of ‘Velvet Revolution’, or vertiginous looking-down-wrong-end-of-a-telescope feel to ‘The Farther Away I Am’, while ‘Dark Pastoral’ hallucinates a Lynchian noir, and ‘Deceleration’ renders a moment of Sylvian’s melancholy into infinite tristesse.