stephan mathieu & ekkehard ehlers: heroin

Between Christmas 2000 and New Year 2001, producers Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephan Mathieu recorded an album of warm, soft, delicately crackling electronic music in the space of that week. It was christened with the ambivalent title Heroin and was released on CD via the label Brombron in 2001 and later in 2003 re-issued on Kit Clayton's Orthlorng Musork on double-LP with remixes the pair had commissioned as expansions. 17 years later Heroin sees its first vinyl release to include all 13 tracks from the original CD track list on this LP plus 12" set. The centerpiece "Herz" finally receives its long deserved vinyl treatment (side C, at 45rpm) and on the flip side Thomas Brinkmann contributes a mirror in a magnificent remix of that very piece on side D. Ehlers and Mathieu were both highly prolific solo artists during the period 2000-2004, and in just two years after the initial release of Heroin each had produced over half a dozen new solo recordings: among them the serial masterpiece Ehlers' Plays released as five stunning LPs in a series on Staubgold, while Mathieu's Full Swing Edits spread over five 10" records plus his album FrequencyLib on Mille Plateaux, Die Entdeckung des Wetters on Lucky Kitchen, and The Sad Mac on Atsushi Sasaki's Headz label. Heroin is an album that embraces the happy accident being made up of reduced, often very catchy and very direct micro hooks which seem laser-guided into a space accepting obvious melodic beauty in what feels like an observation of musics unfolding and revealing it's DNA, embed with for a kind of yearning for innocence and naiveté -- as if Satie were on the jukebox in The Crying of Lot 49. The album not only sounds like that of two producers who are both dreamers and scientists, but that Ehlers and Mathieu chose to work with these means in a dialogue together to reduce pop music to its musical/tonal core, it is not pop music anymore, rather a ghostly pointilistic itteration of song. Heroin is located at this transition, around that point at which tracks, that were or could have become pop compositions, irrevocably slip into a static harmonic nirvana. Includes printed inner sleeves and download code; Edition of 500.