Stephan Mathieu - RADIANCE X: HER DARK GAZE DROWNED IN LIGHT (2017)

The beginnings of the album date back to 2004 when I was invited to perform a live score for Vampyr at the Louvre in Paris. I started making recordings with pianist Olga Politova whom I asked to play some variant forms of Clara Schumann’s Nocturnes for me, for instance by playing selected chords in extreme slow motion with the sustain pedal held down, or harmonic movements as frozen clusters using strumming techniques. By the same time I started using shortwave radio as a live input for my processing techniques, so I've created various long tracks by modulating Olga’s playing with random radio input. Back then I didn't understand the resulting pieces and since the Louvre performance soon got cancelled, I've shelved the material until Winter 2015 when I rediscovered Dreyer’s movie and decided to work on the music again.

While I had initially planned to create a synced score to play along with the Criterion edition of the high-definition transfer from the 1998 restoration of Vampyr, Radiance X eventually contains a series of sonic images from the film as well as portraits of the three main female characters. In addition to the aforementioned piano recordings I used the 10" record of the Hollywood String Quartet’s performance of Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht and guitar recordings made by Sylvain Chauveau.

Radiance X has a deliberate sonic edginess, so in some parts you will hear a soft harmonic clipping or out of phase content. As always, I recommend to download a lossless version of the music.