"A Static Place is about the journey of sound. Between 1928 and 1932 the earliest recordings of historically informed performances of music from the late Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque era were etched onto 78 RPM records. I used some of these records from my collection, playing them back on a pair of HMV 102 acoustic gramophones. The initial soundwaves produced back then by period instruments, like the clavichord, viols, lute, hurdy-gurdy, are read from the grooves by a cactus needle and amplified by the gramophone's diaphragm housed in a soundbox. Those vibrations travel through the tonearm which is connected straight to the gramophone's horn, which releases the music to your space. Here the sound is again picked up by a pair of customised microphones and send to my computer, to be transformed by spectral analysis and convolution processes." - Stephan Mathieu, Madrid, 31 November 2010

Stephan Mathieu
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