Another Pop #3: Matthias Heiderich
March 25, 2011, 0 comments
It’s been a while, but here’s the third installment of our Another Pop series, NFOP’s delightful excursions into realms of pop music that we don’t cover all too often. We’re more than happy to present our first homegrown guest this time, Berlin-born/based photographer/net label co-runner/electronic music producer Matthias Heiderich. Before we share a few words about Heiderich’s new exhibition White Noise, starting tonight at Friedrichshain, Berlin’s Spot Galerie, enjoy the artist’s notes about some of his recent musical obsessions, neatly compiled into a splendid mix that you’ll also find below.
Matthias Heiderich:
In 2007 my good friend Dorothea aka Wolfseule and I started a netlabel called WeirdAndWired. We release weird, dark, experimental underground music. Although I am generally interested in almost all kinds of music, my main field of interest lies in the darker subgenres of ambient music – namely drone, noise, dark ambient and neoclassical music. Ever since I came across productions by musicians like Biosphere, Tim Hecker, Thomas Köner, or Deathprod, this music has captivated me with the dark, melancholic, dystopian feeling it has to it.
Mainly the Norwegian school of dark ambient and noise music has been in the focus of my musical interest ever since my first contact with the Rune Grammofon label around the beginning of the naughties. People like Helge Sten, Espen Sommer Eide, and Geir Jensen with their experimental and often wildly improvised production methods have created an incredible amount of influential output that has a massive impact on all my activities as a music producer and netlabel owner, and also my work as a photographer. Norway as a country predestined to breeding musicians focusing on the darker side of ambient music still is a lively microcosm in itself. Like Rune Grammofon the label Miasmah, run by Erik Skodvin aka Svarte Greiner and half of Deaf Center, has released a couple of absolutely stunning dark ambient releases in the last years by Norwegian artists like ELegi, Juv, and Skodvin himself, but also non-Scandinavian artists like Rafael Anton Irisarri and Simon Scott. Of course there is more than one country on the map of dark ambient music, but Norway is definitely somewhere near the center.
My mix includes some of those mentioned dark ambient producers and others from around the globe that have been with me during my phototrips quite often in the last years.
Thomas Köner – Teimo: The subfrequencies of German Thomas Köner’s productions always blow my mind in an absolutely positive way. I became a huge fan of all of his work in the recent years.
Elegi – Despotiets Vesen: Elegi from Norway released some of the most depressing tracks I ever came across. That’s enough to make me love him.
Jacascek – Taniec: Polish Jacascek released one of my all time favourite albums ever, Treny. Wonderful, deep, melancholic neoclassical music.
Deaf Center – The Clearing: Svarte Greiner and Otto Totland from Norway are two of the most prolific producers in the Norwegian dark ambient scene. Their Album Pale Ravine is absolutely brilliant.
Biosphere – Poa Alpina: Biosphere is without doubt the most influential producer in the (dark) ambient scene.
Deathprod – Treetop Drive 3: Helge Sten aka Deathprod and part of Supersilent is a master in the field of experimental production methods. His 4CD Box released by Rune Grammofon is a collection of morbid masterpieces.
Aaron Martin – Marrow Cycle: Aaron Martin from the US is a streneous musician and likes to torture his instruments (often it sounds as if they were screaming in pain). His sound is absolutely unique.
Phonophani – Mendel: Espen Sommer Eide is an experimentalist and squeezes his sounds out of amazing instruments he invents. He releases truly inspiring stuff.
Clouwbeck – Oxide: One of many monikers of Richard Skelton whose music always sounds like deserted landscapes and windy shores, at least in my opinion.
Hecq – Above: Hecq from Berlin made a couple of awesome dark ambient tracks. He’s a master of music production and his low frequencies give me the shivers.
Some words about Matthias Heiderich and White Noise:
Having started with fine art photography not too long ago, until recently Matthias Heiderich mostly focused on the architectural landscapes of his hometown Berlin. The monochromatic, eerie shots of a forlorn countryside drenched in fog shown at White Noise hence opens a whole new perspective on the artist. The term White Noise, of course, mainly refers to that certain kind of aural signal and as such also hints at Heiderich’s background as an electronic musician devoted to dark, noise-informed ambient music. At the same time, the obvious contradiction of the term in regard to the photos themselves, given that fog is the meteorological phenomenon connected to the end of all sounds due to its physical properties in relation to sound propagation, offers a lot of possible interpretations considering the interrelationship between contemporary visual art and music, without relying on obvious means of cross-media techniques.
The exhibition officially starts tomorrow, March 26, and is open till April 23, Tuesday to Saturday between 1 PM and 7 PM. You can find more samples over here.
All photos taken from White Noise. © 2011 Matthias Heiderich.
