Fantasy: is it beyond visual and sonic? Listening: is it beyond visual and sonic? Is listening a fantasy? What’s what is actually hidden in the sonic texture created in the inmmersive situation to which Before Nostromo leads? Very far from being conclusive, it doesn’t give answers to our questions, but a playful perceptual contract, one in which listening is opened, sent directly to an state where is not only possible to feel what is sounding out, but navigate through it, as a cosmonaut but of the acousmatic. Here the point doesn’t seems to be only about contemplating sound as such, but being submerged into its world, its fabula, where composition and listening are approached in a sublime but paradigmatic encounter, the one happening within the acoustic and the imaginary, a situation in which, what is heard, proposes its own universe, plenum of stillness, based on absorption and resulting in a fictional world that is made of forms which are sinister and unknown, but strangely familiar and pleasant at the same time. Intense textures and drones are here integrated on their course as a constant involvement in subtle vibrations; not silent, not sonic at all, but ghostly, apt to evoke dream rather than concealing materiality. Mathieu establishes a subdued and delicate landscape, with some moments to float through the fog, and others to rise into the skies of an unknown realm. But one thing for sure: it unfolds a soundtrack for daydreams, incidentally breaking the apparent limits of reality. (schwebung)
Stephan Mathieu – Before Nostromo
