Bleep

In the extra-temporal non-space between Christmas 2000 and New Year 2001, producer duo Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers concocted the quietly melancholic electronic sounds of Heroin, an LP caught between noise and song; form and abstraction, not unlike the time of year itself. Shades of Jon Brion shine in the back-masked piano jollity of ‘Rose’, while a submerged sample lifted from Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack on ‘Turkey Song’ invokes long-lost memories akin to The Caretaker. ‘Herz’ is the centrepiece of Heroin, an 8-minute series of snapping synoptic crackles and mounting, haunting ambience.