Sinew0od for Buchla #
Sinew0od is a modular system in which the player becomes part of a controlled feedback system. It was originally composed as a piece for Paetzold contrabass recorder, but the system’s constituent parts has since then been re-patched and further explored as a basis for new pieces. So far the system has been used in a version for bass clarinet, Halldorophone, and here as a new piece for Buchla modular synthesizer with an added electroacoustic speaker.
While performing the piece, the physical body of the instrument becomes both an extension and a modulator to the other parts in the system. The player navigates the feedback network by exploring and mapping the sonic affordances, using the instrument as a probe and a score as a guide.
The piece was commissioned by the Swedish Radio for the Art’s Birthday Party EBU broadcast, January 17, 2024, and will be included in an upcoming release for Caprice records, celebrating Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) 60 year anniversary.
Info #
Artist: Mattias Petersson
Format: CD
Label: Caprice Music
Release date: Upcoming.
Mastered by: Johannes Ahlberg at Saintpid Mastering
Artwork: n/a
Triangular Progressions #
Triangular Progressions is a suite in nine parts written entirely in the SuperCollider programming environment. In using pure additive synthesis, with sinusoidal components only, I wanted to create something that resembled a pipe organ,but with independent tuning and control of all the stops and registers. The result is an organ-like texture, navigating an uncanny valley between the digital and the virtual acoustic.
The starting point for the piece is a magic number triangle that I invented during my early composition studies and which has been an obsession for over twenty-five years, also shaping the foundation of many other of my works. By exploring the harmonic progressions found hiding within the triangle, Triangular Progressions at once emits a sense of introspective calm that fosters deep listening and evokes a whole spectrum of emotions, mediating between the abstract and the visceral.
Info #
Artist: Mattias Petersson
Format: Vinyl
Label: Hallow Ground
Release date: February 24, 2023.
Mastered by: Andreas Lupo Lubich
Artwork: Laurin Huber
Artefact #
Artefact was released under my moniker Codespira1 on the Dutch label Moving Furniture Records in 2016. It is a set of pieces that resembles a life cycle of the subconscious imagined as an articulated drone.
During the course of life, various events gradually build up a library of memories. In many ways they define our emotions, making us for example more sensitive to certain stimuli than others. Unexpected, profound resonances might occur when we find ourselves in new situations and several of those memories seem to merge into one. A shift in our subconscious drone happens and something new takes shape. An artefact – both in the sense of a “found object” and as a glitch in the system.
Info #
Artist: Codespira1
Format: CD
Label: Moving Furniture Records
Release date: June 13, 2016.
Mastered by: Jos Smolders at EAR Labs
Artwork: Zeno van den Broek
CODE009 – Rasterfeld Archives #1 #
CODE009 – Rasterfeld Archives 01 was my second album as Codespira1. It’s a digital album released by the CO-DEPENDENT label.
The tracks were all made in a DAW-like sequencing environment I coded in SuperCollider, and as a result of an attempt to add live coding facilities to the system.
Info #
Artist: Codespira1
Format: Digital
Label: CO-DEPENDENT
Release date: April 10, 2019.
Mastered by: Mattias Petersson
Artwork: @manygradients
Dronecember 2022 #
Dronecember 2022 was the result of joining the #dronecember project on Mastodon. The idea was to compose, perform, and publish a piece of drone music everyday in December 2022.
The result comprises 31 pieces in which I used various combinations of modular systems, SuperCollider code, and simple mixing and editing in Bitwig. Usually, I went with the first patch idea i got everyday and the recordings were quite imrpovisatory in their nature.
An interesting aspect of this project was how easy it felt for the first ten days or so. During this period I had lots of “what-if”-ideas, and usually just started of by exploring single modules of my systems. In the next phase, I had a strong feeling that I had run out of ideas and that I already had explored everything in my studio. I experienced a kind of artistic fatique, and during these days it was a lot harder to get going. However, after this phase it became easier again, and now the focus was not so much on invention, but instead the musicality of the realization. Although, the most important lessons I learned was that interesting music came out during all these phases.
Videos #
Info #
Artist: Mattias Petersson
Format: Digital
Label: Bandcamp
Release date: December 01, 2023.
Mastered by: Mattias Petersson
Artwork: Mattias Petersson
Remaining oddities, resultant additives #
Remaining oddities, resultant additives was released by the now defunct label Jahr Null Aufnahmen in 2010.
Most of the music on the album was originally composed as a live electronic score for the dance performance No mans land, no lands man in 2009, commissioned by the dance company Scentrifug.
Info #
Artist: Mattias Petersson
Format: CD
Label: Jahr Null Aufnahmen
Release date: November 30, 2010.
Mastered by: Mattias Petersson
Artwork: Jonatan Liljedahl
Floodlight #
Floodlight was released by Ideal Recordings in 2008. It is a suite of five pieces, all based on improvisations and real-time cutups of small sound cells in a self-made Max/MSP based instrument.
Swedish electronica expert Mattias Peterson manages to juggle his clearly very keen ear for melody with an appetite for noise throughout this impressive album, saturating every harmonious strand with coating after coating of digital distortion, leaving the opening pairing of ‘Neverfield’ and ‘Floodlight’ thoroughly caked in the stuff. ‘Reality Distortion Fist’ sees something of a letup from all that, offering an electroacoustic interlude, during which piano chords are dissolved into an industrial soundscape full of punishing vaporous textures. Of all these pieces, the finale ‘Bitch Process’ is probably the most up-front with its unpleasantness, assaulting your ears with a Mego-like disregard for conventional musicality.
Boomkat, 2008:
Mattias Petersson’s take on electronica is damaged, juddering and stuck, though it often shows great melodic flare and beauty as well as noisy and atmospheric learning’s too. Floodlight is his second full length and his first release for Ideal Recordings. Opening up the album we have the track Neverfield which presents a warming, vibe like harmonic melody that jitters and splutters its wayalong almost always on the edge of juddering to a full stop like a faulty computer grasping its last stutters of day glow colour- yet it never fully stops and Peterson builds an compelling, tuneful and damaged track. The title track is next and once more offers up quite a harmonic grounding for the track between the jittering and juddering dense electro and synth tones. This is a lot more hectic, flickering and manic then the first track I guess much like a floodlight rapidly flicking on and off and you trying to figure out exactly what’s in front of you. Next is Reality Distortion Fist which starts off with a doomy piano hit before dropping into a collection subterranean rumbles, tumbles and muffled static rolls that feels your like sitting under a vast underground milling machine- this has none of the melodic niceties of the first two tracks been more about atmospherics, through there are lose instrumental textures darting here and there like funked bass and doomy piano hits at times this boils up to some quite noisy and fiery peaks. The next track Firecharger continues the edgy atmospheric edge with jerking, shadowy, doomy to feedback high pitched interlocking synth elements that again boil up to quite noisy and searing heights. And lastly we have Bitch Process which is a collection of shorting and faulty synth tones with hints at melodic and rhythmic shapes but is too jittery, shorting-out and manic to make any firm patterns from. Floodlight is a great, enjoyable and varied collection of jittery, shorting and messed up electroinca with hints of noise, ambience, electro acoustics and soundart. That can be either melodic, atmospherics or quite searing.
Roger Batty for Musique Machine 2008:
Info #
Artist: Mattias Petersson
Format: CD
Label: Ideal Recordings
Release date: April 10, 2008.
Mastered by: Andreas Tilliander at Repeatle
Artwork: Nordwall and Nullvoid
STRÖM #
STRÖM by Mattias Petersson (music) and Fredrik Olofsson (video) is a 45 minute piece for five loudspeakers, live-electronics and live-video, based on an open-minded, artistic approach towards electricity. The piece is an attempt to transfer electric currents via sound to the audience. The five speakers in the surround system struggles to take over the sonic stream like electromagnets. Sine waves and noise rotate at breakneck speed around the listeners, try to charge them with static electricity, and, as an ultimate goal, even make them levitate.
The video part is directly controlled by the sound and is generated out of five discrete lines - one for each channel in the surround system. The lines are treated in different ways, and as the high voltage builds up in the music they look more and more like electric wires, inflicting each other with violent discharges and eruptions.
The piece is divided into two main parts; the first is around 15 minutes and the second is 30 minutes. The second part is sub-divided into 9 parts of equal length. On the DVD this is shown as different chapters for convenience, although these are not to be considered as different “songs” - more like different levels of high voltage. For maximum effect and levitation height, Ström should be watched and listened to from beginnning to end.
Thanks to The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Fylkingen, EMS, Bill Brunson and Pär Lindgren for all their support in realizing this piece and its release.
The DVD-release was kindly subsidized by The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs.
Info #
Music: Mattias Petersson
Video: Fredrik Olofsson
Format: DVD
Label: Fylkingen Records
Release date: November 28, 2008.
Mastering and DVD authoring by: Mattias Petersson
Artwork: Nullvoid
Mimer #
Mimer is my debut album on Fylkingen Records, released in 2003 (FYCD1021). The music was based on field recordings made inside the defunct iron mine Mimer in Norberg, Sweden, during the summer of 2001.
The album comprises seventeen tracks that cross reference each other in various ways. Each track is based on one of nine short loops, selected from the original recordings and treated with different processing techniques. A basic idea was to reimagine the original sound environment from the days when the mine was still active, and to capture the decay and corrosion of the once very powerful, but now silent and abandoned, machines, containers and silos in the closed mine.
Mattias Petersson has here successfully conjured up a dead world, one which - however much the subject matter might bring to mind Paul Weller or Lee Dorsey - has the same clicky, cutty feel to it as a lump of Fennesz, or a nugget of John Duncan at his best. Intriguing stuff, the clang and clatter of activity has a curiously restful effect, it’s like being there without having to be there. Excellent!
Stewart Gott, FLUXEUROPA
The release of this album on Fylkingen Records was subsidized by The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs.
Info #
Artist: Mattias Petersson
Format: CD
Label: Fylkingen Records
Release date: June 10, 2003.
Mastered by: Mattias Petersson
Artwork: Sten Backman
