Mathias Delplanque

News from Ici D'Ailleurs Mind Travels Series: Mathias Delplanque is an artist from Nantes who was born in Burkina Faso and has close links with the ambient, electronic, electro-acoustic and concrete musical spheres as well as dub and field recordings. Normally Mathias takes his time to finely and obsessively sculpt his work down to the smallest detail but here Drachen (Dragons in German) reveals itself to be a much more direct and incisive album. Taking the idea that impurities can also give life to music as a starting point, he set himself a constant working rhythm and the aim of adding interference rather than the sublime going so far as to create actual interference with his mobile phone to disturb the rhythm and harmony of his compositions. By his own admission, he works urgently to induce mistakes or accidents to liberate himself from his own automatic reflexes. All sorts of instruments (guitar, bass, melodica, kora, synths etc.) are run through live electronic processing and he manages to bring a beautiful melancholy - even a certain tenderness - out of this sonic mass despite the roughness of the overall sound. The record is made up of 7 highly distinct pieces which nevertheless fit together as a coherent whole.