Stephan Mathieu - Before Nostromo

Pitchfork 79

It's ironic that Alien's famous tagline—In space no one can hear you scream—emphasizes the silence of the void, because sound is woven into the film's innermost fibers. A nearly constant backdrop of rumble accompanies the Nostromo as it slips across that godforsaken quadrant of the galaxy. The steady drone whipped up by the ship's vibrations quietly erupts into all manner of rustle and whirr—the bleeping of the navigation system, the hissing of steam vents, and countless quavering whines of uncertain provenance—until the entire world of the film feels cocooned inside an omnipresent hum.

That buzzing matrix is the subject of Before Nostromo, a new album by the German musician Stephan Mathieu. Mathieu has been working the seam between ambient, musique concrète, and microsound since the late '90s, running vintage acoustic instruments and obsolete media like wax cylinders through electroacoustic processing and digital treatments. Mathieu describes Before Nostromo as an homage to Alien's sound design, and he has given the work a novel premise. Just prior to being awakened from hypersleep by the ship's computer, the film's seven characters—Ripley, Dallas, Parker, Lambert, Kane, Brett, and even Ash, the android—each have a dream. So does Jonesey the cat. Eight tracks, ranging from four minutes to nearly 20 minutes in length, represent those respective dreams. (A ninth, "Anamorphosis", rounds out the set; Mathieu suggests that it may be attributed to the Nostromo's other passenger, the alien.)

To record the music, Mathieu used two large gongs, piano, and shortwave radio, but none of those elements are obvious from the sound of the music, which changes colors as imperceptibly as late-afternoon light. "Entropic processes," like those Alvin Lucier used to create I Am Sitting in a Room, in which a spoken text gradually decays as it bounces back and forth between two reel-to-reel players, are key to the music's soft, rounded forms.

Using relatively modest means, Mathieu evokes a vast expanse. Rarely, though, do you hear a note being produced; sounds slink into being like shadows creeping across the wall, and they abscond just as imperceptibly. There's a brief tinkling, as of wind chimes, in "Stasis 7 (Ash the Android's Dream)"; in "Stasis 1 (Dallas' Dream)" there's a sourceless tapping that reappears in "Stasis 4 (Brett's Dream)", as if Harry Dean Stanton's character were down in the engine room, banging away on pipes. Otherwise, though, everything is as soft and sanded down as a coastline worn smooth by the millennia. His abstracted shapes genuinely resemble dreams, albeit the memories of one from which you've just emerged tugging at the edges of your consciousness.

Before Nostromo is best suited for deep listening. With so few obvious features to grasp on to, even after multiple plays you may not immediately be able to tell the difference between one "dream" and another. But that's hardly the point. These bottom-of-the-well fantasies are the headiest kind of echo-chamber music, fusing the unstable oscillations of Kevin Drumm's Imperial Horizon and Folke Rabe's What?! with the soft spectral explosion of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna and the melancholy decay of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops.

It's worth noting that Before Nostromo is a digital-only release—a format that Mathieu has dedicated himself to with religious zeal, for reasons both economic and audiophile. The album takes the form of a 24-bit FLAC (the download also includes a beautifully designed PDF booklet designed by his wife, Caro Mikalef) and it sounds unusually sumptuous, with a richness—dynamic, timbral, spatial—that is all too rare in digital music. Spend some time with Mathieu's gorgeous, absorbing tribute, and then return to Alien, and you may find yourself hearing the film as you never have before.

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“Minutes before the Nostromo crew awakes from hypersleep, each member has a dream.”

Before Nostromo takes place inside the diegesis of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. Specifically, it takes place at the beginning of the film, minutes prior to the awakening of the crew. Moments before the introduction of the alien itself. Each of these pieces represents the dream of a different crew member, acting as a soundtrack for the transition between hypersleep and consciousness; perhaps a curdling of memories and character personality traits, perhaps a swirling of anxieties and astral nausea, perhaps a prophetic siren that whispers, wordlessly, of the imminent extra-terrestrial threat.

I hear the sounds of corporeal environment – the Nostromo spacecraft, to be precise – refracted as they infiltrate each dream state. The hisses of decompression are stretched into infinite strands of expelled static. Bleeps of cockpit monitoring equipment are softened into gentle, peripheral pulses. The voices of the crew are warped into hums of the gong, which flail like gushes of amplifier feedback. I feel the proximity of emergent consciousness; high-pitched drones piercing like spotlights through water, tilted like ladders leading back to the surface of the awoken state.

I can’t help but try to unpack the implications of what I hear, reconciling sound with each character’s forthcoming fate. Ripley’s dream is the longest at 20-minutes. I hear glimmers of methodical melodic progression; tiny string sections that unfurl from the corner of my right ear, like composure extending into the mire of dissonance and violence. I am torn between two different interpretations of the cloud of shimmers that engulfs the final minutes. Either this pleasant conclusion forecasts Ripley’s survival, or it embodies the resilient tranquillity that enables Ripley to conquer the threat to her life. In contrast, the dream of Jonesy (the ship’s cat) is more fleeting and harsh – I hear the shrieks of confusion and daggers of senseless noise, as the cat prepares to navigate a scenario that circumvents his understanding. Inside the dream of Ash (who is eventually revealed to be an android), I hear piano notes dropping like intermittent rainfall into a brain of spotless, process-driven clarity, only disturbed by the buzz of awakening circuitry.

What strikes me most is the evocation of micro-experiences. Mathieu plants tiny sounds inside the corners and crevices of each dream, tucked away like dormant memories or innate anxieties, decorating the main image with the flora of distraction and subconscious inhibition. Listening to each of these pieces is like staring into an aquarium: I can examine the large fish that whirl directly in front of me, glimmering in drone and overtonal glamour, or I can pull my focus back to see the specks of minute life drifting through the water. At certain points during the experience, I’m struck with a feeling of dread I can’t quite place. I harbour distrust for a sudden outbreak of harmonic symmetry. Invariably, it’s because I’m not listening right; Mathieu sneaks a drop of dissonance into the background while I’m allured by the fore, like a discolouring ink that gradually blackens the seas of unconsciousness. Like a prophecy, I sense the unease before I truly hear it.