«Lost Places» is an extensive photo-series by Stefan Flükiger. The Bern based photographer sought out abandoned industrial areas and subterranean canals that have been gradually retrieved and sprawled by nature. These pictures of deserted industrial spaces inspired the music collective Mathon for their new – already 6th – release «Lieus Pers». The photographs show places such as the old town-hall canal of Bern, dating back to the 17th Century, which was allegedly used as an escape route for the city government.

 

These pictures of lost places are overlaid with nature imagery from Domleschg, there where the village of Mathon is located. Mathon core members Thomas Augustiny, Pete Aurel Leuenberger and Roger Stucki have created 12 sound researches for «Lieus Pers».

Ambient sound researches for which, the three musicians visited these submerged and meanwhile lost places, scattered all across Switzerland. Electro-acoustic tracks emerged, recalling these dystopian constructions and echoing a potential contemporary soundtrack for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film-opus «Stalker».

 

Layers of time and space interfere on the album «Lieus Pers» for which Mathon also invited musical chums and companions such as Mich Meienberg, Maria Capelli, Nicolas Kellner, Julian Sartorius and the band Digitalis to contribute to the oeuvre.

Combined with the digitally alienated photographs, the album is a quest for traces, conciliating graphics and sound, past and present, nature and technology.

 

«Lieus Pers», Rhaeto-Romanic for «lost places», is an impressive contemporary document by Mathon collective, that transforms strange industrial and nature architecture into cleft soundscapes.