Sold out in Brussels
You mention listening to rock, synth pop, ghettotech – you had all these different types of music around you. I think Beams in particular is a really dense, eclectic album which seems to draw on a hugely varied collection of influences. Is that something which you’ve consciously tried to do or is it just inevitable because your own experiences?
My musical output is a transparent reflection of everything I’ve ingested. I try to stay disconnected from it – I really don’t try to put an intentional personal spin on the way that my music sounds. I think that by removing myself from that decision I get this reinterpretation through my methods and my techniques of how I think music should sound. You do hear a lot of all those influences – the bands that I’m listening to at the time and the bands that I’ve been listening to all my life. What you get is an album like the ones I make.
You’ve mentioned in the past that your music changed when you moved to New York and you were influenced by that environment. Has the touring experience itself had any influence on your sound? Do you write on the road?
I try to. What’s really good on the road is working on loops and obviously testing out software because you can’t bring your studio on the road with you. It’s good for idea building. I don’t necessarily use full tracks that I’ve made on the road just because the audio quality and the mix can’t be as accurate on your headphones or on tiny speakers, but there’s something about the touring mind state. You’re living music. You wake up, you do soundchecks, you perform, you fall asleep, you wake up the next day and it’s the same thing. You’re completely surrounded by your music and the life that you’ve chosen to live through music, so that can be a good time to work because music is really all you’re thinking about.
Last night we had to drive from Brussels to Utrecht in the Netherlands. It was late at night and we played a bunch of Can music in the van. Everyone was really just vibing to it and getting totally mesmerised. After everyone fell asleep I popped on my headphones and started working on a loop that clearly would be influenced by what I was hearing just prior to that. I was working on creating arpeggios and polyrhythms and working with the Waldorf PPG Wave soft synth, which I’ve never used before. Hopefully it captured the mood that was floating around in the van and now I can take that project that I was working on back to my home studio and flesh it out into something a bit greater.
Do you generally prefer to work with hardware and get your hands on the instrument rather than using software?
Yeah. It’s not only the knobs and the physical nature of it but just the sound and the randomness of hardware. Analogue circuitry sounds so much better. Warmer and bigger.
It’s not to say that you can’t make digital software sound good. If I had all the software synths in my computer as physical synths I would need a lot of space. There’s something to be said for the fact that I can just flick through them almost like a Rolodex, pick one out and go to work right away.
But I have a few key hardware pieces that I come back to time and time again. I think a balance is needed, at least in my world.
What are the key hardware pieces for you?
The Korg PolySix has been my staple for a long time. Songs like ‘Her Fantasy’ on Beams – the synthesiser line on that is a PolySix arpeggio. ‘You Put A Smell On Me’ from Black City is the PolySix.
I can’t get away from the Moog Voyager for bass sounds. Actually for a lot of percussion too. You can get really cool percussion hits and zippy hi-hat sounds with the ring mod and everything.
Has your process changed a lot since Black City or are you still working in a similar way?
I’ve sharpened my tools and my techniques but they haven’t changed drastically. Playing live with the band so much probably influences the way that I record a little bit. You know, I’m definitely better on guitar after touring for a month than I am when I’ve just been sitting around not practising guitar. When I get home after this tour I’m going to start recording again and I’m sure that my guitar might come up a bit more in the studio.
But overall the process has stayed the same since I was 14. I just like to play around with whatever I have at my disposal in the studio, blend it all together and make loops which become songs which become parts of the album.
And you’re also working with Tiga at the moment?
Yeah, we just did a song called ‘Plush’ which is on his new mix CD. We’ve got something in the pipeline that I’m really excited about. His reservoir of influences is so big. He really knows a lot about a lot of music and I like hearing where he wants to go, so the goal is to continue working together and see what we come up with.
And the plan for the next few months is to go straight back to writing another album when the tour’s finished?
I’m always working on albums. Like I said, it’s something I’ve been doing since I was 14 years old. It’s just an escape for me. It’s a way for me to express my feelings and the way that I am. It might sound cliched but that’s the way it is. Music is my release. It’s the only language I know how to speak without any false pretences.
It’s the truest vocabulary for me and it’s the only way that I can express certain parts of me or my state of being, so if I stop doing it I sure hope that I find something else to replace that with because if I don’t play music I don’t know what else there would be to do.
Matthew Dear appears at Fabric, London, on Wednesday December 5th. The tour continues through the UK, Russia, France and the USA in December.
Find Matthew on Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitter and his own site.