Mattin
 

I believe its time we give Mattin (pronounced "MAH-cheen") his own thread. I dont think there is anybody in the entire world making experimental music so diverse and so fucking exhiliating right now. Ive been downloading a buncha his stuff on his website www.mattin.org and besides Billy Bao he has countless other great projects. I love how his punk bands come off as a Noise band making a stab at Punk as opposed to the usual Punk bands taking a stab at Noise. He is when it comes down to it, a highly skilled labtop noise artist. Besides Billy Bao he has tjhe almost as excellent La Grieta, a blazing punk band, and then Joxseta Grieta, the same blazing punk band with a wild ass vocalist by the name of Joxseta. His stuff withavant trombone player Radu Malfatti are straight up concrete damaged musiques full of space and silence, very indebted to Morton Feldman'sm most avant stuff. His No More Music project is straight up lab top power electronics, and I really like how he uses his electronics. I also dug his collabs with Junko fro, Hijokaidan, almost a perfect melding of minds. This dude is absolutely prolific and seemingly full of wonderful anf fyucked up sonic ideas. Id love to see him do stuff with maybe Dilloway, Kevin Drumm, and maybe Gulcher form his Home Blitz or Car Commericlas project.

Mattin rules.

where did you hear that you pronounce it "MAH-cheen"? A couple of my friends know him and they both call him Mattin, pronounced "Mattin"

1) Lower-case improv is the most conceited music I've heard, and I've heard a lot of it. While I love A & R Davies, Wastell and Nmperign, Malfatti & Sugimoto are two of the most patronising cunts I've ever had the misfortunate to hear (and that's before you read interviews with them). It's the opposite end of the spectrum to noise, but it's the same conceited 'we don't want people to get it' elitist bollocks.

2) Morton Feldman wrote AMAZING music. It is much more useful to think of his music as something that challenges the paradigm of tonality in a lineage stretching from Debussy than it is to pigeonhole him as 'avant' - the notion of there being an intensive lineage of 'avant' (avant>more avant>most avant) is self-defeating and juvenile. Feldman is far more interesting than merely avant garde music, just as Rothko (or whomever) is a name we remember over and above the legion of abstract expressionists in history's waste bin.

3) The latter point leads onto the next: no matter how hard he tries, no matter how much his rhetoric carps on about it, no matter how many times he tries to 'undermine' existing paradigms, Mattin's music will always be utterly shit.

4) If you do not think Mattin's music is shit then you have shit for ears.

5) Mattin's one success in the world is that he manages to piss me off a little bit if I think about it.

I thought he was quite shit, very unmoving... I did enjoy a collaborative set he did with Drunkdriver though.

it seems to me that he has managed to get himself in with bands who would be good whether he was involved or not, drunkdriver, billy bao, junko & hijokaidan etc, i guess those bands accept him because he will finance stuff for them (my own speculation) and any kind of collabs that result will just sound more or less like that band does already, plus an extra laptop (which probably doesn't have too much of an effect on the end result, just a bit of extra noisiness).
until about a year ago i only knew mattin as a person from quiet improv, now he's got himself involved in all these punk bands and i wonder how he's done it because presumably (and this is pure speculation) but i can't imagine bands like drunkdriver or billy bao having much interest in incorporating quiet improv into punk rock, or that they would have approached him abot collaborating

welcome to the mattin.

How would Billy Bao exist as a band without Mattin?

I pay very close attention to everything Mattin does. I don't enjoy all of it, but I do greatly enjoy all the best moments....Recent collab 7" on Rock Is Hell, his Songbook vol 4 on Azul Discografica, all the Billy Bao stuff minus the Accumulation EP.

Reading his interview in the new Z Gun #3 has helped a lot to make more sense outta what he does. I know some people have read that and threw it down in disgust. It does sound pretty arrogant and intense. The idea of Billy Bao performing "micro-improvisation" on a single riff is a great way of stating something interesting about that band, but I don't see where he takes credit for inventing the idea. Surely, the Brainbombs did the same thing. But Billy Bao supposedly never plays the same song more than once. It does kinda boggle my mind to think that these songs are not rehearsed, though.

The interview explains the Mah-Cheen pronunciation.

The arrogance thing - I think it's fine being a cunt if you're, say, Ornette Coleman or someone. I get the strong impression Mattin has a reputation built on rhetoric rather than actual chops. I'm also aware that noise [etc] is built upon a kind of anti-chopology, but there's a good reason why every town has loads of noise artists but only the odd one surfaces internationally.

Actually, now I think about it, his actual music is just insignificant - his writing is the kind of naif-Marxist, manifestoish shite that entirely undermines any incursions he may have inadvertantly made into 'the point'.

That's the thing... his rhetoric can't even save him. I think he's symptomatic of much of the noise scene in general - way too erudite for its own good, work that is conceptualized to high holy hell but in reality doesn't stand up over time.

Can the naysayers here identify what Mattin releases you've actually heard?

That's okay...take another 26 hours.

Nevermind the speculations or the improv-talk, can somebody tell me what Drunkdriver and Mattin have collaborated on? Or is this just a live thing?

I went and checked his discography - I didn't realise he was actually Sakada, so in fact I actually really like one of his projects.

HOWEVER. The difference between Mattin and the legion of laptop nobodies is that no-one else produced this aberration, or the other odds and sods of things on his website. Music I don't like doesn't usually rankle me, but bad writing does (quite why I continue to contribute to this forum then...). To be clear, it's not because he's writing English as a second language (which doesn't bother me) it's that he's a noise artist who's, conceptually and sonically, stuck in the early 80s.

[from here]



It's this sort of wankery. The naif-provocation. Again, it's the sort of thing that people did, or so I understand, in the early 80s, this interrogation of 'audience expectations'. Or further back, it's not far away from Dadaism, or at least Fluxus. The point being that the majority of grown-ups with a cursory awareness of art in general in the 20th-century find these sorts of 'art statements' to be horrendously patronising.



I know T&B has a problem with the Keith Rowe crowd (i.e., Seymour Wright) and I think the 'lower-case improv' thing of Sugimoto or Malfatti is similarly peurile - most people aware of the (Bailey) free-improv fallout are also aware of Cage's acts of philosophy - the task now is not to challenge our expectations of a 'concert' (Cage did that and made great music; Wolff rarely made good music that I heard) but to take an idea and do something with it.



I'm not saying some anti-avant type statement, but I think shouting about how 'avant-garde' you are is a bit like when Nickleback do something 'extreme'.

keith rowe is fine, it's the wastes of space who congregate at eddie prevost's workshop (I won't name names, other than seymour wright as glice already mention him.... actually i'll name john lely because he's fucking shit) although not eddie prevost himself, but that's an issue that is irrelevant to anyone outside london, or at least unfamiliar with a particular subset of people in london improv, although that crowd seem to be branching out as seymour wright was in last month's Wire and also played at Instal.

i've heard a couple of mattin's laptop things played on resonance and i can't remember much about them other than how unremarkable they were bearing in mind what i'd heard about him as a person and going on what friends have told me about his shows when he performed here frequently, stuff like what glice was refering to, trying to provoke and confront people about nothing in an environment that is effectively a giant safety net. not that my friends said he was good or interesting.

anyway, i didn't realise that mattin played guitar in billy bao, i assumed he was doing some laptop stuff as i didn't know he played anything else. billy bao is great and it's incredible if that stuff really is improvised, and it's still great if it is not.

Yeah, sorry, I did mean the Prévost workshoppers, not Rowe or Prévost as they're both spiffing.

I think my problem with that crowd is that they seem to have the ear of the Wire. I have slight issues with the London-centricity of certain quarters of that magazine. It's still an often indispensible mag, but there's a tendency to over-emphasise movements that aren't perhaps as important as they'd have us believe.

on the other hand some good stuff has come out of that workshop too, mark wastell told me that's where he met rhodri davies & co

Yeah, that's a fair point. I like Wastell, but I wonder if a lot of that is because he's arguably the best record store clerk ever. Nothing self-congratulatory about it, just gets on with it.

he's reopened sound 323 in dalston, in a sort of back room at cafe oto

That's brilliant news. I still haven't been in Oto, I'll have to start hassling them for gigs soon...