When British sound artist Kaffe Matthews thinks about sound, she thinks about space, about time, about travel, about people, about radios strapped to bicycles. In her approach to making music, we find clues about what is so provocative and new about sound today: not songs, but sites; not scores, but algorithms; not notes, but empty hard drives. Her work has traces of the rich history of the art of sound, from ideas of space, duration and indeterminacy pioneered by John Cage, Alvin Lucier and LaMonte Young, to Nicolas Collins's and Ryoji Ikeda's work with feedback and failure. Her sound elegantly merges these aesthetics while at the same time articulating significant new departures. Read the whole interview
"Made live with a Theremin and some microphones, sculpted real time in a New York loft in December 2003, the fat wood vibrating in the floor and the roof, resonating memories of those Chinese sweatshops that used to pound and clatter between aromas of stir fried noodles and hard Cantonese banter." Download here
Although John Burton, aka Leafcutter John, started his artistic life learning to paint or playing the guitar, he soon discovered that there was more to a computer than spreadsheets and video games. Proof is his first album, Microcontact, released on Planet Mu. The album flirts with electroacoustic and music concrète, and demonstrates that the man is one of the most exiting new musicians around. More
Taking a page from seminal British post-punk outfits like The Fall and The Au Pairs and their American no wave counterparts DNA and The Contortions, Erase Errata sets off spastic, clattering rhythmic explosions with stridently barked vocals, wonderfully thin razor-edged guitar, a nervous low-end, rattling machine-gun percussion, and occasional keyboard flourishes and trumpet blasts. Sudden time changes and not-quite-linear song structures help make this abrasive din all the more intriguing. More
In her Paradise Island side project, singer/multi- instrumentalist Jenny Hoyston from Erase Errata explores the more abstract, avant-garde side of her music. Paradise Island's debut EP, Get Up, and the full-length Lines are Infinitely Fine, which were released in 2003 on Dim Mak, dabble in lo-fi electronica, folk, and off-kilter rock and pop -- pretty much every style except the angular brand of no wave-inspired music she plays with her main group.
Kaffe Matthews has been making and performing new music with digital gadgetry all over the world for the past ten years. The music is vast, sculpted into textural landscapes and vibrating granular technorhythms. On stage, she processes sound from carefully placed microphones and an occasional violin. Recently she has collaborated with Christian Fennesz, mimeo, Charles Hayward, Jon Rose, Pan-sonic, Butch Morris, Andy Moor (the EX) and many others. More
This pair of electronic collage artists stands out as innovators in a field noted for innovation. Matmos's Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have intriguing backgrounds which help explain their brainy, decentered approach to electronica. Daniel is a UC Berkeley graduate student in Renaissance Literature and a longtime radio and club DJ who has collaborated on both film scores and hip hop projects with Louisville musicians Jason Noble (Rachel's) and Jeff Mueller (June of 44). Schmidt manages the conceptual art department of the San Francisco Art Institute and has pursued a number of experimental and/or electronic projects in the past. More