There's the experience of just hanging out with Matthew: sitting on his sofa, a scattered conversation about nothing in particular. Even in that he is a clear multidisciplinarian, able to splash around the exchange, chatting about everything and nothing: a gold miner, watching the stream drift past, while still completely alert enough to detect pattern and meaning. He brings this to his music, panning for beauty: ideas, sounds, collaborators and time, scattered bits that wash through his hand and he catches a flash here, a twinkle there and builds delicate structures, held gently together, anchored in the familiar, almost traditional. "I'm, trying to make 'folk electronic' - which is how I tend to describe Believe it or Not, This is the Place. I wanted to include something from it's very distant past while making something new." To create this first solo album, he worked from the component, with a focus on isolated elements, the capturing of small bits here and there. "Musicians would come through the studio to work on their own material and I would get them to record on sparse instrumentals I was working on, and then I would develop lyrics and structure while editing together the ideas they gave me."
This organic blending of components, of vocal layering is a direct reflection of one of Matt's fundamental principals: that production and songwriting are intertwined, that to know where the lyrics and chord structures belong before you enter the studio is to choke off a rich area of surprise and creation. The elements of production are elements of songwriting.
This engagement in a particular production process is fundamentally political: "I think the idea of songwriting being chord progressions, melodies, and lyrics is just a response to copyright law." Some might say that Matt's observation borders on paranoid, but it's obvious enough: the structures of songs must be tempered by salability, radio ease, where something as much a commodity as songs must have shaped themselves to travel more easily through the channels of profit making. This neglects, of course, the foundation: sound. So Matt always brings it back to sound, irrespective of song, trusting song will take care of itself, once sound has been welcomed and made to feel at home.
The first part of his musical life was focused on qr5, a project that literally grew from the grounds of his family farm, culminating in Pharmakon a final, critically acclaimed, album in 2007, with reviewers almost scratching their heads in wonderment: wow, white dudes doing reggae and not fucking it up! Matt's songwriting and vocals yield that rare kind of critical agreement that settles around those unique folks who manage to slide into genres far from home and emerge triumphant: The Police, Paul Simon and David Byrne. These are the names that qr5 was compared to, all artists capable of genre hopping, borrowing in the gentlest ways, snaring flecks of gold: miners of the scattered, all.
Matt is fully immersed in his home of Toronto, with his west-end studio, snuggled between the rail tracks, the chocolate factory and the historic but abandoned Tower Automotive Building (a building worth Googling, if beautiful architecture left to rot is your thing.) The neglected industrial setting, poised for a wave of rejuvenation, a little gentrification and certainly some espresso. For now, you can still find Matt and, just next door, Nicholas Murray and Rosina Kazi, the core members of LAL, musical defenders of the revolution, and a constant bustle of artists walking through Matt's studio: Thunderheist, Luanda Jones, Gurpreet Chana, Bruno Capinan "Gozo," Rakkatak and Matt's group project: Lovemaker.
All of this in his cozy studio, the walls adorned with smart photos that, it turns out, are yet another of Matt's artistic contributions (portfolio at www.qr5.org). A photographer as long as a musician, Matt's visual art displays a similar fascination with catching elements: flecks of light and colour, sometimes a face of a child stares out at you, the depth of field so narrow that they appear to be floating in memory, while at other times there's just a bird or a finger missing a very large chunk of flesh and an implied cheerful assurance that this, too, will heal. The photos, a scattering of concerns, drift around, similar to his songs, subject matter that is personal, focusing on life's big everyday situations, the lyrics woven with the most straightforward but most difficult challenges: love, addiction, parenthood - the sliced fingers of life.
To experience this world yourself, you can listen to Believe it or Not, This is the Place, or you can grab the Dundas streetcar, get off at Sterling, just beside the tracks and walk north past the chocolate factory, look for the automotive building on your left and across the street is Matt's building. Careful: the stairs at the front entrance are steep.
Darren O'Donnell