In Conversation With Matthew Mottel, Part II

Matthew Mottel is ISSUE Project Room’s Artist-In-Residence for April – June 2010. He  is an internationally recognized musician and artist, performing most notably with Talibam! for the past seven years.  He’s been hanging around NYC clubs since he was like 16, and dropping electric mind bombs with his synthesizer in those clubs nearly as long with folks like Cooper-Moore, Rhys Chatham, Karole Armitage, Awesome Color, Akron/Family, Jeffrey Lewis, Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear), Kenny Wollesen, Chris Corsano, Ras Moshe, Cooper-Moore, Sean Meehan, and CSC Funk Band.

The final performance in the residency will be a free concert held on June 9 with Talibam!

The following conversation is an extract from an extended chat held on April 28. Check the first installment here.

Matthew Walker: So, tell me how Talibam! first came to be.

Matthew Mottel: I had met Kevin {Shea} in April 2003 on an improv gig with Ras Moshe at free103point9, the pirate radio station. We just connected well and we were like, “yeah, let’s keep playing.” This was right as I was coming back to New York. So, that’s how the band started. Kevin went to school for critical theory at New School and I graduated with a liberal arts degree in critical theory, so both of us were interested in music and culture from, like, this critical perspective that was internalizing and analyzing mass culture and avant-garde perspectives together.

The way me and him talked for a while – just like how we have this onstage banter – we had that immediately as like a personal relationship where, some of the first drives we took as a band, it wasn’t just like, “Oh, so what do you think about food?” It was like this weird theatrical point-counterpoint hysterical banter. Yeah, we just would banter at each other for two hours in this like fake, or even actual, deconstructionist language. Like, “I think the hierarchy of the longitude of the platitude does not deserve a… Point!” You know, we would just go back and forth, and then we’d be like, “Oh, we’re at the gig.”

MW: …and then you’d continue the conversation on stage.

MM: Exactly.

MW: So, I’m really curious about how you think your relationship with ESP-Disk’ has contextualized your music, both for yourselves and for audiences and critics. Do you think when critics wrote about {last album} Boogie In the Breeze Blocks, their default inclination was to approach the music in the context of ‘60s avant-garde jazz?

MM: In some ways, that’s definitely sort of the starting reference, and in some ways that’s fine, because I love that music too, and I’m proud to be a labelmate with Sun Ra and Albert Ayler…there’s like serious gravitas to be included in that continuum. And that’s the trick that I think the weight of us being on a label like that is — to really be evident to writers and to the public at large…to spark the thought, “The label is back, it’s a contemporary label, and this is the band that they’ve selected to be one of the larger flagship artists of the moment.’  So, that’s where I’d like to be thought of.

There was a lot of weight back then to the artists that were on ESP, but because of the climate of independent labels in the ’60s, you didn’t have the opportunity to promote and be as successful as independent labels can be in 2010, with the internet and different contemporary marketing tools and things like that. So, if you were an independent label in ’66, you were competing against Blue Note and all the other major labels that had money, financing, pr…all those things. So, of course the ESP music was going to be more obscure simply due to limited distribution opportunities. But I think that ESP — now in a contemporary label world — should have the same weight as Sub Pop, Merge, Secretly Canadian, Thrill Jockey, Young God, Constellation…All of those labels are birthed out of ESP’s desire to be an independent label promoting music that they want to promote. So, Sub Pop and Constellation all found scenes needing support, and it grew into large things for them. So, for ESP, the potential is there for them to be recognized on a larger scale.

MW: Though, I think the music ESP seeks to foster does still have a more experimental bent, trying to support music that pushes boundaries and develops new vocabularies. And that’s not something that necessarily prevents it from pushing into a more mainstream realm, but it does differentiate it from a label like Sub Pop or even Constellation.

MM: Yeah, they’re still dealing with much more traditional, like, four walls and a house whereas ESP is more of a geodesic dome {laughs}. Ya know, the paradigm is a little different…but I think, what we were trying to do with ESP is work in both paradigms. The idea was to be part of an avant-garde minded label, and give them a contemporary pop album. So, that’s what we tried to do…

MW: So there was definitely a conscious effort to move into a slightly more intentional pop soundworld, from Ordination {of the Globetrotting Conscripts} to Boogie? I know there were other things in between, obviously, which I haven’t heard but…

MM: Well, those other albums…to me Ordination and Boogie are the two actual studio albums we’ve made. People talk about our excessive discography, but most of the albums are really treated as sessions — edited down jazz sessions. And it’s great that we’ve released music that holds a high watermark…that stands as a session and can still be good. That’s one thing I like about our band is that we can just be in a room for 45 minutes and, ideally, be happy.

But Boogie and Ordination are attempts to utilize the studio as a conceptual building block. A few of the songs that were on Boogie were actually recorded at the time of Ordination but they would have made that album very different. Ordination wound up being very much aestheticized with the label {azul discográfica}. So it turned out that some of the material that wasn’t on that, we used for Boogie. Another thing we did for Boogie, we went through our live concert recordings and found parts of songs we were playing but hadn’t recorded before, and merged them into studio forms and did overdubs and turned them into these pop songs.

MW: Yeah, I love how you guys do that…how Boogie really captures the essence of the manic energy of your stage show — how actual live recordings are integrated in, especially on that song “Slap Yr Boots On! Oysters Await” where you’re playing at Goodbye Blue Monday. The first part is a straight live recording and it becomes more pristine and higher fidelity as it evolves over time.

MM: Yeah, that worked really well. It’s been really nice using the studio as a compositional tool. We like doing that as a band. Boogie was produced in 5 days, so it was pretty intense. But uh, the new albums that we’re working on now have very long arcs of time. One started in a session in October. I did almost all of my overdubs alone, and then Kevin’s going to his overdubs later. So, it gives us more time to think about what we want to do for it.

MW: So are these tracks even more composed than Boogie?

MM: Yeah, we have a single coming out. It’s gonna be a split between Electric Cowbell and ESP-Disk’…actually ESP’s first-ever 45. And these tracks will be the most produced we’ve ever put out. I like to think about the idea of bands losing perspective…like bands starting in the ’60s and by the time they were in the ’80s, they lost perspective and just did whatever they wanted. We’re not in that place yet, but by doing it ourselves with ProTools, we lost some perspective and made something entirely rad that we couldn’t have done in 4 days. The new records have mainly been self-recorded so far. We’ll maybe mix in the studio to warm stuff up, but it’s been a nice process to learn ProTools and Logic and be able to step back from it and not have someone on the clock saying “OK, hey what are you doing next?” To really have time to listen and think about the arcs in which we’re making the album.

But yeah, it’s been nice to be able to examine our concerts, and say, “Oh, I like this 5 seconds” and then those 5 seconds turn into 4 minutes in the studio. Like, we were in Paris working on this duo album and it was literally like two car rides in Italy before the session in which we listened to the live recordings and notated the time frames that we wanted to incorporate into the studio recordings. That’s what separates Talibam! from a lot of more contemporary pop/rock bands. All of those bands are still dealing with the concept of iconic ego, where it’s one person’s vision. I mean, I think that can be interesting, but I like this collaborative approach that involves improvisation and chance elements…you get a more unique thing.

MW: What else have you guys been exploring in these new recordings?

MM: We’re starting to work with new genres and effects…like we’re starting to do some rapping…

MW: Huh, in a way that makes perfect sense. I was actually just recently thinking about you guys in the context of rap because I had read a review that likened the between-song banter on Boogie to the skits on old De La Soul records. But beyond that, I feel like many of the characteristics of Talibam! remind me of rap albums where the projected personas are of these over-sized, larger-than-life personalities. They are reflective of who the artists are to some extent, but there’s also a sort of cartoonish, caricature-like filter happening.

MM: Exactly. That’s again why I like the idea of albums where the music isn’t necessarily the aesthetic choices that define me but we’re instead making music as if approaching these styles as different types of boxes…with the idea that it’s not solely reflective of our own ego. It’s nice that we can approach a variety… But anyways, the personas we make on record are not necessarily directly who we are. Like, when Leonard Cohen sings, you think of Leonard Cohen singing — though I’m sure he puts a character out there, too. But it’s at least perceived as a more direct reflection of himself as a real person.  But with Talibam!, it’s not necessarily me and Kevin. We’re going even further into that realm in the next album.

MW: So, you guys just put out an album in collaboration with Peeesseye. I know you guys are friends and probably have had many intersections through the years, but how did it come to the fruition of actually creating a full-length collaborative?

MM: Well, we were both touring, trying to be active bands, and we both had interesting styles that we thought could yield a dialogue with each other. From 2006 – 08, we played one gig with them every year in Europe, so eventually we decided if we were all going to be in town at this one time again, we should make a record.

MW: It’s a great record – I think it feels so natural how well the two groups meld together.  That’s one thing about Talibam! that I really like…that it seems whoever plays with you guys can be integrated into your soundworld so naturally. You can have Cooper-Moore or Daniel Carter seamlessly fit into the group’s dynamics and it’s just great.

MM: Yeah, that comes from all of us being natural improvisers first. It wasn’t like one band meeting another band like oil and water…everyone can just float in this ocean. That was where Peeesseye and Talibam! both figured out something around 2001 or 2002 – we were both interested in stopping thinking about ourselves as individuals and trying to form a more cohesive unit.