In Conversation With Matthew Mottel, Part I

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 next performance in the residency will be a free concert held on May 7. Read more about the project here. Preview audio here.

The following conversation is an extract from an extended chat held on April 28. Look for a second installment in June.

Matthew Walker: So, tell me about your plans for the May 7 performance of your residency.

Matthew Mottel: Well, it’s tied to the photography of my father {Syeus Mottel}. I first became aware that he had some hip photos about 11 or 12 years ago when I was going to The Cooler – a now-defunct space in the meat-packing district – a sort of gnarlier Knitting Factory-type venue. They had shows starting at midnight with a sort of Sonic Youth crew plus free jazz guys like Charles Gayle. It was a great place for me, as I was 17 at the time.

So anyway, there was supposed to be a Silver Apples benefit because Simeon {Coxe III} had a car accident. My dad found out about it, and was like, “Oh yeah, Silver Apples — I know them. I shot three of their concerts in the 60s.”

My dad was a recognized photographer — he worked with Lee Strasberg and the Actor’s Studio. He was also working with Buckminister Fuller as his media consultant for a number of years. He published a book called Charas, the improbable dome builders about Lower East Side community activists that decided to build geodesic domes.

As I’ve delved deeper into his archive, I’ve found photos of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in a double bill from ‘67, photos of John Cage doing prepared piano pieces in a gallery in ‘72, and the Silver Apples photos, and thought, “Wow, these are all my influences.”

So, I was excited to start dealing with my dad’s archive, which was basically just negative sheets in a closet. I wanted to mediate a project that tried to make the work contemporary. So, what I’m trying to do for May 7 is creating an environment that thinks about the cultural politics of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. My dad was a journalist – not a direct participant in these different scenes – so the idea is to show the work in a documentary/archival perspective but also to create a new environment, incorporating my music, in which these disparate events and places that he photographed can all merge into a larger consciousness…which is maybe my consciousness.

Photo by Syeus Mottel. Silver Apples at Washington Square Park, 1968.

MW: In contrast to, say, a Talibam! concert, how has your approach to the music been different in thinking about creating an actual environment for people to exist in and interact with the images?

MM: Well, Talibam! has been like a 200% direct over-the-line, you know, “watch us perform, have a fun time.” So, this is an opportunity to step back and focus on an ambiance, and really deal with sound in a more pragmatic way. I’m going to do a solo piano performance, using amps and distortion — thinking about the piano as a guitar in terms of approach and attack. It’s great because it’s an opportunity to be completely in control. I’ve been able to learn what the piano sounds like amplified and been able to spend time exploring the features of the space {at ISSUE}.

MW: Yeah, it’s a pretty unique experience to be able to rehearse and prepare in the actual space where a performance is going to happen. I’ve been able to do that a few times in the past and it feels so much better to know that you’re in complete control of every element of the performance…rather than unloading your gear in a club and playing a show 10 minutes later.

MM: Yeah, and that’s the vibe that Talibam! has managed to thrive on. We can just show up and hit if it has to be 10 minutes, and that’s a way we have progressed. In a sense, it used to be very much about the exploration of the moment, but we’ve now reached a point where we can refine the moment so much that we now have control over it in the most discriminating or indiscriminating situation. But yeah, being in the space for a large amount of time allows me to help shape the work that I’m going to do.

MW: Will there still be a fair amount of improvisation involved in this new environment?

MM: Yeah, I’m more working with motifs, and we’re going to see where they go. It’s me thinking, “Do I like the sound combinations? Do I like my oscillator box with my sampler together? Where does the piano fit in?” I’m thinking compositionally in terms of arrangement, rather than there being a notation and score.

MW: And how will the photography be incorporated?

MM: I’m working with this guy Brian House, who does video and installation work under the name Knifeandfork. He’s going to do video editing, using computer filters with the photos, and make abstraction happen. So, using these music photographs, plus the political and cultural photos that he has, to create an environment that I think is going to be pretty exciting. It’s a way for people to get a further idea of what 1967-68 looked like from a different eye, because almost every image we see from that time period is now an image we’ve been accustomed to for a long time. So, just seeing unpublished photos of Martin Luther King, Jr.…

I mean, there are photos of an anti-war rally from ‘67 where my dad is a frontline photographer, with candid images of Ben Spock and Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King just hanging out, and it’s pretty phenomenal. And the work certainly stands by itself…it could easily just be hanging on a wall, but it’s important for me for it to not just be archival but to feel contemporary…

MW: To not just be tied to a specific time and place…

Photo by Syeus Mottel. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ben Spock, April 15, 1967.

MM: Right, to tie it to me, and to my father and I, and to the influences we share… to make a new piece out of it all. What’s nice about a lot of my dad’s photography is that it shows that the public really was part of some of the more avant-garde things happening then. Like, two of the Silver Apples shows that he shot were free public shows — one at Union Square and one in Washington Square Park. Some of these photos are really amazing…like kids interacting with Simeon…and old people {interacting} too. It wasn’t just hipsters, but a much larger field of people, and that’s part of what I want to show in the environment that I’m going to create, that this music {isn’t limited to} the fringe genres that we put people in..it can be a consciousness available for everybody to like.

MW: So did you grow up listening to people like Ornette and Cage because of your dad?

MM: No, because my dad’s not a musician, you know…my parents sort of let me do my own thing. I developed my own tastes growing up in Manhattan, and was culturally aware by the time I was 16. But, I think it’s influence through osmosis, because these things are very much things my parents were both aware of and influenced by.

MW: So, how did your musical interests start to develop?

MM: I took jazz piano when I was 15, and got into improvising and bought a synthesizer. I was welcomed into the improvised music world in NY where you didn’t need that conservatory training — it was about developing your own individual language and so that’s what I did forever.

I went to Brooklyn Tech High School and my junior year I had to pick a 20-year period of history to write a thesis paper on. I picked the avant-garde jazz scene of New York from 1977 – 1997 and so going to concerts became research for me.

MW: So your learning more or less came from direct practice – from going to concerts and just getting out there and playing live with people. Who were you playing with early on?

MM: Well, I played with {Chris} Corsano — I have these tapes of us playing when I was 17 and he was 24. He was working at Tonic and I was just going there a lot and wanting to start a band. He ended up introducing me to Tom Bruno. I was a TEST fan, and I got a page one day – back when I had a pager – and was like, “I don’t recognize this number.”

But I called the number and got a voicemail saying, “This is Tom Bruno, the drummer. I know who I am. If you know who you are, leave a message.”  So, I’m like, “Uh, hi Tom, this is Matt Mottel. Yeah, uh, I guess you know me from uh…I’m a big TEST fan, I guess you called me for some reason, so call me back.”

And I’m thinking, “How the fuck did Tom Bruno get my number?” So, I called Corsano up, and am like, “Hey man, did you give Tom my number?” And he says, “Yeah, I guess I did a while back. He said he was looking to play with a young synthesizer player. So, I gave him your number.”

And then, me and Tom played almost every Sunday for about a year and a half or two years. And that was the beginning of playing duos with drummers. Also, at the same time, I would play with Michael Evans and Sean Meehan and Tim Barnes. And then, also, I met Cooper-Moore and played with him on a fairly regular basis…also Daniel Carter. It was just like New York was a welcoming place.

MW: I mean, what better people could you possibly come up playing with?

MM: Yeah, from 17 – 22, those were the people I was hanging with. I would go to William Parker workshops, I was volunteering at the Vision Festival…I got into Tonic for free from early on…So, I’ve seen so much avant-improvised-experimental music that I don’t really need to go to it anymore. But seeing so much of that music for so long, I saw the ceiling you get to with that stuff — both with the level of economic success and stability. So I thought, well, I can start with that influence, and then steer it into larger, different places.

But still, to have that as a fundamental background is really a cool place to start with rather than just being like only into the Beatles or only being a composer or something. So, it was such a great time, like the Pink Pony was a really happening spot…the Gold Sparkle Band guys were all doing shit there. I mean it was like all Lower East Side places.

The Coma series that still happens at ABC No Rio that Blaise Sula runs every Sunday night… that was a really formative place for a lot of people. I met Chris Forsyth there…I met Meehan around that time. All these guys were like ABC No Rio improvisers. It was sort of like the 4th or 5th generation of the NY improvised scene, after Zorn and all that stuff. But it was nice because they’d have a band or two and then an improv session and it was just really great – no one took things too seriously but it was still serious music. And you could see amazing people play in front of 10 people and it was awesome.

Photo by Syeus Mottel. Ornette Coleman at the Village Gate, 1967.

MW: So, have you been in the city your whole life?

MM: I went away to college at New Paltz, a state university in upstate New York, an hour and a half away from the city.

MW: What did you study there?

MM: I created my own major. I didn’t want to be an anthropologist, I didn’t want to be a sociologist. I was more into this kind of cultural study going back to when I was in high school at Brooklyn Tech. I was able to do a contract major, which was basically, like, pick electives from multiple disciplines, have advisors in three different disciplines, and do that. And I called it Political and Cultural studies. Like, I wrote a paper about the 1960s political free jazz connections and did a number of different things.

MW: What was it like being outside of the city?

MM: Well, it was a small town…mountains right there, swimming. You know, after the first year there, I like lived up there. You know, it was great. I got to learn about classic rock, you know, it was that type of thing. You hang out with your friends, you drink beers, you listen to records. It was nice. You have fires, go to the mountains…so, it was cool.

I was the only one at New Paltz who was interested in bringing live music to the college, outside of, like, the music program bringing, you know, their concert series or something. So, I brought it on myself to get involved with the student associations and do all that type of stuff. And I brought really good people. I mean, I had William Parker and Alan Silva play, I had TEST play, Joe Mcphee, Sean Meehan and Toshi Makihara… I had Greg Kelly and Bhob Rainey, I had Eugene Chadbourne, Cooper-Moore.

MW: Wow, that’s a pretty incredible lineup of people. I mean that sounds like an amazing concert series for any venue. What were the responses like?

MM: The responses…it grew and grew. Like, the first year I was there as a freshman, I brought TEST and I had to convince my friends, “You gotta go see this amazing free jazz band!” And they were like, “What’s free jazz?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s this…” But as people got to know me and the series developed…the concerts were more successful. Like, for Cooper-Moore, it was packed. So, it grew into more of a thing.

MW: And you were taking some classes at Bard during this time, too?

MM: Yeah, one class I took that was really a strong class was Joan Retallack’s class… you know Joan Retallack? She’s done some books with Cage, like John Cage in Conversation and then I guess is an artist in some form. But they had, I forget what the program was called, but the class was called “Silence and Art” and it was just about dealing with different perspectives of how art and silence mediate, you know? These were just like types of classes that didn’t exist at New Paltz. And the kids that were going to Bard were like…you could talk about John Zorn with someone. And the Electronic Music Ensemble was a bunch of weirdoes that were into weird music and we did Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise. We did a lot of different graphic score stuff. We did {Zorn’s} Cobra. And then we just improvised too. it was great. It was great to have Bard as part of my education.

Photo by Syeus Mottel. John Cage, NYC, 1972.

May 03, 2010 | Categories: Announcements | Tags: artist in, matt mottel, talibam! | Comments Off