voices #33
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
MaTT Robert MCLennan
answering some questions. We have already observed his quintet experimental / noise jazz / post-rock work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “J’Peux” that we prefer is “tea tide pool”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Matt Robert McLennan: “tea tide pool” was the first track we laid down and it is completely improvised around a guitar refrain that I play repeatedly and, somewhat obstinately, outside of the metre of what the percussion and bass were doing. On this track, you can really hear us calibrating our sound and finding our roles – which I don’t think is at all a bad thing. It’s a fairly optimistic track despite the dark tonalities.
[2. CREATION]
■ The A. O.: How do you usually approach composition? Do you start with a concept, a sound, a state of mind or what else? How do you generally proceed from the initial seed to the complete work?
► Matt Robert McLennan: I typically proceed from an idea of an overall sound, plus scraps or themes that I collect over time while I’m playing at home by myself. This is how we did J’Peux; I had a lot of very partial ideas and an overall feel in mind, and we worked these out together. But a key part of my process is also to throw sand in my own gears. By this I mean that I don’t want to start with an idea, and then see that idea mechanically coalesce; I want to be surprised, very surprised even, by the end result. Since I’m really into jazz, I find the best way to do this is to recruit non-jazz players, and to give them very little preparation. I remember reading about how Kurt Cobain would get these punk rock magazines in Aberdeen Washington but have no access to any punk records or radio – so he would study the pictures and articles, and he would play what he imagined punk sounded like in his room. That’s magical! I’m aiming for something like that.
For this reason, on the album J’Peux, all credit goes to my band, which was Ryan McVeigh, Julie Paquette, Leo McLennan, and Chris Sauvé. Ryan can produce anything and is a force of nature, but typically he plays in indie rock bands. JP is a brilliant arts and politics scholar but has done very little musical performance. Leo (BORB K) is a talented underground hip hop producer; Chris is a highly creative and veteran metal drummer. Everybody was enormously openminded, but nobody was particularly keyed into jazz or had any indication of what we were going to do, beyond inviting them down and asking them to bring gear or just assigning gear to them. And I love the results, and hope listeners do too.
[3. FEEDBACK]
■ The A. O.: What do you hope listeners feel or experience when engaging with your music?
► Matt Robert McLennan: I hope that our music is perceived as a struggle against nihilism and fascism. I’m well-acquainted with darker themes and tonalities, and I use them to express the pain of the current conjuncture, but I’m resolutely optimistic, democratic, and antifascist in my process and the finished result. I hope listeners get a sense of: your pain is real, and we can do something about it together.
[4. IDENTITY]
■ The A. O.: In a world saturated with digital music content, how do you try to keep your sound distinct and personally meaningful?
► Matt Robert McLennan: As I said earlier, there’s something to throwing sand in my gears and seeing what comes of it. Even down to adding lots of hard to control, analogue sounds like drum machines with dirty tone pots and ripping paper, and the like. I don’t want to fully remove myself, like John Cage tried to do, but I want what is personally meaningful and distinct about my sound to emerge dialectically, in friction with the performers and the materials. And with my own body! A key them of J’Peux is dealing with bodily changes and injuries, and finding workarounds (a reality with which I’m very familiar).
To keep this kind of approach fresh going forward, this means trying to reinvent the ways in which I complicate things for myself. It also means not worrying too much about what others are doing.
[5. INFLUENCES]
■ The A. O.: Mention 3 albums that you consider relevant to your musical path and why.
► Matt Robert McLennan: ○ Miles Davis – Miles Smiles (1967)
In the mid-to-late 90s I was a teenager playing in noise-metal and dark electro bands. I had a strong interest in the possibilities of sound qua sound, but apart from jamming at band practice or on stage, and making noise tapes in my bedroom, I was fairly committed to writing according to something like rock genre and structure. I also played guitar in the high school jazz band, but that experience of jazz was fairly tame. A friend and bandmate of mine, Andrew Workman, lent me Miles Smiles on CD, really insisting that I listen to it, and I remember hearing it for the first time in my room, on headphones, completely riveted.
I was aware of quite a bit of jazz, but to reiterate it was the kind you could play in high school band. The Miles Davis album broke open post-bop for me, which labels aside, was a field of music that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. I still can’t, by the way, so listening to records in that ballpark is an inexhaustible experience for me. A big factor was the drumming of Tony Williams, which was somehow on pulse, without necessarily being on beat – I suppose it’s fairly polyrhythmic too, which is something my band added a lot to J’Peux. Since Miles Smiles is really on the cusp of the electric period, naturally I got into and stayed into all kinds of Miles Davis, and I hoped that J’Peux would sound like cutting room floor stuff from Bitches Brew.This love of 60s and 70s Miles Davis was always about more than just music for me though. For instance, I vividly recall repeated listenings of Miles’s Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969) getting me through the drudgery of a minimum wage dishwashing job, reminding me that there is great and complicated beauty in music for those lucky and privileged enough to have access to it.
○ The Ornette Coleman Trio, At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm, Vol. 1 (1966)
Ornette Coleman is widely appreciated for how he challenged tonality, but the thing I’ve gotten the most out of listening to him is maybe how, at least in the 50s and 60s, he innovated while rarely using a chordal instrument in his band. This struck me at the time I discovered him – also high school – but only recently did this fully sink in, when I was reading Aidan Levy’s excellent biography of Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus (2023). Apparently playing without a guitar or piano was viewed by jazz musicians as inherently risky, like playing without a safety net. When you listen to “Golden Circle” there’s this amazing nudity to it, which would only be possible at a high level of musicianship and confidence. With only bass and drums, Ornette has nowhere to hide, and he’s courageous and masterful. Picking up on this intuitively, I worked out my own version of it by my early 20s – not so much about eschewing the safety net of chords, but more about not hiding behind multiple guitar effects. From very early on, I would only allow myself two things at my feet on stage: a channel switcher, and a Danelectro Dan-Echo pedal. If I wanted to add a different effect, I had to swap out the Dan-Echo. I still try for this approach in my playing, figuring that if I really want to be myself and add something new and interesting, this should come from my fingers and the inherent properties of the instrument, and not a pedal rack. But as J’Peux attests, I can’t resist echo and reverb and all that good stuff when the moment calls for it.
○ Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (2008)
What I love about this one, beyond Badu’s amazing vocals and her ability to tap into deep and historically specific emotions, is how noisy and experimental and unhinged it is for a soul record. But that’s maybe putting it badly; there’s this whole tradition of life-affirming, antifascist African American noise that Badu calls back to. I’m thinking for instance of the Bomb Squad’s production on Public Enemy records; I got into Public Enemy when I was only in sixth grade, and maybe that explains something about where I am now! Anyway, apparently the Badu album also reflects her breaking out of a period of writers’ block, and was recorded after she solicited a raft of hip hop producers to spark her creativity while she demoed the songs at home. I just love that, and it adds an interesting layer.
[6. REGARDS]
■ The A. O.: Leave us with a quote you love.
► Matt Robert McLennan: “… never forget that the art is in the cooking …” (Duke Ellington)