Matt Evans
Matt Evans is a drummer and producer making acoustic and electronic music about the poetic interconnections between landscapes: internal, external, fictional, and virtual. Taking cues from millennial esoterica, natural phenomena, and science fiction, Matt uses drum-driven hypnotic soundscapes and improvisatory performances to embody imaginary ecosystems of surreal sonic worlds. In “New Topographics” (2020) and “Soft Science” (2022), vintage synth burbles, peculiar percussion skitters, and muddy foraged samples are enmeshed like critters in a sci-fi biome. Matt performs these tracks from the drum kit, with samplers and pedals, embodying the array of characters as a ritualistic representation of these futuristic landscapes. His approach creates a groovy psychedelic instrumental music that is "hyperreal and phantasmal" (Wire Magazine), "meticulous and expressive." (New York Times), and "a form of chill complexity" (New York Times).
The poetics of Matt’s music are concerned with the interconnection and translation between landscape modalities, for example, how the resilience of a particular edible mushroom and their relationship to their environment can be studied [external landscape], anthropomorphized and mapped onto a person’s emotional experience [internal landscape], and later imagined within a fictional narrative and expressed through instrumental music [fictional landscape]. This translation through modalities can also be more literal than conceptual, for instance taking the sonic byproducts of communication systems (i.e. the sound of writing with a marker) and supposing them as a musical language that can be imitated or harmonized.
The sound sources Matt employs include drums, Casio keyboards, Moog synthesizers, traditional classical instruments, percussive accessories and found sounds, often manipulated through careful effects processing and electronic manipulation. His style is defined by a tendency towards minimalist characteristics, idiosyncratic rhythms, ambient and fourth-world nostalgia, and experimental production practices.
Matt has performed solo at acclaimed venues such as the Guggenheim, The Kitchen, and Roulette; held residencies at Antenna Cloud Farm, Pioneer Works, Exploring the Metropolis, and The Shell House; given talks at Wesleyan University and Dartmouth College; and released solo records with Whatever’s Clever and Moon Glyph (forthcoming). Matt has toured with projects Neti-Neti, Tigue, piano trio Bearthoven, Deerhoof, and others. He’s performed music by composers Lea Bertucci, Steve Reich, Sarah Hennies, Michael Gordon, Scott Wollschleger, and others. Past festival appearances have included Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, Netherlands, Big Ears in Tennessee, US, and the Summer Nostros Festival in Athens, Greece. He’s toured throughout the United States and Europe, including shows in Latvia, Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, the UK, Iceland and the Netherlands. Matt has released records with NNA, New Amsterdam, Whatever’s Clever, Cantaloupe, Perfect Wave, Thrill Jockey, Dinzu Artefacts, and Moon Glyph.
Matt’s classical compositions tend toward the ambient and the poetic, where simple structural logics are impeded by indeterminate and incidental forms. Textural string and wind writing combine with ephemeral and otherworldly percussion and keyboard sounds in the production of effervescent clouds of subtle shifting harmony and rhythm. Experiments with expanded intonation and euclidian rhythms give these compositions an uncanny, hyperreal feeling that extends an overarching dreamy sentiment. These works often take optical phenomenon and theoretical physics as a point of departure — as calculated depictions of phenomenological anomalies.
