Browse by Artist: MATTIN

Artist:	MATTIN
Title:	Songbook Vol. 4
Label:	AZUL DISCOGRAFICA
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	AZD 002CD

"Mattin once described his approach to music-making as a matter of 'trying to contradict the preconceptions that people might have, to put a different perspective on what can be done in a performance situation.' And so it was that in 2005, the Basque laptop artist best known (depending on who you ask) for his exquisitely restrained laptop improvisations with Radu Malfatti, Eddie Prévost, and Axel Dörner; his palate-cleansing duet with Tim Barnes at ErstQuake 3; or the deformed, impossibly strange 'rock & roll' he makes in Billy Bao and Josetxo Grieta. This fourth volume is far and away the best and quite possibly the strangest in the 'Songbook' series. Whereas earlier volumes found Mattin ripping away at an acoustic guitar and doing his cheapest, most grating Lou Reed imitation, Vol. 4, recorded live in Tokyo, is a concise electric ensemble set featuring Anthony Guerra on second guitar, Tomoya Izumi shouting as Jean-Luc Guionnet plays sax 'in the toilet,' and Taku Unami punctuates Mattin's anguished vocals with popping bass licks and brief piano phrases. Somehow, the resulting 'songs' suggest a particularly fucked-up, drummerless outing by Fushitsusha. In point of fact, Songbook Vol. 4's closest relatives in the rock & roll canon are Suicide's famously confrontational live shows of the mid-'70s, the Electric Eels at the point of disintegration, or the between-song 'banter' on Reed's Take No Prisoners reimagined as a score for five very exciting young improvisers. It is, in other words, one of the greatest live records ever made."

Artist:	MATTIN
Title:	Exquisite Corpse
Label:	AZUL DISCOGRAFICA
Format:	LP
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	AZD 008LP

"If you've been following his work (and even if you haven't, you big bugbear) you know that Mattin brings a conceptual musician's ear to his rock 'n' roll but he keeps it out of the museum and on the 'streetz,' 'cos that's where the riots went down, and this places him at a helluva impasse: the European dialectical impulse has no choice but to hurtle head-on into a game of chicken with the American-historical rock narrative (not the name of a band, though it should be) or to get in bed with it and allow their legs to intertwine in an awkward genital embrace. So it was that in the winter of '08, the bellicose Basque recruited globetrotting bass pervert Margarida Garcia, Kevin Failure of Pink Reason (guitar and piano), and erstwhile Chinese Restaurant 'Lucky' Lloyd Frackkbonner (drums) for an exquisitely corpsical seance conducted on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where Lautreamont shakes hands with the Language Poets and hunkers down for a burger and a smoke with Ivan Julian and Dougie Bowne (engineers and Vietnam vets both). Together they perform an ontological autopsy on the body of rock & roll form, then hogtie the improviser's process with a rope made of crisis (remember the bailout?) -- the Surrealist parlor game subjected here to crushing technology and a stopwatch plus liquor and god-knows-what else. The Rules: ten songs, each exactly three minutes in duration, recorded in strict ass-backwards fashion: first the vocals, then Kevin's guitars, etc., then Margarida's bowed and throbbing bass, then the drums. No second takes. No two musicians were allowed in the studio at the same time and none of them could hear a playback so their only guide -- their score, if you will -- was Mattin's lyrics, which themselves are a living corpse that slices itself open to display its guts, which look like these ten songs or a mangled womb. So we hear it for the first time and guess what? It sounds like a Top-40 station playing nothing but side B of No New York. No shit. Every song is a hit."

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page