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Some records have lyrics so ambiguously specific that one can’t help but
notice hints of a storyline or something that ties all the mysterious
pieces together. Such albums inspire listeners to spin the record
endlessly, trying to decode the messages into some kind of concrete
interpretation or narrative. Emperor X's latest album Western Teleport (Bar/None) is a perfect example.
It only makes sense considering their creator Chad Matheny’s own sci-fi affinity for imagining alternate realities. The concept is omnipresent in every aspect of his music. For fourteen years, Emperor X has been releasing independent records and going on guerilla tours across the US. He’s even in another dimension when it comes to promotion and marketing, as he has been burying demo cassettes all across the country for a number of years now.
A scientific flare is immediately evident in Emperor X’s style. At times the lyrics read like poetry inspired by a chemistry textbook, with terms from phosphate to force fields. The most telling example is probably “Compressor Repair” from Western Teleport, which is a love song about a broken air conditioner. The cover for the same record looks like some kind of subatomic experiment. Even the music’s lo-fi sheen and moments of static industrial noise experiments sound like they were concocted in a laboratory. It’s all bonded together by Matheny’s pop sensibility which fills every song with addictive hooks and melodies.
Yet, the music is anything but formulaic. Matheny is sort of at a loss to describe how he creates the organized chaos that occurs within each song. “When I write an album, things seem to come together of their own volition. That sounds like a tremendous cop-out, but it's as accurate a description as I can give of what it feels like to make music,” he says. To clarify (or perhaps confuse further) he gives an analogy, “It feels to me like the themes that emerge are discovered, not invented…sort of like making a fossil rubbing with crayons and wax paper when you're a kid, remember those?” If it’s a subconscious method, like free association lyric writing, it only serves to make the music more organic and genuine. The scientific façade and glossary are the result of Matheny’s interest in the subject as he even previously worked as a high school science teacher.
Even so, Western Teleport certainly seems like it has a story to tell. Right away with the first track we are introduced to a girl whose name might very well be “Erica Western” and know that the narrator has already lost her somehow. She is a mysterious character who gets “tasered in the ruins” in “Erica Western Teleport,” butin the same song is studying for the LSATs. The album seems to follow her exploits through the lens of the singer, who she meets on the bus back from Canada. She has a revolutionary spirit as she “threw a brick with a note through a ticket counter window” in “Canada Day.” After some apocalyptic natural disasters and/or terrorist attacks, in the last song, “Erica Western Geiger Counter,” she is running around the country, possibly planning to blow up a bridge and fleeing from some unknown pursuer.
Matheny says that he notices the repeating themes and motifs as well, but it bothers him when people assumed he had a clear agenda in mind before he even picked up a pen. “I get really fussy when people confuse identifying themes,” he says, “with identifying me attempting at the outset to write music with lyrics about that theme.” It brings up an interesting issue that interpretations (such as the last paragraph) can be completely subjective to the listener. “This is a difficult subject for me, because I believe in linear narrative and I believe in meaning in poetry,” Matheny says, recognizing his own expectations from art, “but I don't think the particular words I write lend themselves productively to fixed, concrete interpretations.”
In the end, Matheny embraces that his works are open to interpretation, specifically using another scientific term that fits quite well, “malleable.” Yet it’s evident that the songs have strikingly vivid imagery. “That's what's so strange about what I write, to me,” he said, “that it's malleable and yet comes across so specifically.” He gave a few examples, saying, “LSATs? Air conditioners? Football teams? What? Why?” (For curious readers, the songs are “Erica Western Teleport,” “Compressor Repair” and the last “Go – Captain and Pinlighter” from 2009’s The Blythe Archives.) In trying to answer his own questions, Matheny says, “I'm a user of the media too, a creator-consumer, and that even as I write the songs I'm making my own user-defined and non-binding narrative. That's not necessarily THE narrative of the work, though. Hopefully this response serves to answer the question rather than confuse the hell out of you.”
Some more strongest themes on Western Teleport that appear quite often are references to Middle Eastern and Islamic culture as well as to Al-Qaeda and terrorism. From grenade attacks in “Sig Alert” to the setting of rural Pakistan to having a song titled “Allahu Akbar.” Why? “The '00s!” Matheny explains. “Writing about Islam as an affluent Westerner in the early 21st century is like writing about nuclear war in the '80s.” He continues, saying, “Unlike nuclear bombs and totalitarian socialism, Islam is also a really beautiful spiritual structure when you strip away all the patriarchal bigotry and Old Testament wrath.”
Watch the video for "Sig Alert" below::
Matheny may not be writing linear narratives, but listeners can discover a world within the music and it might have something to do with his interest in alternate realities. “Thinking obsessively about those kinds of alternative world states generates a lot of the topics I sing about on Western Teleport.” He continues with an example saying, “What if instead of Sunnis running the show Sufism was the dominant Muslim sect? How awesome would that be? It'd be like replacing Catholics with Quakers or Unitarians, but with more of an emphasis on ecstasy and transcendence and starker desert imagery.”
The same is true for his interest in Canada as a motif. “I just have this immense respect for Canadian society. It's like crossing a border into the future. Going from Buffalo to Toronto is like stepping into a time machine, or -- again, alternate universes,” he says. “A sidereal time machine in which English-speaking "North American society makes better decisions. And this sidereal time is here and now! In Canada! How great is that, to have a friendly alternate universe across the river from Detroit?”
These types of naturally occurring themes reveal the true relevance of Emperor X. What emerge from Matheny are major social, political and economic issues as filtered through a “affluent westerner in the 21st century.” Issues like massive protests, oppressive governments, revolutionaries, terrorism, child soldiers and natural disasters. In simply writing about all of the things Matheny has absorbed over time, he captures a genuine moment in history and the society of our modern age, filtered through the lens of a very unique personality. The lyrics provide the perspective on the current state of global culture and how it affects people. The music becomes the emotional resonance of those effects. What makes the music stand out is that it's through the lens of a very unique, intelligent and multidimensional personality.
For example, Western Teleport has a number of references to natural disturbances like ground slides, boiling oceans, wastelands, ruins and waves of sludge. It is the subject of the ironically catchy “A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp.” Matheny explains the song as a combination of two ideas. First, a group of ten universities run by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod called the Concordia University System. The second is the Kelso head scarp, a disaster in the state of Washington where a whole neighborhood collapsed into the earth and slid down a mountain. Matheny explains, “A lot of the concepts that define these two disparate things grew together in my mind and started to form a cohesive meaning-block that related to my life at the time and some good people I care a lot about, and the song coalesced.” The relation between these universities and this natural disaster isn’t clear. However, pairing a church run university system with a devastating natural disaster could make for an interesting commentary about those universities and possibly into the state of higher education as a whole. It all depends on how the listener interprets it.
Watch the video for "A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp" below::
If his music exists in another dimension, it only makes sense that Matheny would envision an alternate system for public relations. In reference to a random poster he saw of what he called a “top 40 twentysomething songwriter robot,” he notes that “marketing like that is weak, because while it might attract bovine droves it will never get people who really think about things on a deep level or know WHY they listen to what they listen to.” He calls it Pavlovian, saying, “It will get people to come to concerts in the same way that the Trix rabbit gets people to buy cereal.”
Matheny was never interested in promoting himself using normal methods. “Releasing records and letting people promote it the old fashioned way is very boring and I don't enjoy it,” he says. To coincide with the release of each record, he planned a country wide scavenger hunt for demo cassettes, or what he calls “nodes.” There’s a special website that documents each location and publishes an MP3 for everyone to download once a code from the node is entered.
His philosophy revolves around artists being more involved in the marketing process. “Marketing campaigns and the art itself are not distinct,” he says. “They're oozing together so much right now because of how huge of a role mass media and expensive advertising plays in creating the public consciousness. We have to find a way to interact with this system without playing by its rules or art will cease to be distinct from advertising.” He might not be attempting to overthrow the system, but he is doing things the Emperor X way. “Is burying tapes in the ground the best response to that?” he asks. “Of course not. That's an experiment to see what alternative methods could work”
After last year’s Western Teleport, Matheny is already working on a new record called UURRVV that will be released sometime in the fall. He’s noticed that it too has reoccurring themes and that a lot of them focus on the economy, which should make it all the more relevant. “It is going to be a huge departure for me,” he says. “I talk a lot about economics on it, economics in the abstract, kind of an emo economics record if it were recorded by a high life band in Lagos or at King Tubby's studio in Jamaica or something. Lots of soca beats and computers. Really odd stuff.” An abstract emo economic record with digital steel drums is hard to imagine, but quite enticing.
published on thebomberjacket.com
Full transcript from the interview:
One thing that distinguishes your lyrics is the scientific language. How did being a musician win out over being a mad scientist?
Henry Miller, who I talk about a lot and who for better or worse was an early role model for me, could have spent his entire life working as a hiring manager for a telegram company, but in his early thirties he decided to ditch it and go for writing. Why? That's a really tough question. I think when presented with decisions in life, in the absence of external pressures like having to provide for kids or take care of relatives or treat a serious illness or whatever, my favorite people choose the path that allows them to make the most original, unique contribution. Milan Kundera calls it the "es muss sein," the "it must be." I had an absurdly easy, lucky early life, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity to be a scientist, and I like to think I could have done some good things if I'd gone that route. But I followed art and music instead simply because it felt more compelling to me; it seemed more likely that my skill set would let me do unique, original things. As a scientist my guess is that I would have been decent but uninspired. I guess it's just one of those really personal decisions we all make from time to time that we grow to take for granted because in retrospect it seems like we could have gone no other way.
How long exactly have you been making music as Emperor X?
Fourteen years.
What is your favorite of your own releases?
Probably the Defiance (For Elise Sunderhuse) endless loop tape cassette EP. And it's sold out now, I hear. Neat, scarcity!
It seems like there’s some kind of post-apocalyptic romance or a tragedy in a distopian future going on within your last record, Western Teleport. Is there a story behind the album? And if so, what’s the jist of it?
When I write an album, things seem to come together of their own volition. That sounds like a tremendous cop-out, but it's as accurate a description as I can give of what it feels like to make music. It feels to me like the themes that emerge are discovered, not invented -- sort of like making a fossil rubbing with crayons and wax paper when you're a kid, remember those? I'm not trying to escape responsibility or deny agency or anything, but I get really fussy when people confuse identifying themes -- I notice them too -- with identifying me attempting, at the outset, to write music with lyrics about that theme. "Well," someone could say, "if you weren't trying to write about them, how did they get there?" Those are questions that a lot of the people reviewing the record are more qualified to answer than I am. I actually start to believe the stuff the reviewers say eventually, their guesses of what each song is about, even when they're completely new to me, completely grafted on. This is a difficult subject for me, because I believe in linear narrative and I believe in meaning in poetry, but I don't think the particular words I write lend themselves productively to fixed, concrete interpretations. Their function is malleable and user-defined. That's what's so strange about what I write, to me -- that it's malleable and yet comes across so specifically. LSATs? Air conditioners? Football teams? What? Why? It's easier to explain myself to people when I get them to sign on to the idea that I'm a user of the media too, a creator-consumer, and that even as I write the songs I'm making my own user-defined and non-binding narrative. That's not necessarily THE narrative of the work, though. Hopefully this response serves to answer the question rather than confuse the hell out of you.
With all of that theoretical stuff out of the way, yes, there are those things you mention on Western Teleport. I notice them too. There's lots of battle imagery, lots of near future imagery, lots of "fight on my team with me in the ruins" imagery. And there's a lot of that on the new album I'm working on right now too, with some armchair economic theory thrown in too. The way I look at it, the meaning can be assigned later. It's not that I think it's impossible to assign meaning first and then write about something specific, intentionally, from the beginning. People do that all the time with great success. But it's usually more productive for me to just write and sort the metaphors into columns later, during the editing process or, more often, after it's been pressed. I go with my instinct first and foremost, and Western Teleport definitely reflects that fact rather than a scripted storyline I had kicking around in my head.
Who is this Erica Western?
It's not a direct reference to anyone in particular.
What’s going on with the references to Middle Eastern or Islamic culture and things like Al-Qaeda?
The '00s! Writing about Islam as an affluent Westerner in the early 21st century is like writing about nuclear war in the '80s. It's on our brains, we're paranoid about it. Thing is, unlike nuclear bombs and totalitarian socialism, Islam is also a really beautiful spiritual structure when you strip away all the patriarchal bigotry and Old Testament wrath. I don't have a political agenda for my music, at least not right now, but I do like to talk about these things, think about alternate possibilities for world history, etc. -- like, what if instead of Sunnis running the show Sufism was the dominant Muslim sect? How awesome would that be? It'd be like replacing Catholics with Quakers or Unitarians, but with more of an emphasis on ecstasy and transcendence and more stark desert imagery. Thinking obsessively about that kind of alternative world state generates a lot of the topics I sing about on Western Teleport.
How does Canada figure into it and what do you mean by Concordia headscarp?
I think about Canada a lot. Some Americans have a really messed up image of Canada, myself included, one Canadians find silly. We think about it as our more mature and way cooler older sibling, but somehow we lucked out and we're the one in the family with all the money. I just have this immense respect for Canadian society. It's like crossing a border into the future. Going from Buffalo to Toronto is like stepping into a time machine, or -- again, alternate universes -- a sidereal time machine in which English-speaking "North American society makes better decisions. And this sidereal time is here and now! In Canada! How great is that, to have a friendly alternate universe across the river from Detroit?
The Concordia Headscarp is a combination of two things, the Concordia University System, run by the Lutherans, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_University_System and the Kelso Headscarp http://landslides.usgs.gov/learning/photos/pacific_northwest__u.s.__-_oregon__washington/kelso__washington_landslide basically, a whole neighborhood that collapsed into the earth and slid down the face of a mountain. A lot of the concepts that define these two disparate things grew together in my mind and started to form a cohesive meaning-block that related to my life at the time and some good people I care a lot about, and the song coalesced.
To go along with the release of Western Teleport, you hid demo cassette “nodes” all over the country. Where did the idea come from?
Desperation/boredom. Releasing records and letting people promote it the old fashioned way is very boring and I don't enjoy it. When I went to play a show at Penn State this last year, for example, and I was leaving the radio station after doing an in-studio performance with my friends who were in the E.X band for that tour, we noticed a poster for some semi-major label singer/songwriter guy. He was young and airbrushed and looked really sincere and he was staring directly at the camera and his album had some sentimental title like _Thoughts of You_ or some garbage like that and the graphic design looked like an A&F ad. You couldn't look at this image without getting two impressions: 1) this guy is "famous", and, 2) this guy sounds like Josh Blunt or whatever the Top 40 twentysomething songwriter robot calls itself this year. I forget the guy's name, which is good because this would sound like an ignorant dis if I name-checked him. I don't know -- maybe it's good, who knows? But the point is that marketing like that is weak, because while it might attract bovine droves it will never get people who really think about things on a deep level or know WHY they listen to what they listen to. It will get people to come to concerts in the same way that the Trix rabbit gets people to buy cereal. It's Pavlovian and kind of depressing.
Is burying tapes in the ground the best response to that? Of course not. That's an experiment to see what alternative methods could work, and for any project I'm involved with it will always be that kind of experiment unless I get way more cynical and Machiavellian than I am right now. It is very important for artists in any field or genre to take control of their marketing campaigns. Marketing campaigns and the art itself are not distinct. Maybe they never were, but they're oozing together so much right now because of how huge of a role mass media and expensive advertising plays in creating the public consciousness. We have to find a way to interact with this system without playing by its rules or art will cease to be distinct from advertising.
It’s not the first time you’ve done something like that. How does the process differ from your treasure hunt for The Blythe Archives or others?
It was just more developed and specific and it had a lot more people involved this time. We simultaneously buried 30 or 40 of these things and Twitter bombed about them. I'm surprised and happy to say that about half of them were discovered -- sometimes by strangers who just happened upon the node (I love to play this scene in my head, the walk-by, the double take, the puzzled "WTF" expression on their face when they read the attached node or play the cassette which in all likelihood had harsh electronic noise printed on it), sometimes by people who went to look for them specifically because they liked my music before and wanted to hear the tracks. Did it sell a ton of records? No. Would I do it again in exactly the same way? Yep.
It seems that you write and perform a lot of the music yourself. What is your recording process like?
THIS!
Did you have any help on the album?
The rad, talented, indie rock veteran Adam Lasus made "Allahu Akbar" and "Erica Western Teleport" sound about 10x better. He's a mixing savant. Elise Sunderhuse sang backups on "Erica Western Teleport," Leah Ford let me use her keyboard, and Dylan Wood engineered and co-produced a lot of the better-sounding tracks too.
Who do you go on tour with?
So many people. Let's see...this year I plan on touring with Stephen Steinbrink a.k.a. French Quarter, he's one of the most correct songwriters in operation right now. And in a few weeks I'm playing a few West Coast dates with Body Parts who you will definitely know about soon if you don't already, they're one of the best live acts I've seen in years and make very refreshing Paul Simon-meets-Grizzly Bear chorus vocals afrobeat dance pop (that doesn't do them justice, oh well.) I'm forgetting a lot of people right now too. I tour waaaaay too much.
What was the most unique show or guerilla tour you’ve ever played, or maybe the show with the strangest location?
Definitely the punk show underneath the 710 in Long Beach. For that show my pals Zach and Elise from these other great Long Beach bands (Elise = Elkie = a very original composer/songwriter with a gorgeous voice and a WONDERFUL lyrical sense = Fort Wife when Zach plays drums, and Zach = drummer in hyperliterate shouty dub rock Lightmusic and absurdist avant pop genius thing Forest of Tongue, both mind-warping contributions to the LBC weird rock scene) were backing me up in a sort of sped up afrobeat high life dance-y band thing, and the electricity came from a generator, and our friend Omar brought Thai curry pizza (WHAT) and there were about sixty or seventy kids pounding/puking up Four Lokos. Most of the other bands were in the punk department. It felt dangerous and immature and really, really cool.
What have your tours to support Western Teleport been like? What kind of tours will you do in the future?
Stateside, better than before. More attendees, for one thing. That's not to say there are always a lot of people. My audience is usually still quite small in most towns. But the response is growing, and like always the people who show up are usually far more supportive and enthusiastic per capita than any other group of people I've ever met, and I'm extremely grateful for that. I expect to continue doing the same kind of tour for the foreseeable future. Maybe I'll get on a tour opening for some big band this year or something, who knows, that'd be fun. My friends Pretty & Nice got to open for Get Up Kids last year, I'd love to do something like that. YOU HEAR ME, GET UP KIDS? WRITE ME!
The big news for touring this year, though, is Europe. It looks like I'll be headed over that way this summer. We're still getting a lot of the details worked out, but possible places I'd hit include Germany, Norway, and Spain. Kuhl/chevere!
Can you tell me more about the new record?
It's called UURRVV and it is going to be a huge departure for me, I'm recording it right now and kind of freaking out about it, actually, in a good/bad/good/bad/good/bad/good way, in a manic way. I talk a lot about economics on it, economics in the abstract, kind of an emo economics record if it were recorded by a high life band in Lagos or at King Tubby's studio in Jamaica or something. Lots of soca beats and computers. Really odd stuff. I'm kind of excited about it. :/
It only makes sense considering their creator Chad Matheny’s own sci-fi affinity for imagining alternate realities. The concept is omnipresent in every aspect of his music. For fourteen years, Emperor X has been releasing independent records and going on guerilla tours across the US. He’s even in another dimension when it comes to promotion and marketing, as he has been burying demo cassettes all across the country for a number of years now.
A scientific flare is immediately evident in Emperor X’s style. At times the lyrics read like poetry inspired by a chemistry textbook, with terms from phosphate to force fields. The most telling example is probably “Compressor Repair” from Western Teleport, which is a love song about a broken air conditioner. The cover for the same record looks like some kind of subatomic experiment. Even the music’s lo-fi sheen and moments of static industrial noise experiments sound like they were concocted in a laboratory. It’s all bonded together by Matheny’s pop sensibility which fills every song with addictive hooks and melodies.
Yet, the music is anything but formulaic. Matheny is sort of at a loss to describe how he creates the organized chaos that occurs within each song. “When I write an album, things seem to come together of their own volition. That sounds like a tremendous cop-out, but it's as accurate a description as I can give of what it feels like to make music,” he says. To clarify (or perhaps confuse further) he gives an analogy, “It feels to me like the themes that emerge are discovered, not invented…sort of like making a fossil rubbing with crayons and wax paper when you're a kid, remember those?” If it’s a subconscious method, like free association lyric writing, it only serves to make the music more organic and genuine. The scientific façade and glossary are the result of Matheny’s interest in the subject as he even previously worked as a high school science teacher.
Even so, Western Teleport certainly seems like it has a story to tell. Right away with the first track we are introduced to a girl whose name might very well be “Erica Western” and know that the narrator has already lost her somehow. She is a mysterious character who gets “tasered in the ruins” in “Erica Western Teleport,” butin the same song is studying for the LSATs. The album seems to follow her exploits through the lens of the singer, who she meets on the bus back from Canada. She has a revolutionary spirit as she “threw a brick with a note through a ticket counter window” in “Canada Day.” After some apocalyptic natural disasters and/or terrorist attacks, in the last song, “Erica Western Geiger Counter,” she is running around the country, possibly planning to blow up a bridge and fleeing from some unknown pursuer.
Matheny says that he notices the repeating themes and motifs as well, but it bothers him when people assumed he had a clear agenda in mind before he even picked up a pen. “I get really fussy when people confuse identifying themes,” he says, “with identifying me attempting at the outset to write music with lyrics about that theme.” It brings up an interesting issue that interpretations (such as the last paragraph) can be completely subjective to the listener. “This is a difficult subject for me, because I believe in linear narrative and I believe in meaning in poetry,” Matheny says, recognizing his own expectations from art, “but I don't think the particular words I write lend themselves productively to fixed, concrete interpretations.”
In the end, Matheny embraces that his works are open to interpretation, specifically using another scientific term that fits quite well, “malleable.” Yet it’s evident that the songs have strikingly vivid imagery. “That's what's so strange about what I write, to me,” he said, “that it's malleable and yet comes across so specifically.” He gave a few examples, saying, “LSATs? Air conditioners? Football teams? What? Why?” (For curious readers, the songs are “Erica Western Teleport,” “Compressor Repair” and the last “Go – Captain and Pinlighter” from 2009’s The Blythe Archives.) In trying to answer his own questions, Matheny says, “I'm a user of the media too, a creator-consumer, and that even as I write the songs I'm making my own user-defined and non-binding narrative. That's not necessarily THE narrative of the work, though. Hopefully this response serves to answer the question rather than confuse the hell out of you.”
Some more strongest themes on Western Teleport that appear quite often are references to Middle Eastern and Islamic culture as well as to Al-Qaeda and terrorism. From grenade attacks in “Sig Alert” to the setting of rural Pakistan to having a song titled “Allahu Akbar.” Why? “The '00s!” Matheny explains. “Writing about Islam as an affluent Westerner in the early 21st century is like writing about nuclear war in the '80s.” He continues, saying, “Unlike nuclear bombs and totalitarian socialism, Islam is also a really beautiful spiritual structure when you strip away all the patriarchal bigotry and Old Testament wrath.”
Watch the video for "Sig Alert" below::
Matheny may not be writing linear narratives, but listeners can discover a world within the music and it might have something to do with his interest in alternate realities. “Thinking obsessively about those kinds of alternative world states generates a lot of the topics I sing about on Western Teleport.” He continues with an example saying, “What if instead of Sunnis running the show Sufism was the dominant Muslim sect? How awesome would that be? It'd be like replacing Catholics with Quakers or Unitarians, but with more of an emphasis on ecstasy and transcendence and starker desert imagery.”
The same is true for his interest in Canada as a motif. “I just have this immense respect for Canadian society. It's like crossing a border into the future. Going from Buffalo to Toronto is like stepping into a time machine, or -- again, alternate universes,” he says. “A sidereal time machine in which English-speaking "North American society makes better decisions. And this sidereal time is here and now! In Canada! How great is that, to have a friendly alternate universe across the river from Detroit?”
These types of naturally occurring themes reveal the true relevance of Emperor X. What emerge from Matheny are major social, political and economic issues as filtered through a “affluent westerner in the 21st century.” Issues like massive protests, oppressive governments, revolutionaries, terrorism, child soldiers and natural disasters. In simply writing about all of the things Matheny has absorbed over time, he captures a genuine moment in history and the society of our modern age, filtered through the lens of a very unique personality. The lyrics provide the perspective on the current state of global culture and how it affects people. The music becomes the emotional resonance of those effects. What makes the music stand out is that it's through the lens of a very unique, intelligent and multidimensional personality.
For example, Western Teleport has a number of references to natural disturbances like ground slides, boiling oceans, wastelands, ruins and waves of sludge. It is the subject of the ironically catchy “A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp.” Matheny explains the song as a combination of two ideas. First, a group of ten universities run by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod called the Concordia University System. The second is the Kelso head scarp, a disaster in the state of Washington where a whole neighborhood collapsed into the earth and slid down a mountain. Matheny explains, “A lot of the concepts that define these two disparate things grew together in my mind and started to form a cohesive meaning-block that related to my life at the time and some good people I care a lot about, and the song coalesced.” The relation between these universities and this natural disaster isn’t clear. However, pairing a church run university system with a devastating natural disaster could make for an interesting commentary about those universities and possibly into the state of higher education as a whole. It all depends on how the listener interprets it.
Watch the video for "A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp" below::
If his music exists in another dimension, it only makes sense that Matheny would envision an alternate system for public relations. In reference to a random poster he saw of what he called a “top 40 twentysomething songwriter robot,” he notes that “marketing like that is weak, because while it might attract bovine droves it will never get people who really think about things on a deep level or know WHY they listen to what they listen to.” He calls it Pavlovian, saying, “It will get people to come to concerts in the same way that the Trix rabbit gets people to buy cereal.”
Matheny was never interested in promoting himself using normal methods. “Releasing records and letting people promote it the old fashioned way is very boring and I don't enjoy it,” he says. To coincide with the release of each record, he planned a country wide scavenger hunt for demo cassettes, or what he calls “nodes.” There’s a special website that documents each location and publishes an MP3 for everyone to download once a code from the node is entered.
His philosophy revolves around artists being more involved in the marketing process. “Marketing campaigns and the art itself are not distinct,” he says. “They're oozing together so much right now because of how huge of a role mass media and expensive advertising plays in creating the public consciousness. We have to find a way to interact with this system without playing by its rules or art will cease to be distinct from advertising.” He might not be attempting to overthrow the system, but he is doing things the Emperor X way. “Is burying tapes in the ground the best response to that?” he asks. “Of course not. That's an experiment to see what alternative methods could work”
After last year’s Western Teleport, Matheny is already working on a new record called UURRVV that will be released sometime in the fall. He’s noticed that it too has reoccurring themes and that a lot of them focus on the economy, which should make it all the more relevant. “It is going to be a huge departure for me,” he says. “I talk a lot about economics on it, economics in the abstract, kind of an emo economics record if it were recorded by a high life band in Lagos or at King Tubby's studio in Jamaica or something. Lots of soca beats and computers. Really odd stuff.” An abstract emo economic record with digital steel drums is hard to imagine, but quite enticing.
published on thebomberjacket.com
Full transcript from the interview:
One thing that distinguishes your lyrics is the scientific language. How did being a musician win out over being a mad scientist?
Henry Miller, who I talk about a lot and who for better or worse was an early role model for me, could have spent his entire life working as a hiring manager for a telegram company, but in his early thirties he decided to ditch it and go for writing. Why? That's a really tough question. I think when presented with decisions in life, in the absence of external pressures like having to provide for kids or take care of relatives or treat a serious illness or whatever, my favorite people choose the path that allows them to make the most original, unique contribution. Milan Kundera calls it the "es muss sein," the "it must be." I had an absurdly easy, lucky early life, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity to be a scientist, and I like to think I could have done some good things if I'd gone that route. But I followed art and music instead simply because it felt more compelling to me; it seemed more likely that my skill set would let me do unique, original things. As a scientist my guess is that I would have been decent but uninspired. I guess it's just one of those really personal decisions we all make from time to time that we grow to take for granted because in retrospect it seems like we could have gone no other way.
How long exactly have you been making music as Emperor X?
Fourteen years.
What is your favorite of your own releases?
Probably the Defiance (For Elise Sunderhuse) endless loop tape cassette EP. And it's sold out now, I hear. Neat, scarcity!
It seems like there’s some kind of post-apocalyptic romance or a tragedy in a distopian future going on within your last record, Western Teleport. Is there a story behind the album? And if so, what’s the jist of it?
When I write an album, things seem to come together of their own volition. That sounds like a tremendous cop-out, but it's as accurate a description as I can give of what it feels like to make music. It feels to me like the themes that emerge are discovered, not invented -- sort of like making a fossil rubbing with crayons and wax paper when you're a kid, remember those? I'm not trying to escape responsibility or deny agency or anything, but I get really fussy when people confuse identifying themes -- I notice them too -- with identifying me attempting, at the outset, to write music with lyrics about that theme. "Well," someone could say, "if you weren't trying to write about them, how did they get there?" Those are questions that a lot of the people reviewing the record are more qualified to answer than I am. I actually start to believe the stuff the reviewers say eventually, their guesses of what each song is about, even when they're completely new to me, completely grafted on. This is a difficult subject for me, because I believe in linear narrative and I believe in meaning in poetry, but I don't think the particular words I write lend themselves productively to fixed, concrete interpretations. Their function is malleable and user-defined. That's what's so strange about what I write, to me -- that it's malleable and yet comes across so specifically. LSATs? Air conditioners? Football teams? What? Why? It's easier to explain myself to people when I get them to sign on to the idea that I'm a user of the media too, a creator-consumer, and that even as I write the songs I'm making my own user-defined and non-binding narrative. That's not necessarily THE narrative of the work, though. Hopefully this response serves to answer the question rather than confuse the hell out of you.
With all of that theoretical stuff out of the way, yes, there are those things you mention on Western Teleport. I notice them too. There's lots of battle imagery, lots of near future imagery, lots of "fight on my team with me in the ruins" imagery. And there's a lot of that on the new album I'm working on right now too, with some armchair economic theory thrown in too. The way I look at it, the meaning can be assigned later. It's not that I think it's impossible to assign meaning first and then write about something specific, intentionally, from the beginning. People do that all the time with great success. But it's usually more productive for me to just write and sort the metaphors into columns later, during the editing process or, more often, after it's been pressed. I go with my instinct first and foremost, and Western Teleport definitely reflects that fact rather than a scripted storyline I had kicking around in my head.
Who is this Erica Western?
It's not a direct reference to anyone in particular.
What’s going on with the references to Middle Eastern or Islamic culture and things like Al-Qaeda?
The '00s! Writing about Islam as an affluent Westerner in the early 21st century is like writing about nuclear war in the '80s. It's on our brains, we're paranoid about it. Thing is, unlike nuclear bombs and totalitarian socialism, Islam is also a really beautiful spiritual structure when you strip away all the patriarchal bigotry and Old Testament wrath. I don't have a political agenda for my music, at least not right now, but I do like to talk about these things, think about alternate possibilities for world history, etc. -- like, what if instead of Sunnis running the show Sufism was the dominant Muslim sect? How awesome would that be? It'd be like replacing Catholics with Quakers or Unitarians, but with more of an emphasis on ecstasy and transcendence and more stark desert imagery. Thinking obsessively about that kind of alternative world state generates a lot of the topics I sing about on Western Teleport.
How does Canada figure into it and what do you mean by Concordia headscarp?
I think about Canada a lot. Some Americans have a really messed up image of Canada, myself included, one Canadians find silly. We think about it as our more mature and way cooler older sibling, but somehow we lucked out and we're the one in the family with all the money. I just have this immense respect for Canadian society. It's like crossing a border into the future. Going from Buffalo to Toronto is like stepping into a time machine, or -- again, alternate universes -- a sidereal time machine in which English-speaking "North American society makes better decisions. And this sidereal time is here and now! In Canada! How great is that, to have a friendly alternate universe across the river from Detroit?
The Concordia Headscarp is a combination of two things, the Concordia University System, run by the Lutherans, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordia_University_System and the Kelso Headscarp http://landslides.usgs.gov/learning/photos/pacific_northwest__u.s.__-_oregon__washington/kelso__washington_landslide basically, a whole neighborhood that collapsed into the earth and slid down the face of a mountain. A lot of the concepts that define these two disparate things grew together in my mind and started to form a cohesive meaning-block that related to my life at the time and some good people I care a lot about, and the song coalesced.
To go along with the release of Western Teleport, you hid demo cassette “nodes” all over the country. Where did the idea come from?
Desperation/boredom. Releasing records and letting people promote it the old fashioned way is very boring and I don't enjoy it. When I went to play a show at Penn State this last year, for example, and I was leaving the radio station after doing an in-studio performance with my friends who were in the E.X band for that tour, we noticed a poster for some semi-major label singer/songwriter guy. He was young and airbrushed and looked really sincere and he was staring directly at the camera and his album had some sentimental title like _Thoughts of You_ or some garbage like that and the graphic design looked like an A&F ad. You couldn't look at this image without getting two impressions: 1) this guy is "famous", and, 2) this guy sounds like Josh Blunt or whatever the Top 40 twentysomething songwriter robot calls itself this year. I forget the guy's name, which is good because this would sound like an ignorant dis if I name-checked him. I don't know -- maybe it's good, who knows? But the point is that marketing like that is weak, because while it might attract bovine droves it will never get people who really think about things on a deep level or know WHY they listen to what they listen to. It will get people to come to concerts in the same way that the Trix rabbit gets people to buy cereal. It's Pavlovian and kind of depressing.
Is burying tapes in the ground the best response to that? Of course not. That's an experiment to see what alternative methods could work, and for any project I'm involved with it will always be that kind of experiment unless I get way more cynical and Machiavellian than I am right now. It is very important for artists in any field or genre to take control of their marketing campaigns. Marketing campaigns and the art itself are not distinct. Maybe they never were, but they're oozing together so much right now because of how huge of a role mass media and expensive advertising plays in creating the public consciousness. We have to find a way to interact with this system without playing by its rules or art will cease to be distinct from advertising.
It’s not the first time you’ve done something like that. How does the process differ from your treasure hunt for The Blythe Archives or others?
It was just more developed and specific and it had a lot more people involved this time. We simultaneously buried 30 or 40 of these things and Twitter bombed about them. I'm surprised and happy to say that about half of them were discovered -- sometimes by strangers who just happened upon the node (I love to play this scene in my head, the walk-by, the double take, the puzzled "WTF" expression on their face when they read the attached node or play the cassette which in all likelihood had harsh electronic noise printed on it), sometimes by people who went to look for them specifically because they liked my music before and wanted to hear the tracks. Did it sell a ton of records? No. Would I do it again in exactly the same way? Yep.
It seems that you write and perform a lot of the music yourself. What is your recording process like?
THIS!
Did you have any help on the album?
The rad, talented, indie rock veteran Adam Lasus made "Allahu Akbar" and "Erica Western Teleport" sound about 10x better. He's a mixing savant. Elise Sunderhuse sang backups on "Erica Western Teleport," Leah Ford let me use her keyboard, and Dylan Wood engineered and co-produced a lot of the better-sounding tracks too.
Who do you go on tour with?
So many people. Let's see...this year I plan on touring with Stephen Steinbrink a.k.a. French Quarter, he's one of the most correct songwriters in operation right now. And in a few weeks I'm playing a few West Coast dates with Body Parts who you will definitely know about soon if you don't already, they're one of the best live acts I've seen in years and make very refreshing Paul Simon-meets-Grizzly Bear chorus vocals afrobeat dance pop (that doesn't do them justice, oh well.) I'm forgetting a lot of people right now too. I tour waaaaay too much.
What was the most unique show or guerilla tour you’ve ever played, or maybe the show with the strangest location?
Definitely the punk show underneath the 710 in Long Beach. For that show my pals Zach and Elise from these other great Long Beach bands (Elise = Elkie = a very original composer/songwriter with a gorgeous voice and a WONDERFUL lyrical sense = Fort Wife when Zach plays drums, and Zach = drummer in hyperliterate shouty dub rock Lightmusic and absurdist avant pop genius thing Forest of Tongue, both mind-warping contributions to the LBC weird rock scene) were backing me up in a sort of sped up afrobeat high life dance-y band thing, and the electricity came from a generator, and our friend Omar brought Thai curry pizza (WHAT) and there were about sixty or seventy kids pounding/puking up Four Lokos. Most of the other bands were in the punk department. It felt dangerous and immature and really, really cool.
What have your tours to support Western Teleport been like? What kind of tours will you do in the future?
Stateside, better than before. More attendees, for one thing. That's not to say there are always a lot of people. My audience is usually still quite small in most towns. But the response is growing, and like always the people who show up are usually far more supportive and enthusiastic per capita than any other group of people I've ever met, and I'm extremely grateful for that. I expect to continue doing the same kind of tour for the foreseeable future. Maybe I'll get on a tour opening for some big band this year or something, who knows, that'd be fun. My friends Pretty & Nice got to open for Get Up Kids last year, I'd love to do something like that. YOU HEAR ME, GET UP KIDS? WRITE ME!
The big news for touring this year, though, is Europe. It looks like I'll be headed over that way this summer. We're still getting a lot of the details worked out, but possible places I'd hit include Germany, Norway, and Spain. Kuhl/chevere!
Can you tell me more about the new record?
It's called UURRVV and it is going to be a huge departure for me, I'm recording it right now and kind of freaking out about it, actually, in a good/bad/good/bad/good/bad/good way, in a manic way. I talk a lot about economics on it, economics in the abstract, kind of an emo economics record if it were recorded by a high life band in Lagos or at King Tubby's studio in Jamaica or something. Lots of soca beats and computers. Really odd stuff. I'm kind of excited about it. :/
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