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San Mateo: A Layer of Hiss

November 3, 2022 · 2 Comments

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As San Mateo, Matthew Naquin makes the music of nostalgia, dreams, and expanding subterranean root networks. San Mateo’s latest album — Exspiravit Luminaria — features a digitalized tree in its cover art, eerily suspended with its roots hanging like tendrils. The image is a handy approximation of Matthew’s sound and modus operandi. Exspiravit Luminaria‘s music is steeped in earthiness but also exists outside the soil, floating calmly in an unnatural digitalness. 

I’ve wanted to have this conversation for a while. For the past few years, my fledgling imprint 8D Industries has helped to release San Mateo’s steady and always compelling output. In email exchanges with Matthew, he’s given hints about his process. There’s usually mention of self-imposed constraints, of limiting the music-making tools he has access to, and how each new album has an intentional difference from the previous one. Matthew was immediately on my mind as an interview candidate for this blog’s series of conversations about the artistic process. I’m glad to present our chat to you today.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), our exchange is full of laughs. Matthew shares my curiosity about the creative process and the philosophical question of how art works. Of course, it’s hard to talk about those things without a sense of humor. Other topics include dealing with past releases we no longer enjoy listening to, imagining sequenced music as played by ‘live’ musicians, why playlists suck (or not), the benefit of enforcing constraints, and, as excerpted below, the younger generation’s unexplained embrace of tape hiss.

You can listen to the entire conversation in the audio player. Enjoy! (Also, I apologize that my voice in the audio is a bit crunchy. Editing this inspired me to purchase a new, better microphone.)

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MD: So, some years ago, I found myself buying a sound set of various tape hisses.

MN: I’ve actually got a whole file folder of tape hiss that I’ve created. I bought stuff like that before I started making my own.

MD: Yeah, as I’m buying this thing, I’m thinking: the 18-year-old version of me is screaming right now. He has no idea what I’m doing, wanting to actually add tape hiss. Back then, I literally was losing sleep over tape hiss when I was recording, I could not figure out how to get a good sound without losing my high end, unintentionally adding tape hiss, and everything going crazy. 

MN: It’s amazing. Thirty years ago, everybody searched for sonic purity, and now it’s quite the opposite. Like you were saying, your 18-year-old self would be like, “You’ve got this perfect DAW that records at 24 or 48 bits. And now you’re adding hiss back in.” 

MD: I also have these plugins that add hiss. I mean, they’re great. They sound amazing, but it’s just hilarious to me. And I use them. I love ’em, and I use ’em. But it’s so funny how that thing has come around. Why is that attractive, do you think?

MN: I think there’s something about that, the organicness of it. I was actually pondering this the other day as I was feeding noise into my signal chain. In fact, I’m working on a track where I have an emulation plugin running in the background, adding hiss. There’s no sound actually being fed into it. I’ve just got the tape function turned on to feed a layer of hiss into the signal itself. And I was thinking about that while toggling it back and forth, on and off. And yes, it’s digital, it’s fake tape — whatever. But it opens up the mix in a way that it’s hard to define. It’s almost like a gut feeling or something instinctual, where it adds some of this organic layer to things. When it’s dry, you just can’t hear anything like that. Also, one of the things I like to do is stick a mic out my window and just record that. That’s it. I think I did this on Sonnet Ring and Deepstaria — there’s an underlying microphone feed running through the whole album on both of those. You might not be able to hear it or any street noise or anything like that, but it’s the same with adding tape hiss. It puts you there, somehow or another. It puts you in the room in a way that I think a sterile digital environment doesn’t allow. I don’t know; I’m just spitballing here. As I said, I was thinking about it just yesterday, how noise adds character that opens up the mix in a way that isn’t there when it’s turned off. It doesn’t feel as good, you know?

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MD: Do you think this effect is emotional, like an emotional reaction or a nostalgic reaction?

MN: It could be, but then it’s very popular with this current generation, and they wouldn’t have grown up on that. I mean, I understand with vaporwave or something like that. That genre taps into more guttural, nostalgic things. But tape noise — I can’t imagine that many people in the younger generation into lo-fi music heard tape noise growing up. Maybe they did?

MD: I don’t know. It’s like that phenomenon that was around for a minute of music that sounds like it’s in an empty mall.

MN: Oh, yeah! 

MD: There was a New Yorker article about the phenomenon and how a lot of the people creating these YouTube channels are too young to have actually experienced a mall in its heyday.

MN: I wonder if there’s something that gets ingrained generationally. If your parents experienced the empty mall, there’s something in your genes somehow, that nostalgia or that emotion that gets passed down. (pauses and laughs) Probably not. But, yeah, they’ve never experienced this. They’ve never experienced tape. So why is it popular right now? What are they nostalgic for?

MD: And even adding crackle and vinyl record noise to digital songs. There’s an instrumental hip-hop label I do some work with, and half of their catalog is like that. The artists, who are all very young, add vinyl noise to their digital productions. It’s funny to me, but it’s also cool. But I do feel there is a sort of emotional, nostalgic appeal to tape hiss. I do think that because tape hiss won’t work on everything. And if you remove it from certain songs, your emotional feeling from those songs will be different.

MN: I mean, Boards of Canada created a career on it, right?

MD: But that’s where it’s almost like it’s being passed down. Boards of Canada are a great example because they obviously grew up with tapes and weird educational films and things that had sonic deficiencies in them. They added these defects to their music, which may have been because of an emotional feeling it gave them. This feeling then attached itself to their listeners. And then suddenly, you have new listeners who may not have experienced the original sources but still catching on to the feeling that, say, Boards of Canada originally felt. It’s almost like this cycle of audio nostalgia.

MN: Well, I mean, look at Stranger Things. I’m sure the bulk of its audience is probably people that didn’t grow up in the eighties. Well, I’m not positive, but I would bet that’s the case. The show’s very popular with a younger generation. And then the sound of Stranger Things, the synth lines and production, and all that stuff. There are kids that have never heard that. But it’s the whole intent of Stranger Things; to hit a nostalgic bone, right? It’s supposed to have an eighties ‘feel.’ So, yeah, maybe it is generationally apparent to a child. This makes me curious about what sounds will get used 40 years from now. What’s that going to be? Will producers still use tape hiss and vinyl crackle? I mean, when we’re that far out, will it be something else?

MD: That’s interesting. But it’s interesting, too, when you think about how trends come around. Something that’s really scary to think about for anyone our age is Stranger Things is basically to now as Happy Days was to us in the eighties. 

MN: I haven’t thought of it that way, but yeah, that’s … (shudders)

MD: I mean, as far as the era that was being depicted and the music that was in it. But it seems like the eighties look and sounds have more perseverance then, say, beyond bands like the Stray Cats as an example of fifties music emulated in the eighties. So I don’t know; it almost feels like there’s something else going on …

MN: And then there was that weird swing revival in the nineties.

MD: Which we don’t need to talk about. (much nervous laughter)

→ Exspiravit Luminaria, San Mateo’s latest album, is available now on Bandcamp and all the streaming places.

Filed Under: Interviews + Profiles Tagged With: 1980s, Boards of Canada, music production, Nostalgia, San Mateo, Stranger Things, tape hiss, Vaporwave

laurie anderson – smoke rings

March 25, 2021 · Leave a Comment

I watched Laurie Anderson’s Norton Lecture yesterday — the second in a series of six. She spoke on perception and memory, regular topics in Anderson’s oeuvre, and pushed the limits of a ‘Zoom lecture’ through shifting virtual spaces. At one point she became a creepy deep-fake John Cage. And, at another moment, she played the end of the concert clip above. That’s from the 1986 film Home of the Brave. There’s a trio of great artsy ’80s concert movies: Stop Making Sense, of course, but also Tom Waits’ Big Time and Home of the Brave. The first on that list is, of course, widely available. The second was missing until a couple of months ago when it unceremoniously appeared on Amazon Prime. Home of the Brave is sadly missing in action, only available in full via an illicit YouTube upload. I’d love someone like Criterion (who was involved with Anderson’s 2015 film Heart of a Dog) to step up to the plate and give a proper digital release of this gem.

Filed Under: MEMORA8ILIA Tagged With: 1980s, concert movies, Film, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits

Slippery Between Fingers

February 2, 2021 · Leave a Comment

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The Web is Too Damn Complicated → Robin Rendle says, “The web doesn’t have to be this ugly and embarrassing thing … the web can be made beautiful.” He’s made a beautiful webpage to prove this case. Rendle has illustrated his scrollable essay with vintage woodcuts and metal engravings that are surprisingly effective in amplifying his points. And those points are about how the recent ubiquity of email newsletters is a missed opportunity for a blog renaissance.

Rendle is really asking, “how do we make the web for everyone?” He sees the rise of newsletters as an encouraging sign that people are moving away from social media’s grasp. But why not embrace blogs, which are capable of much more creativity than allowed in email? Because, ultimately, the open web is not as convenient. Website-building is not intuitive, nor is website-following (“RSS is for nerds.”). The creators of Substack know this and made a publishing tool that’s easy to use and receive. 

“If we could subscribe to websites easily,” says Rendle, “then the web itself might not feel quite so forgettable.” He suggests that browsers should include built-in RSS reading. In a way, I guess this would be like a global version of Facebook’s newsfeed. That feed is essentially an RSS reader, but one can only subscribe to feeds within Facebook’s prison camp. 

I do like newsletters. On second thought, I actually like that more people are writing and sending out personal essays. The email newsletter is merely the delivery method. Thanks to Feedbin, I read my newsletters in an RSS reader, living side-by-side with the blogs I enjoy. 

I have an email newsletter but, if I had to choose, this blog is my preference. It feels more open, free, and permanent (as permanent as something on the web can be). I do fear that newsletters may prove a fad — both Facebook and Twitter are jumping on the newsletter bandwagon, which hints that ‘peak newsletter’ isn’t too far off. Blogs remain that scruffy outlier, unpeggable and persistent, slippery between fingers of profit-hungry CEOs. Email’s okay, but blogs keep the web weird. 

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New Wave Eye Candy → That’s a tag on Simon Reynolds’ Hardly Baked blog, and there are three installments in the series (so far). These posts contain a long scroll of vintage graphics from album covers, adverts, and posters that exemplify the look and attitude of the post-punk new wave. It’s also a remarkable glimpse of cutting edge graphic design just before the days of Photoshop et al.

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Emily A. Sprague – Hill, Flower, Fog → “Mirror” is the unassuming third song on Emily A Sprague’s latest, Hill, Flower, Fog. As gentle as a shower of cotton puffs, the song lightly bubbles and pings in sensuous repetition for over nine minutes. The changes are subtle — a lonesome synth swell lingers in the background, pining for recognition, and stereo echoes increase patiently. “Mirror” is the best kind of unobtrusive, and it’s almost shocking when it ends. It feels like a sound that should last forever. 

It’s tempting to say the same about all of Sprague’s latest album for RVNG Intl. — its warm reassurance is a welcome companion. It feels real, and, over six sonic tapestries, Sprague turns a Eurorack’s cold toughness inside out and brushes its circuitry with earth, dew, and sap. Like mysteries of the natural world, Sprague’s electronics feel emergent.

Hill, Flower, Fog is a pandemic album, recorded last March as the world started to realize the trials to come. But these songs magically (and sonically) trade impending sense of loss and uncertainty for sonic intimacy and optimism. One could note that Sprague’s cyclic melodies and looping treatments reflect the imposed routines of lockdown. However, the music is encouraging, inferring these daily patterns as something cherishable, an opportunity for reflection and moving inward. It seems to say, “one day at a time.”

Filed Under: From The Notebook, Listening Tagged With: 1980s, Ambient Music, Blogging, Email Newsletters, Emily A Sprague, Graphic Design, Robin Rendle, RVNGIntl.

8sided.blog

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8sided.blog is a digital zine about sound, culture, and what Andrew Weatherall once referred to as 'the punk rock dream'.

It's also the online home of Michael Donaldson, a slightly jaded but surprisingly optimistic fellow who's haunted the music industry for longer than he cares to admit. A former Q-Burns Abstract Message.

"More than machinery, we need humanity."
 
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