Photo: Adam Matlock by Jerome Harris
By: Lys Guillorn
Adam Matlock is a New Haven composer, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who plays and records under several names. An Historic is his vehicle for sweeping, original art songs on voice and accordion. As Gzara/G. Zarapanecko, he writes and records deeply textured and multi-layered instrumental music. Adam is also a member of the band Dr. Caterwaul’s Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps, the improvisational trio Broadcloth, and the Yale Klezmer Band. Among the instruments the 29-year-old plays are accordion, synths/piano, viola, clarinet, guitar, and percussion.
In 2014 he released An Historic Sings Peter Hammill, an album of covers by Peter Hammill of Van Der Graaf Generator, a two-song single Song for Ferguson, and The Accordion Covers, a series for which he covers video game music and tunes from eclectic international sources (the most recent of which is a cover of Purcell’s March from the Funeral Music for Queen Mary perhaps best known from Wendy Carlos’s soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange).
Gzara’s brilliantly atmospheric 5-song record When suddenly you must be restored is released today, Monday, February 23, 2015 on Bandcamp.
I spoke with Adam via a Skype text chat on Friday, February 20, 2015.
Lys Guillorn: You have a release coming out Tuesday. Can you tell me a little about that?
Adam Matlock: Uh oh, I didn’t put the wrong date up did I? Planning on releasing it on Monday to coincide with a dentist appointment, sort of.
LG: Oh…I just read it wrong. Why to coincide with the dentist appointment?
AM: I’m only half-joking when I say it has become a sort of conceptual album based on this ongoing dental saga I’ve gone through, first getting a wisdom tooth pulled and then getting a root canal. A lot of the music and art was made while I was panicking about losing all my teeth, which it turned out was premature.
LG: The classic nightmare theme, though.
AM: Indeed. GZARA is the rechristened name of the project I first released an album under, G. Zarapanecko. Pronounced, the G is soft – I dunno linguistically what that action is called, but it would be like “ig-zara” but with the vowel not really sounded. A glottal stop maybe? But however it is spoken, the banner has always been for ambient-leaning music, lots of samples, lots of processed sounds, lots of synths.
LG: So you picked up in December something you had been working on for a while? I read on your blog that you did a session in 2012 and then in December [of 2014].
AM: Two tracks were originally recorded in…let’s see, July of 2012. I was approached by a Russian director named Jurii Kirnev, who liked some of the music from my previous release and asked me to compose something for a science fiction short. But at some point after finishing them and sending them to him, he stopped returning my emails.
LG: Oh, man.
AM: I’ve kept tabs every now and again to see if he’s used them, but so far nothing. A shame because he did have an intriguing visual style.
LG: But it must have been a boost at the time…too bad he didn’t follow through.
AM: It was – at that point, the previous release was dropped on New Year’s Eve 2010 and I hadn’t worked on the project since, so it was a nice motivation to get back into it.
LG: And what made you pick it up in December?
AM: Hard to say, exactly. The project has always been sort of opportunistic, trying to pin down improvisations and build something around them. And so there were two solo accordion improvisations that I recorded during the course of a day that gave me some ideas…I spent roughly the next month tinkering with them, adding overdubs and synths and whatnot.
LG: Is one of those the track you made the YouTube video for? [“Earth laid pillows on our heads”]
AM: That one will be a bonus, but that track is not too far off from how the two December tracks started, under all the layers. The project has always been inspired by science fiction and the occult, for non-musical sources of inspiration, and I suppose I always start thinking about those things more in winter for whatever reason.
LG: It’s time to cocoon, watch movies and brood on the weird magic of winter. You mention winter in a bunch of your songs. This is the non-narrative version, perhaps?
AM: Less-narrative, let’s say. Musically, the project has always been inspired by black metal, the dark ambient side-projects of black metal artists, darkwave/neoclassical stuff…things where a significant part of their value to me as a listener is what they trigger in my imagination.
LG: What are some of the bands?
AM: Ulver is a main one, a Norwegian band that started out exclusively black metal, and has evolved quite a bit in 20+ years. Mortiis is another, Dead Can Dance (in both their goth and their dark wave phases)…
LG: I’m familiar with DCD but not the others.
AM: I have always liked the weird micro-genre known as dark jazz, even though there are tons of things that bug me about it. But when it works it hits all my buttons. Probably the main player in that field is The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble.
LG: Music doesn’t always have to agree with you to be inspiring.
AM: It’s true.
LG: Inspiration can sometimes be a rash.
AM: I think the last two projects under this name have started with the specific intent of at least one track improving on their formula. Never ends up that way, but that’s the impetus in some cases.
LG: What do you think is the failure you’re trying to correct? Failure is the wrong word.
AM: Too much delay, noncommittal improvisation, a non-critical view of Film Noir as an artistic genre. I understand that in many cases changing one element of the formula might produce a different result, which is why I’m content to let the tracks evolve as they may.
LG: Is it liberating in some way to release a record that won’t necessarily be performed?
AM: For sure. I’ve performed under this name less than 5 times in my life, and it’s always been improvised, or compositions specific for live performance, rather than trying to imitate the records. (Not for lack of trying – there are at least 3 drafts of pieces from the second record, Glitterdämmerung, that I have tried to adapt for live performance, but I finally had to concede that they just wouldn’t work)
LG: Would you ever try to play the ones off the new record? Or is that not even a possibility.
AM: Probably 3 years ago I’d be scribbling away trying to ‘transcribe’ myself, fix some of the elements that happened by chance and replicate them. But I think I’ve learned better by now. Part of the appeal of the project for me is how intangible some of the processes are, especially with regards to the use of synths.
LG: Things you could never replicate?
AM: Things I could replicate but probably only with a backing track, which for me takes the fun out of it. Or with a laptop, and I’m not sure I’d want to crossover into that realm…so many potential issues when working with laptop-generated sound. I’ve seen it happen enough times that I think at this point it’s not a priority.
LG: Eek. Yes. Robots gone mad.
AM: Which isn’t to say I don’t like laptop music…but for me that’s a level of stress I don’t want to have to take on at this point.
LG: Two questions: what have you been listening to beside black metal, and what science fiction was affecting your thinking in December when you were working on these tracks?
AM: Well, OK, so I have as always been listening to a lot of accordion music. This Swedish duo Stabi-Jensen, which is just both of their last names. The duo of Trygve Seim (sax) and Frode Halti (Accordion), both Norwegians who have a really nice interplay – sort of jazz, sort of folk-ish. The D’Angelo album, Black Messiah. The recent release from Peter Hammill …All that Might Have Been…. And I found myself returning to Alice Coltrane’s music after a year or so of not listening to her.
AM: Let’s see…second question – I’m a huge Star Trek fan, particularly DS9. I finished Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris maybe 3 years ago but it has been on my mind for that time.
LG: Small Mercies has been in my car since I bought it from you a month or so ago. It’s like a disc full of encapsulated sci-fi movies. Your lyrics are out there, in the best way possible.
AM: Thanks! Octavia Butler was a huge influence on a lot of those lyrics. As well as kind of a mashup of apocalypse/zombie narratives. There have been points where I have set out trying to write lyrics that feel more immediately personal/biographical, and I think those tunes always end up really depressing (but I’m OK with that, honest!)
But of course that doesn’t always end up the case – still some narratives of things that definitely have not happened to me (yet). I hate the term, but I think a lot of my interest in Science Fiction is with what is termed “soft-Sci-Fi” the chief impetus for the plot isn’t a super-intricately researched technology or what have you.
LG: A slightly distorted reality…
AM: The term is misogynist and stems from the “hard science/soft science distinction”, as far as I understand. But for me, one of my chief interests in narrative as a consumer and as a storyteller has to do with seeing how different fantastic situations help us see human nature from a different perspective. So it really doesn’t matter if the author has interviewed a dozen theoretical physicists – as long as the setting gives us a cool way to look at human issues. That’s not to say there’s no value in a well-researched story, but it’s not the main priority for me.
LG: Yeah, the tech isn’t important if the characters are compelling.
AM: Exactly! And I think my suspension of disbelief hinges much more on the latter.
LG: How is it being in a band with a novelist [Brian Slattery, who is also in Dr. Caterwaul’s]? Inspiring, intimidating?
AM: More the former. In a previous life (i.e. high school) I had aspirations of being a writer of that type, but I’ve reconciled that that isn’t me anymore…so I enjoy the conversations with Brian when carpooling to gigs, etc.
LG: You guys share some affinities.
AM: A few yes, particularly in storytelling ideas. Brian [Slattery] wrote the libretto for the opera I wrote, Red Giant. When I explained to him the story that I wanted to tell, he told me that it was scarily close to the plot of his then-unpublished third novel.
LG: That’s nuts!
AM: So naturally he agreed wholeheartedly.
LG: How did you guys work on the collaboration?
AM: I had more or less outlined the story when we first started talking about it. I had even made a few attempts at starting the libretto, but I knew that I wouldn’t really be able to do it justice. So I showed him my outlines, and we batted some ideas back and forth, talked about tone, etc. I left him at it for a few months, and he came back to me with a really exciting draft for the first third of it, and we went from there.
LG: How long did the whole process take you from it being commissioned to being performed?
AM: Let’s see…I submitted the proposal to Rhymes with Opera, the company that produced it, in April ’11. Even before they accepted it, I got excited and approached Brian with the idea, asking him if he’d write the libretto if RWO accepted the proposal, which they did in August. The first performance was in June ’12, and then I revised it/expanded the instrumentation (from a 2-piece ensemble with 3 singers, to an instrumental sextet)
AM: that was in the fall of ’13, for a staged performance in January ’14.
LG: How involved were you with the actual production?
AM: I was consulted by the production and costume designers, and saw some drafts for costumes and some inspiration photos for the set early on. Then it was more-or-less out of my hands once I turned the score in.
LG: How did it feel to see it performed?
AM: I cried, I won’t lie. It was really rewarding.
LG: I bet! I would’ve wept.
AM: Of course part of my brain was thinking about things I wish I had changed or spent a little more time on. But not the main part, which is kind of rare. RWO really did a fabulous job with it. There’s a thought that they might release the audio from the staged performance, with the expanded instrumentation.
LG: What is the new An Historic material shaping up to be – did you do a couple of new tunes at the Sunday show [on 1/18 at Café 9 in New Haven]? You did a new winter-inspired song, right?
AM: I did…tentatively titled “Makes Me Right”
LG: Even if winter sucks, you get some good material out of it.
AM: It’s true. I think this one is probably more directly about depression, but they’re not mutually exclusive, obviously. I think one of the ways my depression manifests is to be kind of more adversarial than I would care to be, and this is a way of trying to own up to that.
LG: Are there any formal plans to record the new songs, or are you going to let some accumulate for a while?
AM: I’ve recorded a few tracks, not yet finished, with Ceschi Ramos, and done a few home recordings. I would love to release another album as I’ve got probably close to 20 songs queued up.
LG: Collaborating with Ceschi, or he recorded them?
AM: He recorded them.
LG: Ooh. That’s exciting. Solo voice/accordion or with more instrumentation like Small Mercies?
AM: At their current stage, just accordion and box with a few harmonies. Small Mercies was recorded live with Caterwauls as the backing band. I love that record, and it was a great way to work for an album. But this time I would love to do something with more overdubs. I hesitate to say orchestral, but that’s the word that comes to mind.
LG: What kind of instrumentation? Everything you’ve got in your arsenal or other players?
AM: Both. This is one area where the aforementioned Peter Hammill has been a huge inspiration. He’s had an enormous solo career, many albums just done himself with overdubs, and some with longtime instrumental collaborators.
AM: And I think I’ve always been attracted to solo artists who use the studio to get a really big sound. Prince would be another – he’s had his share of bands and collaborators, but so many of his records are just him playing everything. The sound is so distinct from a “band” record, for better or worse. So, I hope one day to have a true ‘studio experience’ like that.
LG: Yes. In a way, recording like that is like writing fiction. Building a world…
AM: Exactly! And I think there’s a different pressure than cutting everything live, as with Small Mercies.
LG: I would think cutting live would be more pressure. Not for you? Or the pressure of being on the clock?
AM: Mixing Small Mercies was difficult because we didn’t really have enough isolation for the instruments. So the engineer had a hell of a job trying to bring everything out.
LG: It seems to have worked – it’s balanced pretty well. Or were there parts you’d want to swap out? I’d imagine it’d be nearly impossible.
AM: On that record there is exactly one cut, no overdubs. Sometimes I wish there could’ve been more layers, but I know that it’s an honest record and really reflects the work that the other players put into learning the tunes, which is part of what I love about it. But several of those songs exist in other demoed versions that…just sound different. I don’t really think of either of them as being definitive.
LG: It’s got a lot going on – the interplay between the strings and accordion. It doesn’t sound bare. The demos have more overdubby stuff?
AM: Yeah – they’re all me, so harmonies, some keys/synths, badly played percussion, everything. Ideally the new songs would have some of those qualities, but recorded and mixed by somebody who actually knows what the hell they’re doing.
LG: (We should have a “demos we wouldn’t play for the general public” show-and-tell day.) Having an advanced hand at the recording helm would be amazing.
AM: Hah. well, I’ve released probably more of them than I should. But yeah there are some that won’t get out there.
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An Historic is playing Café Nine in New Haven on March 4 with Jacket Thor and Entrance to Trains.
Lonesome Noise 