MATTHEW DEAR
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
Read the Remix profile on Matthew Dear. Dear discusses the process of recording his pop-fusion techno album, Asa Breed.
If ever there was a musical genre that manifested an uncanny ability to adapt with the times as the years wore on, it would have to be techno music. Look among the so-called “second wave” of Detroit-connected producers today — a group that includes such innovators as Carl Craig, Robert Hood, Richie Hawtin and Tadd Mullinix — and you'll find an ecosystem loaded with as many species of techno as a rainforest has flora.
Matthew Dear is firmly entrenched within that second wave, and in four busy years has made a few waves of his own. Beginning with his full-length debut, Leave Luck to Heaven (Spectral/Ghostly International, 2003), Dear became immediately known for his gritty, granulated beat sequences and tripped-out vocal processing. As his sound moved through phases that were equal parts minimal (Backstroke [Spectral/Ghostly, 2004]) and aggressive (Audion's Suckfish [Spectral/Ghostly, 2005]), he made a renewed case for techno as a truly malleable entity.
“I've continued to push myself in terms of my ideal sense of what I need to accomplish with production,” Dear explains, “but now I guess my goals have shifted. In the Leave Luck to Heaven days, I was still very much focused on reaching the dancefloor masses. Since then, I've toured a lot more and had some nice 12-inch releases, and I've found that I wanted to return to my more experimental rock-pop roots and see if I could hone those a little bit.”
Named for a character in Kurt Vonnegut's sci-fi classic Cat's Cradle, Dear's latest, Asa Breed (Ghostly International, 2007), is easily his most diverse and open-ended project yet — and gear-wise, perhaps his most stripped-down. Working primarily at his home studio in Detroit using Ableton Live 6 as his main platform (with Making Waves software in reserve) and the Smartelectronix ASynth (designed by Antti Huovilainen in Finland) as his main instrument plug-in, Dear takes cuts like the soulful “Shy” and the infectious single “Deserter” into strangely familiar dimensions, where melodies are hummable and lyrics are memorable.
Asa Breed ripples warmly, in fact, with multiple vocal takes, organic instruments (acoustic and electric guitars, bass and even the Mobius Band on “Elementary Lover”) and found percussive sounds. “It could be a coat hanger or a deck of cards or my hands on the floor — whatever works,” Dear says. All the elements — along with Dear's signature short-delayed and flanged Roland TR-606, -707 and -808 drum sounds — are exquisitely looped and layered with a focus not just on the groove, but also on the overall song structure.
“Some of what I do with the vocals I learned from The Beatles when I was 15,” Dear reveals. “If you listen to Ringo's voice, say in ‘Yellow Submarine,’ it's totally off, but when you hear him together with everyone else, you get this really addictive sound. I try to do a lot of that. Usually, one of my vocal tracks is a deep, weird pronunciation of the vocal line. By itself, it'll just sound stupid, but when you put three vocal takes together, you get this very dense, thick, new personality of a voice that wouldn't happen on its own.”
Whether he's channeling Eno-era David Bowie (on the deep-space acoustic ballad “Give Me More”) or quirky David Byrne (on the Carib funk-tinged “Good to Be Alive”), Dear is intent to stretch beyond the confines of the techno “ghetto” but still with an echo of his roots. “Techno is all about subtle changes,” he asserts, “which is why I've always liked loop-based production. In a rock studio, you might be using Pro Tools and you have a drummer play his drum line, but a lot of times they end up looping that anyway to get to the perfect pop format. So I don't think there's really that big of a difference, in that sense, in the way I lay out my songs. I've just always done it this way, and I do it for that repetitive building — that climax — that you get in the music.”
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