Photo by Jonnie Craig
Matthew Dear wants you to pull his music apart.
The inventive Detroit electro artist’s new project, DELQA, skews somewhere between EP and obstacle course. A sprawling installation at the New Museum in New York, which opens today and runs through Sunday, it allows visitors to manipulate a new song by touching fabric structures around them, their prodding captured through Microsoft Kinect motion-control technology and synced directly to the audio. Dear created the system over the past two months with a team of NEW INC members that included the environmental design team the Principals and the interactive developer Charlie Whitney.
Dear—who is currently gathering material for his next, long-in-the-works Audion album—talked with Pitchfork on the eve of DELQA’s launch about creating his "Frankenstein" track, enjoying the fallout of EDM, and the virtues of stealth polka attacks.
Pitchfork: Can you describe the atmosphere of the exhibit? The New Museum site says that it’s dynamic, that both the physical and the auditory experience changes with visitor movements.
Matthew Dear: Yeah. So when you walk in, you’ll see a series of netting, mesh material that the Principals came up with. We want you to touch it. It’s all very hands-on. There’s six sections within this maze of netting that people can go up to each station. Within those stations my song has been, essentially, dissected and spread out across 44 speakers going around the rectangle of the space. So if you’re in section one, and you are interacting with the netting and the material, the Microsoft Kinect cameras are essentially following your movements. Whatever you’re doing with your arms and your hands, if you’re pushing on the netting, the depth is being translated to data that goes into the master mainframe computer, which is running my song in real time on Ableton Live.
Within the song, I’ve created a base layer; the foundation of the song doesn’t change and within each of those stations, there’s about six different parts that can change, based on the interaction of the audience or the person experiencing it. It’s a weird Frankenstein of a song that is essentially left wide open in certain areas so it’s always gonna react and move with a person. Each station has kind of different highlights – one station is percussion and drums, another is playing a lot of modular stuff I did at home, another station is doing arpeggiated synth in the song. The song is about 10 minutes in full form, and it loops, so people can interact with it the entire time.
Pitchfork: Audience members become really physical with the space, right? They’re crawling and pushing through this mesh fabric maze. So how do you approach a song, knowing that there’s going to be such an immediate element like this?
MD: It was different. You hear songwriters say, "A song is never finished," and I really believe in that philosophy. It’s only done when you say it’s done, when you put it out or release it to the public. You hear about singer-songwriters that add verses at the end of a tour and are always changing the story or something.
I’ve always really liked that idea, that philosophy where you can leave stuff open-ended. In our world of singles and albums, it’s kinda like, "Ok, well, that’s out and that’s what it is." But for this, knowing going in that it never would be completely finished—it could always be changing, could always be open-ended—was really inspiring. It allowed me this new kind of freedom.
I wanted it to be soft and kind of inviting but not too happy and glossed over, a little eerie at times, knowing that every piece essentially has to fit.
Pitchfork: Does the song hew closer to one of your projects over the other? You’ve had several, from Audion to the solo records to the art-rock band.
MD: It’s definitely more myself. I can see the song being on an album if I put some lyrics to it—there’s no lyrics to it now. We talked about that, if I should put words in it. I felt that if I did do words it would be completely for the sonic experience of it, not really the message. If I did do lyrics, I was thinking maybe I'd just make up some random sounds and noises. But in the end, I chose not to. I could see it being on the album. Who knows, maybe I'll expand upon it later.
Pitchfork: That could be a bit dangerous—if people are manipulating the sound, they could be literally putting words in your mouth.
MD: That would be fun. I'd love to somehow put it out there where people could continuously mess with it and add to it or change it. Maybe just put it online somewhere and leave it in the state that it is now, in the gallery where it's open-ended and people can just interact with it, use their keyboard or mouse or something. We haven't finalized anything like that but that would be fun to keep it open and keep it accessible for people that can't come to the actual show.
Pitchfork: What's the significance of the name DELQA? Does that stand for something?
MD: Honestly, it's pretty funny. We were talking about Easter eggs in certain games—and in modular synths, every now and then, the developer will put in an Easter egg. It's hidden in the back end or it's like a secret code that you have to get to release this new function of the device, or you know, a new level of the video game. We were thinking, "Yeah, we should add some Easter eggs." Say, if everybody does 'x' then 'y' happens. We joked that all the music should switch to polka, and there's this moment of confetti and balloons that comes down—it's like the polka drop.
As I worked on the song I actually called it "Polka Drop" in the beginning. And then I was like, OK, I have to change it. It can't be "Polka Drop". So then I switched it and I started calling it "Dolka Prop" in my file on the computer. And from "Dolka Prop" I was like, hmm, I really like the "Dolka", that's really fun. I started playing with the letters and it just turned into DELQA.
Pitchfork: Did anything prove especially challenging in the creation or execution of DELQA? And what was rewarding in it?
MD: The main thing was just not overdoing it. I did lots of jams on the modular and some stuff got a little too crazy. It was just knowing when to pull back. That's always the hard part, I guess, with any songwriting—especially with electronic music—is when not to add stuff and when to reduce. With a song of this size and filling a space like this, that was the tricky part. You don't want it to be too chaotic. You don't want it to be causing aural seasickness.
I actually walked in yesterday, at the climax of the song, and was really overwhelmed by it coming off the street. You're walking down the Bowery and all of a sudden you're walking into this dark space, and it's sunny outside. You're just going about your day and you go into this dark room and all of a sudden: boom! The song is just like flooding you from every angle.
Pitchfork: Is visual connectivity something that's a priority to you? You collaborated recently with the team behind Amon Tobin's ISAM tour, which was just an incredible visual experience.
MD: That's the way to go. There’s just so many options now. But I get contradictive; you can go and there's a totally over-the-top, super-intense visual experience, or I've been to shows where it's just a spotlight and a performer in a room, like a black box, and that to me is also very engaging, very exciting. So I think when the time calls for it, I like playing with it.
I guess the bottom line is, I'll do it if the players are completely in the right mindset, and if I'm connecting with somebody. With this show, it was just such a great energy involved. Any form of collaboration or art is good if everybody's flexing what they do, and everybody's really showing off their best self. I’m just a piece of that.
Pitchfork: Your father was a folk musician, and there's been quite an institutionalization of that genre nowadays—recently, the Folk City exhibit in New York. Do you think, as a dance artist, that electronic music can fit into that realm too? Can it be properly explored in a museum setting, or does it need to be out in the wild?
MD: There’s definitely something to the intimacy of just a person, a woman, with their guitar and their voice. I would hope so. I hope you can kind of create a sense of intimacy with electronic music as well. But I don't know if it's the same, really. I don't know if we get the same impact when it's soul-to-soul, going from one person to another. But I love it all and I really appreciate it. Some of my favorite artists are guys like John Prine or Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt, who can craft these incredible stories. It sounds so simple and they're using such sparse vocabulary and it just comes across, like, a blade to your soul. There's a talent in that and almost a literary prowess with that stuff that's very inspiring to me, very intriguing. And it's another code entirely that I would love to try to crack.
Pitchfork: You told Pitchfork three years ago that all the kids going to the big EDM festivals are 'binge-drinking music.' Do you think the hangover has started yet?
MD: Absolutely. Yeah, it's crazy. I was thinking about that recently. I always said, "Look, if 5% of the people that like Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas dig deeper and get into like Autechre or Aphex Twin and follow the path toward Kraftwerk, then our job is better." And it’s crazy—it's really happening, quicker than I really imagined.
I did Mystery Land in New York on Memorial Day weekend. The big stage was your big, classic EDM artist. We had our little tent and did more techno and underground stuff. I did a show at Verboten [in New York] maybe three weeks later, and it was packed. It was a fresh group of faces that I hadn't seen. I ended up inviting some people that messaged me on Twitter; they were like, "Hey we just saw you at Mystery Land, we really liked it." I was like "Oh cool, I'll put you guys on the guest list. Come on down."
They ended up coming backstage and I got to talk to them and meet them, and they're like the exact people that I was talking about. I had this smile on my face, like, "Yes! This couple is exactly the people I was talking about!" They're probably in their mid-twenties, and they're starting to dig deeper, and they're starting to find stuff that's a bit more experimental. That made me really happy, and I think that's happening to a lot of people. I don't know if they're hungover, but I think they're maybe just moving on to find their liquor—not just binge-drinking the garbage Milwaukee's Best, EDM. [laughs] They're kind of saying, "We need a snifter with some fine Scotch."