Photo: Gregory Wikstrom

One of our favourite albums released last year, New Topographics, came from the hands of ingenious Brooklyn based multi-instrumentalist and composer Matt Evans, so we’re delighted to know he’s ready to follow it up with a new album. Entitled touchless, the forthcoming album was written between 2019 and 2020 after the loss of his partner, sculptor and eco-feminist artist Devra Freelander. A moving creation that reflects and transmutes grief and loss into a work of art, the album came to life as “a way for Evans to externalize his experiences and make them real outside of himself” and “crystallize some sentiment from the last few years” as the press release describes. “Ultimately, it’s his way of reaching through the void to touch something lost, and to remember how real those experiences are.”

touchless will see the light of day on June 25th through Whatever’s Clever Records but we can already wrap our ears around the first single ‘Arcto 2’, a delicate, poignant and beautiful track. It comes with a striking video made by Evans, featuring landscape footage shot by Devra in 2017 in Norway. Through the video, “Evans questions the phenomenology of touch, reaching to transcend the boundaries of the physical to embody touch (of landscape, of those we’ve lost) while being touchless.” Here it is.

This Friday will see the release of Matt Evans‘s debut album, New Topographics, a bewitching collection of rhythmic percussion/electronic pieces stemming from a month-long residency at Brooklyn artist space Pioneer Works. After sharing ‘Cold Moon’ and ‘Full Squid’, the Brooklyn based drummer and composer is enticing us again with a new single from the album called ‘Spinning Blossoms’. The track is being offered with an accompanying video directed by Soop Groop aka Vanessa Castro, Dara Hirsch, Melodie Stancato, and Matt Evans. Castro had this to say about it:

“In the video for Spinning Blossoms, Matt, who scored this song and video, performs the various percussive and melodic loops that steady the rhythm of the song, while simultaneously falling out of sync with the actual performance of sound. Mel, the video’s choreographer, performs in another form of abyss, an empty office supply warehouse overflowing with detritus of corporate America.

To me the challenge for this video was: how can an ‘object’ of performance be both repetitive and improvised in both sound and movement? How can singular experiences happening in different times and places create a simulation of linear time? Matt composed Spinning Blossoms with self-made, sample-based, loops based on an internal rhythm that Matt himself created. I decided to follow that same framework.”

Watch the video below and grab New Topographics when it’s out on April 17th thought Whatever’s Clever.

Based out of Brooklyn, drummer and composer Matt Evans has collaborated and contributed to innumerable musical projects in numerous directions, including Tigue, Bearthoven, Man Forever and Private Elevators, as well as honing in on his own solo work. This April will see him release his debut record, New Topographics, a bewitching collection of rhythmic percussion/electronic pieces stemming from a month-long residency at Brooklyn artist space Pioneer Works. Read on for some insight from Evans about it:

“For me, there’s a link between these sonic byproducts and human empathy— a gateway towards a greater conversation on what it means to live the paradox of complicitness— a guide to re-focusing how we understand the consequences of our actions by way of sound. The first step toward any significant change in our behaviour is becoming aware of the object like significance of our actions. Making this record has been a way of tuning my ears to this phenomenon. To learn the language of these object-like byproducts so as to speak the language my own way and further empathize with that which I was not previously informed. Being aware, being sensitive to that awareness, and reflecting that experience outwards. This is how we can make a shift in how we see ourselves in the world. Making this music was a way to practice understanding what I leave behind. We put up walls to function, but if we make a habit of taking them down and really looking and listening to what’s happening around us, we will have greater empathy for the people and beings we share space with. Our ability to empathize with the earth itself will grow.”

Following the release of first single ‘Cold Moon’, Evans has recently shared the celestial and soothing opening track ‘Full Squid’, remarking that “the title refers to a state of being more than the cephalopod itself, a zoomorphic phrase for the experience of drumming at the precipice of presentness”. He continues, “’Full Squid’ was born from a kind of personal meditation, a “spiritual” performance practice that attempts to bend a typical sense of time through stream-of-consciousness playing pushed to the brink. It’s a drummy dive into a sound stream of crackling creatures, wiggly drones and globby ink-splatter harmonies, without coming up for air.”

Slated for an April 17th release through Whatever’s Clever, New Topographics awaits you. Prick up your ears and give a listen to both singles below.