A.Cave #7 - PUFF UP THE LEMON
Talking with Matt Mottel [Talibam - Alien Whale - CSC Funk Band - Afternoon Freak]
Matt Mottel discovers sound.
If you’ve ever spent any time in and around the New York experimental music scene, chances are high that you’ve smoked a lemon with Matt Mottel. You probably had a pleasant encounter with this talkative, easy-going, well-versed eccentric fellow.
Little did you know that beneath that infectious smile lurks a dangerous sociopath….
Hee haw, I’m just pulling yr leg.
Matt’s a sweetheart, whether you’ve sucked a lemon with him or not.
My own history with Matt goes back a ways and is not immune to the charms of chance. I first met him in 2000 or 2001. I was living in Cleveland, Ahia and was accompanying my pals Fuzzhead on a jaunt to New York for a couple of shows. The first one was in the city at the Continental, where I purchased many bulk-discounted rounds of Jäger, failed to sell Mark Ibold some Fuzzhead swag and met Byron Coley while smoking an obscene amount of hash in the basement band room (Coley declined to partake). Fuzzhead buds Suntanama was on the bill, so we went up to the Hint House in Harlem where there was an afterparty with more live jams with people from No Neck playing in various forms and copious amounts of various smokes. I crashed hard on the floor. The next day we drove up to New Paltz where the money gig was. The bill was something to look forward to: No Neck Blues Band—Sunburned Hand of the Man—Fuzzhead. Keep in mind that this is before New Weird America fever gripped the nation. We get there and guess who’s the point man for this shindig. Our protagonist, Mr. M. Mottel. I’m guessing that Matt was smoking some really good herb himself that weekend. Let’s just say that not a lot of prep had been completed. Where was the show gonna happen? Ummm, maybe this classroom? Uh, OK. We start loading in..….No, stop. Can’t do that. Permission has not been granted. Well, fuck a duck. This is a goddamn beautiful-ass campus, how about out on the student quad or whatever the fuck they call the central outdoor area. Yes, let’s do that. We find extension cords, we find some outdoor outlets. Fuzzhead sets up their gear en plein air. The sun has gone down. Me and Bill from Fuzzhead eat a tab and it’s on. A few minutes into a slowly evolving dub jam—bam, the fucking cops show up. Campus PD. No can do. Shut it down. Banned by the Man. A gang comprised of the members of No Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand of the Man and Fuzzhead (and me) walk the town in the dark. We crash some lame house party (where I distinctly remember seeing a Nine Shocks Terror 7” in someone’s collection, which I thought was funny) and eventually crash ourselves at Matt’s pad.
Next time I see Matt is in 2003, when I came to NYC, in part to see The Ex play at the Knitting Factory (my band Tokyo Storm Warning opened for them a few days earlier in Clevo). It was a great night (got Punjab Deli with soundman Gert, the Ex brought me backstage etc); I was on the curb smoking when out walks Matt, and he recognizes me. We start bullshitting and he’s like—Wanna drive around and smoke weed? My drunk ass says Hell yeah and we cruise around Manhattan in his brown minivan getting high. He takes me to where he’s living (see below) and shows me the photographs his dad, Syeus, took of Silver Apples playing in Washington Square Park in 1968. Mind suitably blown, I drift off to sleep. These pictures later show up in Swingset magazine and then The Wire and other places.
A note: There’s another interview with Matt that went up recently on Jesse Rifkin’s Walk On The Wild Side. Although it’s from 2020, Matt is in fine form and covers a range of subjects (including hanging at the aforementioned Hint House). I recommend reading it to complement the following.
The Riddler endorses Natty Ice.
Enter the Mottel.
I was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at Roosevelt Hospital, Columbus Circle. My dad had lived in our apartment—on W. 79th, the top of the hill between Amsterdam and Columbus—since 1965. He met my mother three years before I was born and they had a honeymoon romance, I showed up in 1981.
The party’s over. Tell me about early MM vibes.
My parents were avid theater goers. I remember seeing Into The Woods and Les Miserables and Fiddler On The Roof when I was eight years old. In second grade, I auditioned for Les Miserables to be the little boy in the cast. I remember being angry that I had to leave my Little League game to do the audition.
Was it worth it? Cuz you haven’t been to the World Series, as far as I know.
I didn't get the part. I had piano lessons from age five and onward. We had a piano in the house. It was my mother's piano, she had a piano teacher. I had classical music training from age 6 to 12 or 13. The piano teacher I had was actually—it was very brutal and like German-style strictness of hands on the keys in the right position. Slam your hands down if you've got the wrong finger placement. By the end of it, I was so burnt out on it that I'd be going to lessons, afraid, leaving crying, feeling somewhat humiliated. And I didn't have the skills, communication-wise, to tell my parents really what was up. And I had also been in abject loyalty to this person. So even when there was a piano teacher in my building that was like—Let's play music by ear—I didn’t do it.
If only it had been Isabelle Huppert.
I was in a percussion ensemble in junior high. We were playing kind of Afro-Cuban-like drum jams. So I had basic rudimentary drum chops from that. A friend of mine gave me his child-size kit. So I had that in my room and it was missing one of the legs, so it would always topple over. I played in a hardcore punk band as a drummer called Mindless in 8th grade with 7th graders. We went to see Sonic Youth in 1995 at Roseland Ballroom. Right before the gig, they kicked me out of the band and they were like—Well, you're really not that great a drummer and this drum set you have isn't really up to snuff. So I went to this gig super-bummed and the opening act was Test with Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Matt Heyner and Tom Bruno.
Go, cat, go.
It was so abstract in that moment that I definitely couldn't process it, especially with the bummed-out nature of my emotions. Another six months goes by and I went to see Yoko Ono in Central Park and Zorn's Masada opened that show. My best friend from junior high school, his father was a guy who hung out a lot with Rahsaan Roland Kirk. So going to the beach or whatever, we'd shuffle between Nirvana and jazz. So I had a relationship of energy music to punk rock that was not yet defined in the live zone. But seeing Masada play and seeing Zorn kick over the photography guys up at the front, I was like—Oh, this is punk rock but jazz.
Fusion in your face.
So that was kind of like the basic return to thinking—Maybe this synthesizer that is like a rudimentary Yamaha keyboard I have is a noisemaker. I started plugging that into the RCA inputs into my stereo system and making my own kind of overdriven tapes. That led to me discovering that Zorn was playing the Knitting Factory. That following summer I saw on their website that internships were available at the Knit. I went down to the Knit, this is like summer of ‘98. The guy who was the booking agent was named JW and that turned out to be John Colpitts aka Kid Millions. So he hired me to be his intern and two weeks later, he decided to quit. They brought in another guy and at that brief moment, I had more experience than him. So I was sort of showing the new professional booking agent the ropes, but I was able to get on the calendar. My best friend from elementary and junior high school went to a different school than me, but we had been starting to play music together. Then I met a guy named Peter from going to shows at the Knit who was a decade older than me, but coincidentally lived in Washington Heights where my friend lived. We became a band and we were called PPOC—Peter Pan's Oedipal Complex. We played a smattering of gigs at the Knitting Factory in ‘98 and ‘99. On one of our tracks, I read the Zabar's grocery bag with the menu on it during the breakdown.
Biodegradable improv.
It was cool because this was the first time I smoked weed. Again, having peers that were a decade older than me who were not judgmental of hanging out with a 17 year old kid. I was going to the Cooler where the gigs would go til 3 AM. My parents felt sort of good that there's someone looking after Matt at these shows, like they had met Peter and felt secure. The same thing happened when I met Steve Dalachinsky and Steve called up my dad to say—I'm hanging out a lot with your son, Matt. I just want to let you know that I'm not trying to fuck him.
That’s called getting ahead of the allegations. Smart play by Dalachinsky.
When I got to college I was trying to integrate myself into the jazz program. Suddenly, I felt like a five year old again because the kids were all playing Real Book jazz standards and I couldn't stay in key or didn't know how to vamp or do any of those traditional things. But at the same time, I was back in New York City hanging out with Daniel Carter and him being like—Man, we got to play sometime, and getting all of this positive reinforcement to only be myself.
Daniel’s good at that.
Then I met [Chris] Corsano when he first came from Hampshire to live in New York. Tonic was open right away. This is the beginning of Tonic and he was also working at Other Music. I have some tapes that can ruin Chris' career, of him playing with us. He was seven years older than us and not yet the guy who he became. We played a couple of gigs and I was anxious or excited and I was trying to drill the shit out and be like—Book us at Tonic, book us this and he was sort of more hesitant on it. He was like—I'm not ready to be that public and so he decided to move back to Western Mass.
What was this thing called?
It was called Eye Door. We made a CD-R. And we did a five-day East Coast tour, summer of 2000. I'd met the Sunburned guys already. They set up the Boston show. We played the Flywheel in its original infant stage. Corsano played on the bill and I think it might have been his debut gig with Paul Flaherty. And it was so clear that in those two years that he'd been shedding nonstop, like he was an entirely different drummer.
Tell me about SUNY.
1999 is when I started in New Paltz. I graduated in ‘03. I really wanted to go to Bard College. My parents said that Bard was out of our price range, but we’re not gonna let you go into debt, and I'm very thankful that they forced me not to do that. But I learned that through New Paltz, I could take classes at Bard. Suddenly I was hanging out with Richard Teitelbaum in his electronic music ensemble.
In that first year and a half of New Paltz life, I was going to the city every weekend to go to shows. I was still kind of active around the ABC No Rio C.O.M.A.series that Blaise Siwula organized. C.O.M.A. was the Sunday night improv show. That was nonexclusive. You got a gig just by asking and then there was an open session afterwards. It was expanded from a series called Amica Bunker. There was a featured set or two and then an open session afterwards. That's where I met Chris Forsyth, Fritz Welch, Michael Evans, Sean Meehan. At the benefits for ABC No Rio that C.O.M.A. would have, they'd take over the whole building and there would be an artist playing in every room for seven hours, including, like, Borbetomagus.
What are some crucial venues forgotten by time’s fickle memory?
The Internet Cafe, which was on E. Third off of First Avenue. It was an internet cafe in the daytime. It had a real narrow room, but (Bush Tetras drummer) Dee Pop was the booker.
You could see marquee people, like William Parker, play to seven people because it was just not a hot zone. And the Swiss Institute, which at the time was just a loft on Broadway, right at Prince Street. They had fancier gigs, like I saw Fred Frith and Sylvie Courvoisier play there. Eye Door played there on a bill with the late guitarist Marc Orleans, who had moved from Boston playing with Sunburned to New York and had a band Eschaton that was kind of like noise/space rock. Eye Door and Eschaton shared bills of a fair amount of time. In Brooklyn, the two main spots at that time were 220 Grand Street, which like a ground floor loft. Casey Block who then founded Eat Records was living with Harry Rosenbloom and Mike Burke. Mike Burke started the label JMZ Records that did the first Parts & Labor CD. I got back from college with no interest in any version of a job. My parents had bought a house in Sullivan County and they were trying to live up there full time. I started making hats, putting random junk on a baseball hat, attach this or that to the hat. It was kind of like the peak moment of trucker hat fashion. I'd befriended Noah Lyon, who did Retard Riot. He'd gone to art school and he hung out with me one day and was like—Your hats are cool. You should try and sell them at a Lafayette Street boutique. I went in with hand-sewn junk on these hats and they were like—No, thank you. As a result of that, I would just play keyboards on the street with my hats out.
Where would you play?
All over the city. Really just wherever I plopped down. Well-trafficked zones occasionally. But it was really about conversation and openness. One of the guys I met as a result of that was Leif Ritchey. I was on Bedford and he walked by and was like—I bet we all know the same people. He invited me to his art show that was happening in Carroll Gardens. Tom and Colin from USAISAMONSTER were playing improv jams, so I met them that way. From the Knitting Factory days, Lucas Crane was a bartender there and one year during the Vision Festival he was working the door and we hit it off. Lucas essentially ran after-hours at the Knit in the Old Office, where he was the bartender and that became a deep coterie of people that would just hang out from 2 to 5 AM. Lucas lived in a loft in East Williamsburg that became known as Fort Awesome. So I would go back with Lucas to be the couch guy. Before he lived there, Eric from Black Dice had lived there and maybe some of the Rapture guys. Lucas and I started playing, and then one time on Bedford Avenue with my hats out, a guy passed by on a motorcycle and looked at my hats and looked at me playing synthesizer. It was winter time and he was like—You're a weirdo. We exchanged info and he's like—I'm in sound production classes at NYU, I play clarinet and saxophone. I put him and Lucas together and we became the Beatles, spelled the same. Lucas was doing tapes, I was doing the synth and Chris Taylor was on saxophone, clarinet and electronics. We played gigs and then that guy [Chris] wound up in Grizzly Bear.
I’m sure he regrets that choice.
Two more places in Manhattan that were super important, at least in my booking development, was the Apocalypse Lounge. It was a bar that also had a basement, maybe on E. 4th. Originally it was one of these places that tried to relive the glory of the ‘80s East Village and its facade fell so flat that then they let everybody in. Booking gigs in the basement of Apocalypse Lounge was super cool. Like Rotten Milk from Chicago came through on a gig that I organized and then a few doors down from there was the Tribes Gallery that Steve Cannon had been living in as kind of a similar space for poetry that Experimental Intermedia was for music and things. But Tribes let you organize all-day events and I would corral my friends who had gone to Bard and Purchase and all of those spaces to play there. Because I was from New York City, but went to New Paltz, and had friends at Bard and Vassar and Purchase, I was the link to all of those guys booking shows in New York right off the bat. Another room that was important was when the Tank was up on 42nd St. between 10th and 11th Ave. The guys from the Tank started the first circuit-bending festivals in New York. I had a band for the last two years of college that was called Shadow Maps. That was me, a bass player and drummer.
Oh shit, I have that CDR! Totally forgot about that. I think Dan Friel or BJ gave it to me the first time Parts & Labor played at The Black Eye.
That would make sense.
So what else are you up to now that you’re back in the city?
My parents were upstate and I could exist as this weirdo with my hats out and playing keyboards. I was really kind of heavy with wanting to post up in places and be an observer of the scene and of the communities. I used the hats and the keyboard as a way of doing that. A neutral place that had the broadest spectrum of people was where I needed to be. When you put the hats out in Williamsburg, it's just another artist. But then I was arrested in front of Bryant Park. I'd actually found a place that was perfect because it was neutral. I'd already sold a hat, sold a second hat and then two undercover cops came up to me and they were like—How much are the hats? And I'm like—I don't know, $10 or $20. And they're like—Do you have a license to sell? I'm like—These are handmade objects and they cuffed me. I sat in the local precinct jail for like eight hours.
I'd sell them at Tonic too. Kenny Wollesen, who was a drummer that plays a lot with Zorn and Bill Frisell, started buying the hats. It turned out that Kenny lived on the Upper West Side too and decided to start commissioning me to make hats for his marching band that was heavy in a lot of the anti-Iraq War protests in 2003-4-5.
At the same time I had been hanging out at SUNY Purchase and made friends with the guys that were booking Culture Shock festival, that like their indie rock festival that they had $100,000 budget to book. Dan Deacon was at the school at the time and he was basically like the mayor of the school. I met this other guy who was the booker of the festival and I was like—Yo, Alec man, you know about my hat? He's like—Yeah, your hats are dope. I'm like—How about my hats are the free giveaway at the festival? And he was like—That's a good idea. $3 a hat, 500 hats, 1500 bucks. He's like—Sure, got you. So I made hats for the festival. They were called Flanged Confection hats. I’ve got photographic documentation.
DJ + MM = *fire emoji*
Here I am with Daniel Johnston. Here's Dan Deacon wearing one of the hats and his buddy Oscar. This is the best. This is Blowfly and like, I didn't plan to make a hat for Blowfly specifically, but that looks like Blowfly's favorite place in the universe [it looks like a vagina is attached to the front section—gynecology ed.]. When he died, I posted this photo and someone in his band was like—Yo, he wore that hat for the next 20 years. I had this pivotal moment when I was at Downtown Music Gallery with my hats out because Bruce's partner Manny liked them. He wanted to buy the hats. But then John Zorn came in and he looked at my hats and was like—I don't know about this, and it was at the time that I was now becoming too known as the Hat Guy. So I kind of dropped hat-making. I was like—Let's put the skids on hat-making and refocus on music.
Tune in next week, as Matt forms Talibam to general perplexity, flirts with success and achieves that elusive (and break-even lucrative) European nod of approval. We also get the lowdown on Matt’s triumphant four-day residency at The Stone, which begins on Wednesday, April 17th.