A.Cave #8 — VIBING HARD
Part Two of a talk with Matt Mottel [Talibam - Alien Whale - Afternoon Freak]
Talibam! @ Death By Audio
Read Part One here.
Tell me about the dawn of the Talibam(!).
I met Kevin [Shea] from a free jazz quartet gig at Free 103.9. I'd played with Tim Barnes and Sean Meehan and all these guys. No one really wanted to be in a band and I wanted to be in a band. I really like band culture and the idea of working shit out or at least playing with people consistently. The main advice Tom Bruno had given me was find the people that you like playing with that like playing with you and do that and stick to a working band. Kevin and I just hit it off socially at the gig. And then we stayed in communication and maybe we did a practice space jam that was like both meeting the energy that we wanted from the music and that's just how it started. And then we were committed to that. He's eight years older than me, so he has a full generation of experience as a drummer that was more vetted in certain communities, which helped Talibam a little bit in terms of access. But we were still really floating in our own lane. Kevin had studied philosophy. He got a philosophy degree from the New School when he moved back to New York after Storm & Stress ended. He was very much deep into all of this critical theory that I had a cursory knowledge of, but we were both really interested in the deconstruction of culture and the reappropriation of it. We didn't have a band name at that time. I was like—Well, this phrase Talibam! from a New York Post headline has been on my college dorm fridge. I think that's a good band name to reappropriate that language. There were certain gigs in that 2003-4-5 era—like we played this show and Phill Niblock was there and Phill hated the set. Like, hated it, really hated it. That was sort of like a badge of honor to have the OG guy really hate what I did.
Ed Bear joins at some point.
I don't remember what the gig was, but I met Ed and I was like—What do you do? He's like—I play baritone saxophone with feedback and I'm like—OK, so we played together.
What kind of gear were you rocking?
I graduated from a chintzy Yamaha PSR kind of synth. I bought the Yamaha CS1x. It was a really good analog-modeling synth. It allowed you to play piano sounds but also have waveform modulation, and it had internal effects. That was my synth up until I accidentally drove over it with a car. I backed into it. I played that synth exclusively from 1998 to 2006 or 7. I broke it right before our first European tour, so I had to come up with something and I bought a Juno-1 for like 220 bucks. I still have the Juno and that became the synth on a number of the next wave of Talibam records. After that, there was a tour where that keyboard disappeared at the airport for the whole tour. I wound up getting it back and I was able to file an insurance claim on lost luggage. Because it was so deep in the bureaucracy that the airline, they didn't know I'd recovered it. I got paid for it. 1200 bucks. *we both explode in gleeful laughter*
Matt + Nick w/ Alien Whale; pic by Stefano Giovannini
Europe took to Talibam.
I think by 2010 or so, I'd been touring Europe with Talibam consistently. We'd broken into the European underground and made enough connects with local bands that we could kind of like pillage our way through.
People have complicated views on Talibam.
We never viewed ourselves as ironic. We took it seriously that we had bad taste. High culture/low culture are all part of the thing. I grew up listening to Spike Jones records. My dad turned me on to that stuff and the connect from Spike Jones to Talibam isn't that hard to view, and even our pop songs that we started writing later on don't sound that different than a B-52s song. It was only once Kevin was playing with Mostly Other People Do The Killing, the jazz quartet, that Steve [Dalachinksy] was like—Wow, you're a really great drummer. What the fuck are you doing with Mottel? A lot of our songwriting would come from just listening back to the live tapes and then find the riff, find the feel. We would listen back to our live shows and be like—There's a phrase that's repeated once and we'll plop that into Logic and then we'll start a studio track based on that. We said—Rehearsal is for amateurs.
Answering the call of the wild, Talibam enters the Octagon.
It was all over the map and we started to change consciously after our 2012 albums, Puff Up The Volume and [Discover] Atlant[ass] got zero notice beyond Mick Barr saying it was his favorite album of the year. I have deep respect that Mick loved Puff Up The Volume. But we realized that if you put the jokes into your own music that you find funny, no one else is gonna find it funny. I could share with you the original rough takes that are instrumental psych rock synth and drum tracks that we littered with everything on top of it because we found it funny and we thought it was interesting. But when you go too deep into your own head of references that you're cracking yourself up with on the inward, it really doesn't expand outward. Our favorite thing we would watch on tour was The Mighty Boosh and those guys did it perfectly. And we were not as smart or as funny or as good rappers as Lonely Island or Das Racist or Death Grips. That record happened because of a gong accident. We were working with a dance company for some years during this period playing Rhys Chatham's music with the choreographer Karole Armitage. We were in Italy and there's a gong in the show and Kevin rolls the gong off at the end of the set and it's on string instead of wire and falls and breaks the toe on his right foot. We had the rest of the tour and a session at the end. So he plays bass drum with his left foot for the rest of the run. We realized after we recorded all of these takes that we were making a rap album. Kevin and I had a major disagreement when that record came out because we actually got paid $10,000 from a Fire Records subsidiary, Critical Heights, to release that album. This label failed within two years and then Fire redirected and realized they could be a better vanity reissue label. But between that and Atlanta, which was this Frank Zappa-style theatrical performance that we did as a theater piece that became a CD in a comic book. We realize no one's paying attention to all of this humor in our world and or at least we're not developing expanding opportunities with it. That's when we put out a digital record that we call Translition 2 Siriusness. The goal was to return almost to our ‘03 bona fides as improvisers where there's already a networked world that wants that. We don't have to try and be rappers. We don't have to try and be performers. So being just more or less po-faced improvisers without vocals, without all of the extra shit, was how the European thing started to swell up again. That was the realization that being slightly conservative in your art-making pays more dividends than throwing everything at the wall altogether.
You guys toured a lot in Europe for awhile there.
Our longest was eight weeks. That was like in ‘09, I think, or ‘08. We did eight, or maybe it was six. We were able to string along shows playing pretty much every night. Italy was always super fun. Brussels gigs were always really good. Paris had a variety. It was just always generally playing to the communities of the DIY circuit that didn't even read The Wire. Ultimately, it was just more the people that were in the circle of going to shows and we'd play those shows. There was a joke in our world for a long time that every time Talibam makes a new fan, an old one dies.
Hahaha. So how did the German residency come together?
The Moers Festival, which is a 50 year-old music festival in this small city just north of Dusseldorf. For the past 15 years, they have a quote “improviser in residence.” It's a year-long project where they pay a salary to live in a house and you present concerts in and around the city. When we had played a little local gig in Duisburg in 2013, the guy that booked us there wound up working for the Moers Festival and that's how we started getting booked there in 2017 and 18. And then mid-2019, they sai—We want you to be the improviser-in-residence in 2021. Then COVID happens and we're completely convinced that this is not gonna happen. We had to get special flight visa clearance to go because we flew over in January 2021 when you couldn't arrive in Europe unless you were a citizen.
Kevin and I, who have never lived together, are suddenly roommates with a practice space in our living room with no gigs. So we can't even go anywhere to play. But we had a budget. So we bought recording gear and we had enough friends local to Europe from Berlin or the local Cologne-Dusseldorf axis or down to Munich that people started coming to the house to do sessions and we had a budget to pay them. So we just recorded, recorded, recorded and there's one record that is finished that is supposed to happen with OCII, the Dutch club that has a label too. We recorded with the current members of Embryo, it's a double LP. Victoria Shen was with us at the house for a day. Leila Bordreuil was there, Audrey Chen, Alan Wilkinson came, Thomas Lehn. We realized quickly that we weren't gonna record a straight studio album. It would have been smarter to have done that, but we just found the best thing is I go left in the morning, he goes right. We know that it's 5 p.m, there's a session in the home. I gained a ton of respect for Kevin. He spends two hours a day on the paradiddle on a pad still, where I'd rather get stoned and go on a bike ride. So that's what 2021 was. And halfway through the year is when I went back for my 40th birthday and I'd met my girlfriend in Newburgh, right before leaving for Europe, and the relationship stayed good through the year and we found out that we were pregnant. I flew back to Europe, knowing that Sydney was on the way, to sit in with a version of Faust that was happening at a festival. It was realizing that everything that's happened is now gonna be different.
The words “Professor Mottel” sound weird coming out of my mouth.
I'd had only life experience in art and education as someone who's been part of art and art culture for my whole life, but my background was in pastry delivery. So like I wasn't gonna get a job through the traditional form of an algorithm, reading your fucking resume. I kind of got lucky. I have recognized now—2.5 years of teaching at undergraduate level—has generally been about exposing students to the idea that independent culture exists. So many kids have no idea that when you're looking at Adobe or Photoshop for the first time, what the fuck to do. Because when you use these programs when you're 18, you're only looking at mass media and mass culture, you're only seeing Photoshopped, high gloss fashion world or videos that have fancy stuff happening. So I'm getting the kids to work with found footage, using youtube to cut video. I have them make a digital zine where they go to an art exhibition. Like I send them to Artist Space or the Swiss Institute and they photograph those shows, but they don't do it like a book report, they then cut up the material and chop it up into their own creation. So it's again exposing them to the process of art making, which I have a lot of experience of doing.
Dance me, romance me and pull the sword out of The Stone. Tell me all about your residency (which starts TONIGHT, Wed April 17th).
I started thinking that I wanted to have a Stone residency probably a decade and change ago. I've known John since I was 16-17. The generation of musicians that are younger than me, that went to conservatory, that all studied with his peers, all got into the Stone. In 2013, I started emailing him, politely saying—I think I'd like the opportunity to present my work. I've been a serious musician ten-plus years now, let's see what happens. And there was always a polite response back that said—Matt, I support what you're doing, but I still got my network of people that I'm booking. So that was a slow, deep chisel of emails over a decade of time that it finally chiseled in, in the last year and a half. I think I got the email that I was part of the roster of 2024 in November of 2022. So it's like this full year and a half ahead kind of booking. And so at that point, Sydney was already six months old and I made the smart choice and dumb choice at the same time to think that I should pair his second birthday 4/20 with my residency because you get to pick your week. And so I picked my week without consulting my wife and then realized seven minutes later, I should have asked her first and then realized within the last year that Sydney's birthday should be Sydney's birthday. It shouldn't be Dad's vision quest music world. And so I've learned a lot from that, but that being said—the challenge of the Stone is they don't give you any budget, there's no guarantees. It's kind of hard to lock anybody in a year and a half out to play. So I didn't really start conceptualizing my line-up until the fall. And then I got an email from Zorn in December that was like by Jan. 1, you gotta send me your fucking line-up. I thought about four concerts that would reflect on my life—past, present and future, as a musician in and out of New York.
The first concert is Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille from Haunted House, Daniel Carter, and Yuko Otomo. Gig One is my 17 year old fandom of the music, coming to fruition. Gig Two is my point of view in 2024 as a 42 year old who has musical relationships across multiple generations of New York culture, like Ernie Brooks and Peter Gordon and then people I've met in the last couple of years living in Newburgh. Ernie and Peter represent the OG New York scene. And then the people I'm playing with up in Newburgh, drummer Tony Cenicola, who coincidentally is from a band that I used to see when I was 18 called Tono-Bungay with Bob Bannister. He lives in Beacon, so we connected up there. That band is kind of like a bridge between and we're gonna try and do a slate of my compositions, kind of simple melodies, riffs and things. Kind of between the Sun Ra Lanquidity record and CAN, or something like that. And then Gig Three is with Cooper-Moore, also someone I've played with for 20 years and Jean Carla Rodea, a vocalist who I met in my MFA program and she was part of the expanded Vision Festival scene. Gig Four is on Sydney's birthday. It’s comprised of parents of toddler age children. So the solidarity ideally amongst us is that we're all kind of coming from this new place where a lot of the time—99% of the time in our world these days—you have to leave your ego at the door because your chops on diapers are way better than the chops on your instrument. And so that's kind of been like the reframing of my world in a way that you can't only prioritize your own ego-driven shit anymore, especially as a parent, as a husband, as a family unit. That's the world you're in and everything else is also happening, but in a balance.
Do you have a guarantee to cover the babysitting at least? *genuine jest*
*serious response* I got a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts that's called the Emergency Grant and it's gonna go to pay for babysitting. That's the run. It represents kind of like this first chapter—let's say 17 to 42—what this 25 years of my music-making life in New York and the world has been. It’s like a centering, but it's also now I’m more comfortable accepting what happens versus making shit happen. The first twenty years was about making shit happen. But now with all of the realities of responsibility I have in my life, if you make too much shit happen, it causes too much stress elsewhere in the world. If you're gonna be a parent, you just have to accept that you can't be a selfish prick anymore.