Matthewdavid's Outmind: silence, sampling and ontology
One of my favourite labels to emerge from this scene is Leaving Records (I was first mesmerised about a year and a half ago by dak's standthis). The head of the label is Matthewdavid, whose album Outmind just came out on Brainfeeder (have a listen to it here). I get the impression Matthewdavid is considered one of the more innovative and 'out there' producers to be linked to the LA scene. His new album certainly isn't what you might expect if you have 'instrumental hip-hop' in mind, opening and closing as it does with fuzzy ambient drone. One review put it quite well: “Outmind pans out over twelve tracks of psyche-beat mashup, at points psychadelically dense, to the point of becoming almost lost in the sheer weight of the fog”.
This notion of tracks being lost in their own fog speaks to the significant aesthetic character of Outmind. At the heart of each track on the album is a fundamental indeterminacy. Those elements that are typically seen to comprise the 'essence' of a piece of music – rhythm and melody – are rendered permanently muddied and unclear. This aesthetic gradually builds up over the two and a half minutes of the album's second track, 'Noche y Dia / San Raphael'. As listeners we're able at first to grasp on to the track through its clear 4/4 drumbeat, though we're immediately aware that everything seems clouded in heavy reverb. By about 45 seconds in, layers of synthesiser and sample work serve to rupture the determinacy both of melody lines and of the distinctive character of each musical element – it sounds like the different sounds are meshing together. This gets more pronounced in the second half of the track, with heavy compression forcing the track to lose cohesion with each strong bass drum.
This indeterminacy is relatively mild compared some of the other tracks on the album. Take the last track, 'No Need To Worry / Mean Too Much (Suite)'. The track begins in a complete haze of vocal and synthesiser drones before moving to its main theme, a combination of synth pad, sine-wave bleeps and what sound almost like sharply-plucked harpsichord strings. At about 1:45 a stuttering beat makes itself known, and after a few seconds bass drum and snare begin their 4/4 procession. The harsh compression and frequency modulation is such, however, that the whole track sounds like it's been overwhelmed by this beat. Elements are allowed only to momentarily slip in and out of the mix before the bass or snare pounds them into the hazy background again. We now can't make out if the previous melody is continuing as is or is alternating in some way. We can just about make out a new vocal drone by 2:20 and a new slightly dissonant chord every bar or so, but it's nigh-impossible to really distinguish them from the other sounds or, say, work out if the vocal's saying anything. By 2:55 it sounds like nearly all the previous sounds of the main theme have been sieved out of the mix, and a new long-note melody has entered. The snare too disappears by 3:05, lost in ever-growing synth and vocal pads, before those pads briefly shed half their frequencies twenty seconds later and the snare re-emerges. We've now completely lost track of where sounds or melodies are beginning and ending, the drum beat acting more like a scythe through thick musical undergrowth. Sounds continue to fall in and out of focus as the heavy compression wrecks any cohesion. By about 4:10 everything seems to have fallen into its own reverb, collectively forming an overarching chord that frames the remainder of the now-beatless track. The last couple of minutes bring to my mind a kind of otherworldly euphoria reminiscent of some 20th & 21st century classical music.
It's easy to lose yourself in this track, precisely because the melodies are so indeterminate and shrouded in harmonic fog. While drumbeats in popular music usually work as a pivot around which one can arrange one's listening of different elements of a track, placing one element alongside another in relation to the beat, with this track the drums force the rest of the heavily-compressed track to collapse with each bar before juttering back into life as other frequencies are allowed back into the mix. The overall effect is to make it seem to listeners that the track is teetering on the edge of existence/non-existence, with its musical essence constantly being destroyed and then rebuilt. This complete lack of typical ontological cohesion makes the 'No Need...' both easy to lose track of and exciting to follow. There's more to this listening sensation than just the overall indeterminacy of Outmind; timbre and texture are playing a big role too. Critics and bloggers have noted what they've called the “super-thick aesthetic” of this album. Crucial to the achievement of this thickness is Matthewdavid's near-constant use of 'background haze' throughout a track. Sometimes this takes the form of a specific synth pad; at other times it sounds more like the reverberated remains of other sounds in the piece. Despite being present, however, these sounds are more implicit than explicit; they're placed so far in the back of the mix that they can't quite be picked out when listening. While we can't distinguish this hazy note cluster, we're nevertheless aware of its presence; it somehow covers all the other sounds in the track such that the latter are experienced in relation to the former. Have a listen to 'Being Without You'. About twenty seconds in the intro stops and a soft chord of vocal harmonies and pads establishes the key of the track. This chord then falls away at 0:25 with the emergence of more concrete dubby vocal samples. All we're left with are snatches of vocal and a steady boom-slap drumbeat. Yet in-between these snatches we're nevertheless aware of that soft chord, which each bit of vocal seems to fall back into once it's sounded.
This background musical fog plays with our accepted notions of silence or not-sounding in a piece of music. Usually we take a sound element in a track to fall away into a 'fog' of silence once it's finished sounding. This silence is interpreted as absence, as the lack of artistic sounding. But with Outmind, the musical elements fall back into this background haze. Silence is not absence in these tracks; it's a presence, again of a very indeterminate kind. Part of the reason for the difficulty one has in properly distinguishing these background chords from other elements of each track is that the overall aesthetic of Outmind is one that very much plays around with our accepted understanding of sampling. In the last post I talked about sampling in experimental electronic music as typically having a very specific aesthetic, one that to our culturally-affected ears evokes sound's instability and ghostliness. In Outmind this typical sampling aesthetic is present in the majority of the musical elements of each track. The aesthetic of ghostliness and sonic degradation enshrouds everything, from the reverb of the drums to the thin frequencies of the melodies to the muffled nature of the vocal lines – indeed, the mushy nature of all the tracks, the extent to which different instruments or elements seem moulded together, helps constitute this degradation. Consider 'Like You Mean It' as an example of this. When another snatched vocal line comes in at about one and a half minutes, it doesn't sound 'out-of-place' in the way we'd expect a vocal sample from an old vinyl record to sound. Nor do the lower-register vocals that follow; they simply merge into the overall aesthetic.
The shortness and suddenness of vocal lines like the one at 1:30, however, do fit our idea of 'sample'; as listeners I think we're tempted to apply the label 'sample' to certain elements of each track in order to make sense of their disjointed and unclear nature. As a result of acknowledging this similarly to typical sampling, though, we're also encouraged to consider whether the whole piece has been a 'sample' all along! Once again, there's this indeterminacy at the heart of the track. In fact there's little embedded in the sound of each track to allow us to distinguish a sample within it from the track's other elements precisely because all those elements share that 'sampled' aesthetic. Outmind's overall sound is necessarily degraded and made ghostly to us. The idea of Outmind being lost under the weight of its own musical fog, then, is essential to its success as an exciting and innovative piece of music. Like the best experimental electronic music, it forces us to re-evaluate those musical assumptions we carry with us into our listening experience, about ontology, silence and sampling. Not bad for a 26-year-old with a professed love of 1980s R&B singles!
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