by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
When I contacted Chad Matheny... "Whatup, Boz?"
I told him EU wanted to interview him in support of his upcoming show at TSI. Fortunately he was planning on being in town (under unfortunate circumstances) and so he said I could catch him in person. He called me at 9:30 pm and told me to meet him in fifteen minutes at the Publix in faux points (across from Memorial Park) where we were to purchase frozen burritos and proceed on to an undisclosed location to conduct said interview. By 10 pm we were cooking French fries on ceramic plates in the home of Cadets drummer Cash Carter.
While searching for the desired burritos, Chad was distracted by the urge to purchase French fries and tater tots, which is what lead us to Cash's house where there were microwaves and ovens in ample supply.
The party consisted of Max Wood, Cash Carter, Chad Matheny and myself. All of us have Cadet numbers, which simply means we've all had something to do with the band The Cadets over the years, but I was the only one that has not actually performed some relevant function in the band. My number was assigned to me during a hiatus that, at the time, seemed as though it would never end, but has since ended. The reason for me getting a number, according to Cash, is because I booked the show that was responsible for their reunion.
Chad Matheny is from Jacksonville but he currently lives in Brooklyn New York. He tours and records as Emperor X, plays bass for The Cadets, and runs the Discos Mariscos record label with Max Wood. Although his degree is in Physics, he is currently studying music theory and composition in New York.
As we huddled around a plate of soggy French fries and tater tots on Cash's front porch, I asked questions that ranged from quantum physics to Jesus to "The Problem with a capital ‘P' and a capital ‘T'" (according to Max). What follows is a truncated transcription of this conversation:
EU: What is Discos Mariscos up to in 2007?
Matheny: (To Wood) Did you tell him about ‘Praise and Worship?'
Wood: Chad's going to be doing field recordings of urban sermonizing. We're calling it ‘Praise and Worship.'
Matheny: Where I've lived for the past couple of months, the neighborhood I live in is heavily Jamaican and Haitian. The church services in this neighborhood are amazing. Their PA systems are all shattered and slit speaker cones and the works. Their drummers are all excellent and play the same thing over and over and over again and its hypnotic the way voodoo worship is except you switch out whatever they worship in voodoo, because I don't know anything about voodoo, with Jesus and its incredible.
I have this awesome tape recorder that gets this great recording signal. It sounds cool and it runs on four D batteries.
EU: So it's a Sunday thing, you'll just go around on Sunday and record these services?
Matheny: Yeah, I haven't done the work yet, but it's not going to be that hard. I don't have to do anything. The real work will be going to the congregations afterward and telling them that I want to put their worship service on a record full of the great worship services around here.
Wood: You better give a donation first.
Matheny: As long as I don't go broke doing that, I'd be happy to.
EU: So is the purpose of documenting this music just to capture the time and place or is there a commentary to putting it on a record?
Matheny: The purpose is to capture the really great and unique feeling of Nostrum Avenue at eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning. Its really strange. Its really bleak in that part of Brooklyn, not bleak like poor, but it's just boring, there isn't much. But then Nostrum Avenue has all these intense vegetarian places and it's a really vibrant place. Knowing New York, it's not always going to be that way, so it would be really nice to have a recording of it.
EU: Why is Discos Mariscos going to foray into literature?
Matheny: Literature?
Wood: I mentioned ‘People I Met on the Internet' and ‘Format' [publications Mariscos plans to release] and a little about my books.
Matheny: Oh.
Wood: It's just more interesting than releasing CDs.
Matheny: Max and I have both been worried about, obsessed with trying to make things interesting. A little too hyper-concerned with just releasing CDs. There are so many record labels these days it's easy to make a record label.
Wood: Or at least it is clogging the pores of The Problem.
Matheny: You're aware of The Problem right?
EU: What's The problem?
Woods: The Problem has a capital ‘P' and a capital ‘T' and it's all around us. [More on The Problem later]
EU: Does Discos Mariscos run the risk of becoming too esoteric and representing one finite group of voices?
Matheny: We run the risk of becoming another boring, unsuccessful record label.
Woods: I don't think we're focused on maintaining one solid group of people. There is this one 16-year old girl in California that we tried to release their music, but she didn't want to. There is a noise band from the UK that we are releasing their record.
Matheny: And by releasing, we mean spending maybe one hundred and fifty dollars to manufacture handmade cassettes and doing all the work to promote it through the website. There is nothing to releasing a record.
Wood: It definitely isn't just Cadets side projects.
Matheny: We're really into digging around and finding neat things. Preferably fewer and fewer by white males. That's kind of embarrassing.
Wood: Fewer and fewer white males, Chad's vision for the future.
EU: What is your education in?
Matheny: Right now I can safely say it's a combination of music and physics. First I got my physics degree then I taught a little [at Stanton College Preparatory High School] and I guess I didn't really get bored with it, I just didn't deserve the position of teacher. I didn't know enough about the things I wanted to know about so who was I to tell these kids anything. It's a high responsibility and I was not cool enough for that responsibility yet. So I just started recording music and now I'm in school for music composition.
EU: Is that music theory?
Matheny: Yes, everything I've been doing so far has been music theory. I haven't had a single composition lesson yet, it's all been "Here is how Back wrote music."
EU: How does that affect your writing in Emperor X?
Matheny: I don't think it does. I don't think it should. If it does than I probably shouldn't be in school.
Wood: It seems like it goes hand-in-hand with you thinking more critically though.
Matheny: Yeah. Exactly. It's more about how I think and the decisions I make and what to include on the album. I don't know. I haven't finished an album since I've been in school, so maybe its bad for productivity, but maybe it's good for quality. We'll see. I'm hoping so.
Composition is weird. It's this stodgy way to put music out. It requires this class of humans that is able to read code, with the code being music. It's like a bunch of human computers interpret the code that you write, and that's definitely not the way music works anymore.
EU: Does that create an aristocracy among musicians?
Matheny: If they had a big piece of the pie you could say that, but they are scraping the bottom of the barrel as any of the indie labels are. I think Matador has as much money as Nonesuch, being the label that puts out Wilco and a bunch of neoclassical music.
EU: Given that you don't like Cat Power and Smogg, what would you consider your contemporaries?
Matheny: You mean that I like or feel affection for?
EU: Progenitors.
Matheny: Well obviously this is colored by the fact that Max has plagued me with it in the car non-stop lately, Sebadoh and The Microphones, although I never listened to the Microphones until after I started writing music. I only started hearing them in the past one to two years. Consiously its just Lou Barlow and Guided by Voices, really, which is sad because there are a lot of good musicians that I don't know about.
EU: So who are some of the musicians that you've been finding since you've been playing in exotic places, meaning outside of Jacksonville, what artists have you discovered.
Matheny: there's this awesome band called Dust from 1000 Years that are really great. Who else? It's shocking how many bad bands there are in the nation. It makes you doubt the whole idea of doing music. [To Wood] Did we play with a good band that whole tour, Max?
Wood: In Delaware we played with the Roaring Twenties.
Matheny: The Roaring Twenties and Algeron Cat Walder. Most of the bands I find myself having affection for aren't guys with guitars, so I don't think there is a linear relationship between what you do and what inspires you.
Wood: I don't think we did play with any good bands.
Matheny: Max and I went on tour recently; he was gracious enough to let me jump on to half of his tour.
Wood: There are a lot of good radio stations around the country.
Matheny: It would be ignorant of me to say there isn't a ton of good music out there right now, because there is.
Wood: They just don't get booked with Emperor X.
Matheny: Right.
Wood: But there are a lot of good people and a lot of good venues and a lot of good communities. Good alternative newspapers, good political movements, good books.
EU: When you get out and see these communities, does that inspire you to bring that stuff to Jacksonville?
Matheny: I'm not here really anymore. I'm pretty much gone, and it doesn't hurt to leave. I walways thaought it would. It always had the feeling of a place that was firmly behind enemy lines, the enemy ruled here, with the sprawl and the cop;s and all that, but there still seemed like there was a fighting chance, now when I come back I see Five Points almost completely pacified I see Riverside Apartments with rents that aren't htat much less than Chicago. People are starting to talk about moving to Moncrief and having art lofts. It is going to happen in Jacksonville, its an inexorable process of squeezing poor people out of their neighborhoods by spoiled rich people like.. like me. And it sucks and its terrible and to see it in your home town is painful.
EU: Is the art movement as a predeccesor to gentrification a horrible thing or does that mean there's hope for an underground and a creative soul.
Matheny: I'm sure it exists, but I've never seen a poor community successfully integrate artists and remain affordable.
Wood: in order to build that kind of community you'd have to kick out poor people.
Matheny: This is going to come across as really strange, but I don't think it's the money of the gentrification, I think it is that when people gentrify have specific and certain tastes that are, for lack of a better word, fancy.
There's this post-adolescent nice-vibe going on around Riverside. It feels like all of your dramatic dreams were silly. I don't like being here sometimes because it's so sad. Max met some really cool people that live here recently that are in high school., buit they are all leaving in a few months.
There are some really great people that are living here and making a life here and doing really good things.
Wood: Bu think of all the awesome people you knew in high school that left and never came back.
Matheny: The arts community here seems, I mean there are some really great artists here, but it doesn't really hit you over the head when you are here, and going to Springfield and seeing coffeeshops spring up doesn't necessarily make me feel welcome.
Wood: The good artists here don't know the thirty year olds that book the art galleries in Brooklyn.
Matheny: The most amazing interaction I've had with the arts community in Jacksonville was one time when I was collecting signatures [for Jacksonville Carbon Nuetral initiative] downtown at ArtWalk and I was in an art gallery and this guy that looked like Jimmy Buffet, complete with mustach and tucked in Hawaiian shirt, goes "Buddy, art and politics don't mix." My mouth fell open. I don't think that art is overtly political, but go to Gainesville or any nearby town with an arts community. That's what sucks. There are so amny good artists here, but the culture has this sad entrenched southern mindset that you can't rock the boat. And the thing that really freaks me out is this new kind of nice. Again, I'm going back to the "fancy" people, you get these developers that are rednecks, they are nice people microscopically, but macroscopically it becomes a huge problem when you have these developers with moron, redneck taste trying very self-consiously to look rich.
Wood: Wackadoos.
Matheny: Right, Club Timucua and Wakadoo's have the same set. But the arts will always depend on money, and music included.
EU: But music can escape that. You can play in a laudromat. [Max Wood is famous for his Laundromat performances]
Matheny: But ultimately someone has to fund the music getting popular. It does happen organically on occasion, but a lot of things are dependent on the cloud of fame you have already. Being in Pitchfork gives the illusion that because you are in that magazine, you are a real "artist."
When the Jaguars came to Jacksonville when I was in seventh grade I was so stoked because of civic pride. It was from a good place. It was because I wanted to live in a good place that was doing good things, which is a good, wholesome desire. I was excited about that because Jacksonville would be on TV which made it a real place.
EU: It's like a false validation.
Matheny: Exactly and I think that's true for the art world too. There's no access to that validation in Jacksonville. People don't make the magazines that people care about in Jacksonville. They could, they just don't. Those people all leave. I've wanted this place to be that for a long time, and it could be, and God hel whoever wants to prove me wrong, but its so hard, its like swimming upstream.
EU: So what is "The Problem."
Wood: Have you seen the movie Idiocracy?
EU: Yes.
Wood: The Problem is the fear that that movie is too real to be funny. The problem with the media is that it's supposed to be representation and controlled by the free market, which is kind of a republic, but really it is controlled by a handful of old rich dudes that want to control what the country thinks.
Matheny: The Internet is a radical alteration to how people see content. Because now it's a little more obvious that you can do it too. If the funniest thing you see all week is a dog that eats birthday candles, well you have a dog, and you have some birthday candles, and you have a video camera.
Wood: Just cut out the Bob Sagget.
Matheny: The Problem is that we are swimming upstream against all of this democratically fueled garbage that is being replicated by mass media.
Wood: The Problem is role assignment too.
Matheny: Meaning people that look at their lives as opportunities to live up to what they see on television.
Wood: Or of natural actiuons becoming like imitations of bad acting.
Matheny: There's definitely some psychologist that has thought long and hard about this.
EU: So is the solution just diversification of voices?
Matheny: The solution is just if you're good or you notice that there is anything that should be fought against to just stand up. If everyone that thought Jacksonville was screwqed up did something to make it better it would alter the place like night and day. That's true for any city.
Wood: You don't have to build a thirty story building with a community center in it. We're going to go play Risk in the gazebo in San Marco on Thursday.
Matheny: It seems like it helps.
Wood: Or sit in your room and draw instead of watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire or go to the library. There are so many things that you can do without extolling your resources.
Matheny: I don't want to be seen as anti-capitalist, because I'm not. I'm happy that we are allowed to make money how we please, but the pursuit of money is too much a motivating factor for some people. There are some businessmen in Jacksonville that are showing that not to be what they're after. Jaxcore Skate Shop is a good example of someone doing something because they like doing what they want to do. It's the idea of the act being inherently valuable as opposed to what the act can do for you. It's like the bands that are in it to be famous instead of in it to make the music.
EU: What's even worse is watching a band that started out just making great music go through that evolution and turn into a band that just wants to make it.
Wood: Someone whispers in their ear that they can make them a star.
Matheny: And that person is the one person that has never made anyone a star and has no idea how to make someone a star.
EU: Is it time for a punk rock renaissance?
Matheny: No. There already is one.
EU: I mean the ideology of punk rock. The whole screw disco and commercial rock…
Matheny: You mean the store owner that put together a band to promote fetish gear?
Wood: The kids that live in the Pacific Northwest are doing it. Phil Evrum from The Microphones and Adrian Orange from Thanksgiving, that's their attitude. They have this letter press from the nineteenth century in Phil's garage and they are making books, letter pressing the pages individually, and making album covers and pressing their own vinyl.
Matheny: You can boil that down to this: DIY, yes.
Wood: But for real this time. Not ‘I went to Kinkos."
Matheny: Punk rock as a fashion statement ossified last decade and the quicker they become unfashionable the better.
Wood: It's like we talked about earlier, there's not going to be one focused movement at this point because there isn't as strict of editorial control over the youth anymore. What do the oughts look like (the 2000s), shit if I know, but I know the colors of the 80s because of MTV. So there is nothing to react against and form a movement for because that whole system has decayed.
Matheny: They're trying to make 90s nostalgia stations but it doesn't work.
Wood: They're trying to generate emo as a fad.
Matheny: Specifically with punk, the attitudes are great. All the bands that affescted me the most were crazy, experimental post-punk bands like Swell Max. I got a Swell Max tape for ten cents from the Camelot on San Jose and that was probably the most affecting music of my young life. But punk is also holding a lot of people back. The idea of punk. You have to be a loser or you have to be poor to be legitimate.
Wood: Or you have to follow this paradigm that was established in the seventies, even if they didn't know what they were doing then.
EU: So are the new rules that there should be no cultural rules?
Matheny: It's not that there shouldn't be, there just isn't anymore. There aren't giant unified movements.
EU: Can capitalism have a future through the new micro-media?
Wood: It already does.
Matheny: The future has to be a capitalism that's also ethical.
EU: But isn't the argument that decentralization of that media removes the possibility of any kind of instilled ethics?
Matheny: But the instilled ethics can't come from the system. It can't come from any economic system. I always though communism and capitalism made the same essential mistake, which is centralizing the way society is organized around the maximization of resources beyond need, instead of thinking of higher goals. I'm not an economist, so I might sound like a moron right now, but I'm also that uneducated, folky voice. I'm one of the ignorant millions that feels there is this thing that should happen. That's sort of Marxist to think that things are going to inevitably move toward microcapitalism. That makes a lot of sense.
EU: Do your songs project any of that angst?
Matheny: I don't think so. I think the fact that I live now and think about that stuff means that it will come out every now and then.
EU: But some of the songs you wrote with Beatcancel made me really think about things, your lyrics stuck in my mind.
Matheny: You mean songs like break it off? I think I could have done that better. Those lyrics came from instances in my life, but there were parts that don't make any sense. I couldn't tell you what political position I was advocating. It's like that guy at ArtWalk that said there is no place for politics in art, I couldn't disagree with that more, but I would also say there is no place for an overt statement in music. Because that is an essay. That is a protest song, which is a great form that Woodie Guthrie and people like that perfected, but if I'm doing that its definitely something that I don't know that I'm doing when I do it.
EU: Do you find yourself getting disappointed with artists that do do that?
Matheny: Yeah. Definitely. It's so easy. It's like a sucker punch. Especially now because of the democratization of media means people can attain success without having to press the avant-garde. Which is good for a lot of reason. Things can happen that the stodgy avant-garde wouldn't like. The perfect example is the Virginia Tech killings. There is this guy on You Tube, and he will forever be remembered as ‘This Guy on You Tube" because no one knows anything else about him, wrote this terrible terrible terrible sappy sentimental song about the tragedy in Virginia, and he wasn't there. He was experiencing it through the media and it was role-fulfillment for him. He needed to have that feeling about Virginia Tech. Of course its sad, people were murdered, and it's a really fascinating and weird sadness because it was done by this closed-up pent up emotional guy with a shaved head that takes digital photos of himself pointing guns at the camera. But the leap from there to I have these emotions about an event, I don't believe him. I don't believe his emotions are real, especially when it's a one four five power ballad written on a digital piano.
EU: What is the most damaging outcome of September eleventh?
Matheny: Clearly, the way that its made Americans feel justified in their way of life.
Wood: What a hilarious outcome.
Matheny: And a close runner up would be the loss of the ability to do things relaxed because everyone is worried about insurance and security and we've become even more safety-obsessed than we were, and we were already really bad.
Wood: Obviously, it was also easy vindication for The Patriot Act and the NSA.
Matheny: And creatively things like Toby Keith.
Wood: And war.
Matheny: Oh yeah, and war. I forgot about that one. My friend from Washington, who is into the whole DC punk thing, when Bush was reelected he said "this is going to be bad, but maybe it will be good for music." And it sort of has been. Godspeed You Black Emperor has made some great music in 2003 right when we were obliterating Saddam Hussein.
Wood: Thank God it hasn't been like Punks against Reagan.
Matheny: Well there is music like that, but its so clear that its sentimental and role-fulfillment in the same way as the Virginia Tech guy. It's just not that simple. The resistance music is a lot more nuanced these days. When you walk into Inertia Records you'll find some really cool, weird statements. They mix it up with an Anton Lavey statement and have anarcho-satanism or like weird thoughts about bikes and science. There are bizarre ways to rebel now.
EU: What does Chad Matheny think about Jesus?
Wood: This is an insane interview.
Matheny: Wow. God's watching. Like anyone raised Christian, I had the feeling that the answer of that question is going to effect the destiny of my eternal soul, so I'm going to be careful about saying it. There are some very specific only Christians go to heaven things that Jesus said, but if you zoom out and look at the flavor of all of the things that he was saying…I think that it's pretty clear that history revolves around Jesus Christ, so there has to be something really amazing that happened there on the order of Abraham or Buddha or Mohammed, or what people saw in him was an amazing person. I believe in the spiritual side of life, but I pretty firmly don't believe that God interacts at will and plays with us. I'm more of the founding fathers' deist model. Basically God made it and said "it is good, now let's see what you can do." Jesus may be a rare instance where life did something that was so good that it approached or maybe touched the divine, but there is nothing in me that thinks that people that don't believe in Christ are going to hell. That is where I split off from Christianity.
But pretty much everything that he said, including what Ayn Rand hates and Nietsche hates, I love. Turn the other cheek and things I have miserably failed at achieving in my own life but I wish I did. I think he's great. I'm a ba'hai. I don't know anything about them except that they think there were times in history when there was a touch of divinity to give us another hint. It's like "We know it sucks to die of cancer and to have wars and have your legs cut off, just keep going." And we get this sort of encouragement from the divine and we haven't had one of those in a while. So it's good to look back and Jesus and think there was someone that really thought he knew what right was. It's great. I wish I had a more coherent answer.
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EU Critic’s Choice Awards
