Matthewdavid's Psychedelic Soul Music Is Not Exactly That
[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]
Credit: Patricia Miller Matthewdavid
"All profoundly original art looks ugly at first," opined art critic Clement Greenberg. He was alluding to the abstract expressionism that he helped to popularize, but his mantra describes much experimental music as well.
A thin membrane divides the beautiful, bizarre and bogus. One man's Animal Collective is another's yelp for institutionalization.
Over the last five years, few L.A. musicians have more artfully surveyed the oft-jagged creative frontier than Matthewdavid, whether through his solo work or via Leaving Records, the label he co-founded with visual director Jesselisa Moretti.
"Music should be a progressive thing, and that's embodied in the label's releases," says the spliff-thin Matthew David McQueen, 28, in the living room of his Highland Park aerie. He's wearing a Mountain Dew-green T-shirt, black cigarette pants, hair loosely swept from right to left and a light brown beard. There are shelves of art books, CDs, vinyl and enough cassette tapes to open a 1980s carwash. Above a heating vent, a trumpet lies next to a cassingle of Outkast's "Elevators (Me & You)." A guitar slouches in another corner.
"There's a humanity and universal consciousness, a deeper spiritual, psychedelic awareness that we're trying to convey to the world," the Pensacola-via-Atlanta native says about his own music and that of his label, which recently raised its profile by signing a distribution and promotional pact with Stones Throw.
Overheard in a vacuum, these words could seem like hippie cliché. But Matthewdavid has an easy-natured humor and self-awareness that undercuts the seriousness.
He's also exceptionally talented. Where much experimental music feels like formless splatter, his beats reveal sublime chaos. It's psychedelic soul music that sounds nothing like psych-rock or soul music. The beats are carefully sculpted, codeine-slow and without formula. It's as though he worked to build a safety net made of hemp, but then smoked it.
This is how you get someone who grew up a hip-hop DJ and producer obsessed with regional Southern rap, who got so into experimental beat, noise and folk music that he moved out to L.A. upon graduation from Florida State.
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