Matt Mayhall

I usually try to avoid being bloggish on this site.  But I wanna start writing more, so… here.

I just finished a week in New York City at the Performa 09 Festival, playing in the show Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus created by Mike Kelley.  We spent the entire month of October rehearsing the music in Los Angeles and had a great experience performing for packed crowds at all six performances.  Check out the New York Times review here.

Looking forward, there are a few things I’m excited about that are worth mentioning here.  First, Spain has recorded two songs for a 7″ to be released December 15th, 2009 on the Spanish label Acuarela Discos.  It will be released as part of their “Singles Club,” which is pretty similar to what Sub Pop does.  There are some really cool bands making records for this series (Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu, Mount Eerie, etc.), so we’re happy to be a part of it.  To celebrate, we are playing a show December 19th, 2009 at Spaceland here in Los Angeles.  From what Josh tells me, Spain played its first gigs at this club in the early 90s, way before it was even called Spaceland, so this is a little bit of a homecoming.  Come out, see us play a bunch of new jams, and buy our new record.

Secondly, Sam Minaie and Nate Wood have finished mixing and mastering Peter Epstein’s Abstract Realism record, which is going to be released on Seattle’s own Origin Records in early 2010.  The core band for this date was me on drums, Sam Minaie on bass, Andrew Barbera on guitar, and Peter Epstein on alto saxophone.  Gavin Templeton and Brian Walsh also played on a couple tracks.  It’s all Peter’s music, very open structures and lots of free improvisation, all super rad.  Hopefully this band will tour.  Stay tuned.

Lastly, I’m in the process of booking a March 2010 tour for a trio that I’m leading with Sam on bass and Adam Benjamin on piano.  I’m really excited about this project; we’ll be playing music by all three of us, as well as some Monk stuff, some Ornette stuff, some standards, you know… I’ll post those dates as they’re confirmed!  Word up.

Rashied Ali died yesterday.  Any drummer who has ever tried to play “free” is indebted to him, as far as I’m concerned.  I know I am.  Thank you Rashied for your truly inspirational and inventive musicianship.

Sam finally gave me a disc of a gig we did with Adam Benjamin about a year ago.  We listened to it and decided that it was “killing,” to use the parlance of our times.  Despite their relatively poor sound quality, I posted a few tracks in the Listen section.  Pictured above is the guy inadvertently responsible for bringing the three of us together.  Photo by me.

There seem to be at least two different kinds of Radiohead fans: those who readily consider everything the band has released as the work of collective genius, and those who pretty much quit paying attention somewhere around OK Computer. It has been my observation that those who fit into the latter category are predominately male.  This makes sense, because it appears to me that Radiohead’s sound and overall aesthetic pre- vs. post- OK Computer work to represent two distinct, opposing male identities.  One identity is the that of the sensitive yet powerful male, more or less represented by the band’s earlier,  guitar-based music, which is replete with conventionally “stable” harmonic devices (most of the songs on The Bends are representative of this).  But a conflicting identity begins to crop up on OK Computer and comes to the fore on Kid A and Amnesiac, both of which showcase a predominant reliance on electronically manipulated sound and relative harmonic stasis or ambiguity (see “Idioteque” from Kid A). The confluence of these factors on Kid A and Amnesiac enable an interpretation of the music as being somewhat androgynous, where the lines between “masculine” and “feminine” musical signifiers become blurry to the point where some males feel the need to disassociate.  Given that the electric guitar has historically served the male performer in molding the audience’s perceptions of his power, what happens when that instrument’s role in the music is greatly diminished?  Similarly, what happens when a more or less conventional usage of harmony is replaced by a static loop of bleeps, blurps, and hums?

And as my friend Nick recently pointed out to me, what about those who didn’t really care about Radiohead until Kid A?

Seeing as how those records came out a long time ago and we’ve all had some time to sit with them, I’m sure someone’s already written at length on this topic before, I just don’t know about it.  If you do, let me know.