Solidarity & Psychosis: An Interview with Matt Papich

No No, the new album from Baltimore-based Matt Papich, aka Co La, is an album that conflates and emphasizes contrast. Though reactions to the maelstrom of samples he conjures has been a little polarized, and elsewhere it’s suggested that No No is unstructured and “avant-garde at its core,” I have to wonder what comparisons are really being made there? The reality works at length to avoid skipping away from pop. The album’s formal elements imply a critique of club music but explicitly conflate its spaces and shapes with very human, often domestic elements — sampled sneezes, screams, cries, or the album’s frequent snippets of laughter — acknowledging a universe of significance that historically dies on the dance-floor. According to Papich, its pace and intensity is deliberately “jarring.” He and others, particularly through his Club Undo events, have made it a priority to experiment with the expectations of club music by engaging more consciously with audiences — to “make the DJ less important,” in his own words. Thanks to that his work  may be most unique for the extent to which it stays close to both of the polarities it navigates. Even compared to it’s  predecessor Moody Coup, No No is dependent on small sounds, clustered together and set against well-placed tones to flesh out an album that, though unusual, is meticulously club conscious.

 Co La is wrapping up some shows this week with a stacked bill (alongside Magic Fades+Soul Ipsum, PHORK, and (Visible) Cloaks) at Short Space in Portland, though he was good enough to talk a bit about the new album via Skype last month. No No is out now via Software and 1080p.

Do you feel like ‘No No’ is a less spatial record than its predecessors?
It’s strange… some of it feels more conceptual than previous records, like less about how a kick-drum sounds in a certain room and more about psychology. Simultaneously the music is pretty physical so when it gets to a loud volume it becomes spatial too.

Does your job at BMA play much into your music?
I mean, I went to school for art, so there’s that anyway… but working in a museum environment, learning about installing things, has a lot to do with how I do performances and think about space. Almost even just in terms of cleanliness, or something… clean, dust-free, reflective surfaces.

I understand that a lot of the audio on ‘No No’ was sourced via FreeSound.org?
There are a bunch of sample websites but FreeSound is the one I’ve gravitated toward… I would say something like 70% of the actual users are audiophiles. I used to make my own samples… I just used a field recorder… with Moody Coup most of the samples that aren’t from music, I used field recorders. Even though I bought a good one I started noticing all the recordings had a certain texture, a little bit thin… like even when you’re recording with a field recorder at the right volume it’s still a little hot sounding. FreeSound samples, because it’s audiophiles making them, they’re impeccable… very, very clean. The samples are in their purest state and the site is pretty encyclopedic. I don’t usually go there and search with something in mind, I just like browsing and coming across things… but if you wanted a sample of a light bulb being turned on, there is a sample of that, and you could search for it and find it. You want a sample of toes touching mud, there’s a sample of that, so it’s like an atlas and I felt like I had better access to more interesting, higher quality, and a greater depth of sound than when I was doing it by myself.

For comparison ‘Moody Coup’ was made in a kitchen, right?
Yea, my work space used to be on the first floor of my old house, and that was just an open-floor plan with no walls between me and the kitchen. For the last several years I’ve also been interested in flavor as a medium… I was doing a lot of flavor/studio projects, and it was kind of useful for me to go between those two realms. We used to make these sprayable foods, graffiti flavors basically, so I could be working on that… with turmeric or something to make a yellow spray and then get back to working on the record. In the same way that someone who’s a painter and a musician might oscillate between the two things… but I also really liked the interruptions too, living with three other people… I liked being able to hear the music with a blender on top of it or a sizzle from cooking bacon. It helps to build an impression of how the music sounds in those spaces too.

There’s an egg frying, there are all kinds of food sounds on the album. With Moody Coup I was way more interested in sampling a domestic space, I was sampling my house and people around me a lot, but with this record I wasn’t looking for something so close to home or personal… I wanted it further removed, with a wider scope. So I would find samples of things that I would never sample myself, folders of just hard-drives booting up… ya know, which are very melodic, or modems… and of course things that I wouldn’t be able to do as well myself. I think a lot of the people that use the website use it for film, because I mean there’s a lot of stuff, like an apple being crunched or a sneeze. No No was made in a way more isolated studio, not a “headphone” studio but way more private.

 What’s your current studio situation?
When I started No No I moved my studio to a more isolated space, upstairs. I live in more of a neighborhood now where there are things like trees outside… there’s one direction when you look out and it looks like just trees, so it’s kind of changed the headspace a bit… I’m also rarely interrupted when I’m here. With a large scale record I like to change the situation I’m working in, and I think in this case it allowed me to make something a little bit more intense, more sharpened, and less humid or muddy. Sharper in a psychological way… more mental.

Can you talk about F5 syndrome and your impressions of the news cycle living in Baltimore?
Yea, that’s something I still feel like I’m “in,” ya know, but everyone’s kind of more in that now. Something that’s been interesting for me, like in the last six months… really when Egypt had their first uprising is when I got into Twitter as a source for information. I followed those uprisings and than smaller ones all across the world, protests in Germany, protests against Israel really closely, and you know in April the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore… it brought this virtual thing I was pretty addicted to into a real space, where I’m following the protests on Twitter, but I’m also here in Baltimore, going to the protests. I could recognize which pictures in the news were real and which of the pictures going up on Fox News were faked, from other parts of the world… it was pretty grounding. By that time I was nearly done making this record, the tracks were mixed by then, but it felt like something crystallized. For years relating to these emotional events from across the world through a virtual interface and then having to cope with them in actuality. There was definitely a psychological moment there, like the mirror stage that Jacques Lacan would talk about, where you don’t really know that you’re an individual human until you recognize your reflection in a mirror. Simultaneously, through moving, going through a break-up, I was in a heady psychological space… I wanted to investigate the emotional and virtual worlds at once.

So ‘No No’ is more explicitly concerned with the “real?”
Yea, I think it’s less fictitious, less trying to imagine another world… less like exotica! I used to listen to a lot of exotica, and was pretty invested in the concept… I ended up doing a lot of research into the beginnings of that genre, the purposes it served in post-WWII America, for people who had visited southeast Asia to have this image of it through sound to share and relive. This is when tiki lounges were popular, Mai Tais were popular… so I feel like my music used to be imagining another world, a collage of other places.

I’ve kind of had to go in two directions at once… I had to play with opposites in order to handle more delicate concepts. In the same way that we like have to have a thumb and forefinger to pick up paper… our digits are “opposable.” I feel like through extremes I can get closer to the ideas I want… “thin” is a word that comes to mind, more specific…

Despite the name, ‘No No’ sounds like a very resolutive album… it feels very positive to me. From repeated listens the observations I might take away are how often you’ve included sounds of people laughing, threshold moments and liminal things.
A good example of the philosophy of making this is that track “Tragedy.” There’s laughter, but by the end there’s crying…. there’s a song called “Fear,” with a sample of a guy saying “fear” and a baby crying by the end, but it’s auto-tuned into a major key. That’s the kind of opposition I’m talking about, though I agree it ends up being… it’s not a record that’s bleak. It’s a record that believes in humanity but in order to describe that belief there’s a little on both sides.

From a certain angle it reminds me of ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.’ The sounds are more disembodied but it seems expressive in similar ways.
Right, I mean Brian Eno and David Byrne are people that I’m always influenced by, even when I’m not listening to their music… My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is definitely an ongoing inspiration, and so are the Talking Heads. There are a lot of similarities here with David Byrne’s general philosophy, being critical of capitalism… and I’m a huge fan of True Stories, love that movie. There’s a great example; it’s critical, it’s sarcastic, it’s fun, and in the end you have John Goodman singing that song. It’s so positive despite being sad, it’s definitely that kind of territory I’m aiming for. Like the stage… it’s very much like a minimalist sculpture. Yea, David Byrne is clearly a huge inspiration, I love his stuff.

Could you talk about Joe Williams (Motion Graphics) and his involvement with the production on ‘No No?’
I love Joe, he also worked on Moudy Coup, and we used to do a very experimental project together called the Bakers that played in Baltimore and New York but never released music. We’ve collaborated for like ten years… he’s finally putting out a record, probably next year, that he’s been working on forever. I see us as peers very much in the same way as Byrne and Eno working together, different voices coming into the same place… with Joe that’s very fast and easy. His music is still a little bit more involved with this concept of exotica though. It has these eastern motifs and tends to be a little bit more beautiful in a traditional sense, particularly in a melodic sense. In our group Joe is the one downloading new video game soundtracks as soon as they come out, excavating them, and then sharing with other people. He’s a scientist. He showed me Max For Live, which I’m not too deep into yet but he goes in those directions. He thinks about making digital music like he’s building instruments from the ground up, using Ableton, using Max, and then writing music for those instruments. Instead of writing a song and using whatever synths are available, he makes a sound that’s between a xylophone and a guitar, and then writes a song for it.

He did a couple things for the Lifted album, the collaboration I was involved with for PAN… there’s a song called “3D” that he took the lead on… anything on that album that’s very digital sounding, that’s probably Joe. He also did some piano, but he’s involved with almost any music project I might get into.

Was that true of his approach on ‘No No?’ I know for ‘Moudy Coup’ he was playing most of the synths…
Yea, he did really play most of the synths on that record… and he was actually playing real synths, mostly an Ensoniq and some samples of a Voyager he had. Moody Coup was very finished and then Joe did a week’s worth of sessions, where he played on top of everything. With No No we bounced things back and forth before they were anywhere close to being done, so he was involved even more from the beginning. Like, the bonus track “Comb My Hair,” Joe took the lead on that, and the difference from before and after he’s involved… is dramatic. The final version with Joe is kind of swirling and more alien sounding, it was originally kind of a text piece, much more about the language. We have a great relationship in that way and I definitely trust him enough to kind of hand a song over and lead him take a lead, and vice versa.

Could you talk about Club Undo?
Yea, that’s a party I’ve been doing in Baltimore for about two-and-a-half years, not very regularly… at the beginning almost once a month, but now I kind of reserve that heading for more specific events. In general Club Undo is about flipping as many of the formal/traditional elements of club music and culture as possible. We were really involved for a while with flavor as a studio practice, making specific drinks for events. We had an event at the beginning of May at a space that was about to be… heavily under construction, and we took the roof off… and didn’t have to use any lights. The space was lit by street lights… you could see the stars and stuff too though, you could see all that. It’s a way of experimenting with what club culture means, and a lot of our friends would DJ, almost all of the people involved with the Lifted record… like Jeremy Hyman would DJ a lot of Club Undo parties. I mean, club music is popular in Baltimore, there are still the OGs who have been doing it for 15 years, so we were interested in being able to play that music and dance, but also make a situation where people notice things in… in a similar way to how you might notice things at an art show, when you notice the shape of the room or how the space looks, or the way a laser light is pointed at something. The first we did at the Crown when that space was just opening, but now we move them around and do things wherever makes sense.

It’ll probably be a while before we do another one… it might be New Years. Like, a move from the last New Years Club Undo: we bought 365 champagne glasses and let people break them all. There was a designated room… you could hear the music, but it wasn’t loud, it was just a place for breaking champagne glasses.

So it’s a similar philosophy playing out in the album?
Right. All the songs on this record are 135bpm, which is basically the tempo where Baltimore and Jersey club are sitting at right now… where a lot of the new grime music is, so a lot of the drums are basically traditional club music patterns. Like the kick drums in “Tragedy” are pretty similar to a Baltimore club kick drum. The track “No No” is very much a humorous club music deconstruction… like, most of the rhythm in that track is someone laughing, and ends with people laughing and screaming. In “Crank” it’s similar… there are some moves like that, where it’s like using the formal structure of club music from Baltimore or the UK and then… not necessarily to like “tear it apart,” like it’s nothing against that music, it’s more flipping elements of that so that things become funny or surprising or jarring. It focuses the attention.

The sense of humor?
Yea. There’s rarely a place for humor in club music… Baltimore club music especially is very sexual. The main content for club music is to dance in a way to hook up, and most of it wants listeners to have no questions about how to move their body… or to have questions about what they’re doing there at all! So I use laughter, or flip the rhythms, or instead of a drop happening just go with silence… all of those things that can break people out of euphoria. There’s also something very pagan and mystic about club music, and this attempts to remind you of that through humor and absurdity… by using the sounds of people’s bodies, like a sneeze, cough, or sniffle. It takes you off the fast-track to euphoria and reminds you “you’re in this room, with other bodies, with other people.” Hopefully it does that in a fun way… it’s not meant to be mean or embarrass anyone, it’s meant to increase solidarity in the group. When everyone laughs because something funny happened in the music, that’s rare. I saw Dan Higgs perform a piece a few years ago where the chorus of the song is laughter, and he laughs into the microphone… for a long time. He basically does laugh therapy. When he laughs long enough and in a ridiculous enough way, the entire room starts to laugh. It’s so uplifting and surprising because his music is very… Biblical, mystical, and serious, so when he draws in humor is when the set actually feels the most spiritual. Suddenly you’re in church, because everyone in the room is feeling the exact same way, having the same emotion. He’s not in Balitmore anymore, but Dan Higgs is an amazing brain that’s very good at playing with perception.

How do you feel about adapting ‘No No’ live?
With most Co La shows there’s some kind of minimal action that’s meant to be funny or surprising… a lot of the times I play tracks from No No I have someone sit at the back of the room, usually near where a sound booth will be, with a laser… and at the climax of the music, the part of the set when there’s the most strangeness, I have them focus the laser on my forehead. It raises the tension and can seem a little bit scary, but it’s also self-deprecating like “killing the DJ.” Sometimes I’ll empty a whole box of tissues when I’m playing that song “Tragedy,” basically to the rhythm of the track. Sometimes when I’m doing “Shrink” I’ll just scream with one of the screams near the middle, and you can’t really tell whether it’s the music or not… but for the people who can tell, very jarring. I usually try to include something that breaks down the traditional barrier between the performer and audience. To make the DJ less important, more human. When I made Daydream Repeater and the music was more bucolic, dubby, and positive, I would have people come into the room sometime during a set and serve champagne at the back of the room. Just to the people who are at the back though, an olive branch to the people who are “not participating” in a traditional sense. It’s anti-rock… like if a guitarist instead of doing a solo, got down and tied his shoe. Doing the banal thing instead of the epic is what I think about for performances.