“The dense medium’s mine,” sings Emperor X on “Raytracer,” a just-under-two-minute slightly experimental pop splinter that manages, partly because of its succinctness, to joyfully confound the listener by pairing an intricate, hummable melody with many psychiatric sessions’ worth of seemingly shifting topics (is it about romance? Self-esteem? Math? All of the above? I don’t know). Several of the song’s lyrics lead with the first half of a question—“Did you ever?”—but the different ways it ends each time (“get help with the problems or exercise?” “make out on Capitol steps with an AK-47-wielding Marxist girl?”) offer no obvious outs. It’s as self-involved and intellectual as it is obtusely grand (the song appears on a record titled Central Hug / Friendarmy / Fractaldunes).
It’s clear that this dense medium is, in fact, Emperor X’s—I’m just not clear which medium he’s talking about, and the Emp—the musical alter-ego of Florida-bred, Brooklyn-based Chad Matheny—seems to prefer continually re-thinking as many of those mediums as possible, from live-show instrumentation to how and why to release records.
In a performance two weeks ago at avant/indie Lower East Side venue Cake Shop, I watched Matheny, who records and plays out solo under the Emperor X moniker, strum a charmingly small six-string acoustic as pedal-delayed tones pouring out of his tiny amp. “It’s a guitar called a First Act,” he explained to me later. “They’re made for children. I’ve gone through three at this point.” Matheny started using them in mid-2006. They break easily, but another can be gotten for $30. I buy them because they are portable, cheap and have character.”
Taking things a step further, Matheny had a lo-fi microphone feeding the guitar’s output into a tape-recording 4-track at his feet. Occasionally he would crouch, cease recording and reverse the tape, playing backward what had just been recorded, strumming and howling out over the top, his mouth often extremely wide open, singing out “Shut up!” repeatedly or supporting the home team with a “Go panthers!”
Matheny’s vocal style may be the most conventional aspect of his performance, as he can genuinely give a full-diaphragm “oomph” to a line like “strength of signal/ undiminished,” from the transcendent “Spieltier,” easily holding out long syllables at the end of each line if he likes. But just as easily, he might use his mildly nasal head voice, spill everything out of his mouth off-mic or hide his vox underneath a budget distortion pedal.
On the recording side, Matheny is currently working on a series of releases themed after an odd place he (for reasons potentially coincidental or unknowable) has a mysterious connection to: “I’d been marooned in Blythe, California”—a city of 20,000 in the southern half of the state, not too far from the border—“not once, but twice on tour,” he says. “Once in a wreck, and again about a year later with car trouble. I was obsessed with the town, and wanted to do something with it.”
When label Burnt Toast asked Matheny to make a one-sided piece of vinyl with some kind of art on the reverse surface, he conceived of The Blythe Archives, each volume of which has a lost half waiting to be un-archived in the art side’s clues. “I wrote GPS coordinates in an etching,” he explained of Blythe’s already released first volume, “and hoped someone found it.”
Concerned that things might go awry with the only physically existing copy of side two waiting patiently in a G-train station, Matheny designed it so that “when someone found the object containing the music on the lost side, it would have instructions on a card that would tell the finder how to unlock mp3s of the music on the Internet and allow everyone to download them. I’m in the middle of releasing a bunch of volumes of music like this.” The message really is the medium.
It’s astounding, indeed, that Matheny is comfortable releasing such personal music—things that I feel I can effortlessly appreciate but will perhaps never understand like he does, in so user-dependent a manner. Like many poets, Emperor X is speaking an intensely personal language; but he’s more than willing to recite it to as many as will listen. It’s not certain that listeners will take away exactly what Matheny had in mind; but whatever an audience gathers, expect the strength of the signal to be undiminished.
Emperor X plays the East River Amphitheatre on June 28, East River Amphitheater, Cherry St. (at FDR Drive), ermp.org/eastriver; 2, free.
It’s clear that this dense medium is, in fact, Emperor X’s—I’m just not clear which medium he’s talking about, and the Emp—the musical alter-ego of Florida-bred, Brooklyn-based Chad Matheny—seems to prefer continually re-thinking as many of those mediums as possible, from live-show instrumentation to how and why to release records.
In a performance two weeks ago at avant/indie Lower East Side venue Cake Shop, I watched Matheny, who records and plays out solo under the Emperor X moniker, strum a charmingly small six-string acoustic as pedal-delayed tones pouring out of his tiny amp. “It’s a guitar called a First Act,” he explained to me later. “They’re made for children. I’ve gone through three at this point.” Matheny started using them in mid-2006. They break easily, but another can be gotten for $30. I buy them because they are portable, cheap and have character.”
Taking things a step further, Matheny had a lo-fi microphone feeding the guitar’s output into a tape-recording 4-track at his feet. Occasionally he would crouch, cease recording and reverse the tape, playing backward what had just been recorded, strumming and howling out over the top, his mouth often extremely wide open, singing out “Shut up!” repeatedly or supporting the home team with a “Go panthers!”
Matheny’s vocal style may be the most conventional aspect of his performance, as he can genuinely give a full-diaphragm “oomph” to a line like “strength of signal/ undiminished,” from the transcendent “Spieltier,” easily holding out long syllables at the end of each line if he likes. But just as easily, he might use his mildly nasal head voice, spill everything out of his mouth off-mic or hide his vox underneath a budget distortion pedal.
On the recording side, Matheny is currently working on a series of releases themed after an odd place he (for reasons potentially coincidental or unknowable) has a mysterious connection to: “I’d been marooned in Blythe, California”—a city of 20,000 in the southern half of the state, not too far from the border—“not once, but twice on tour,” he says. “Once in a wreck, and again about a year later with car trouble. I was obsessed with the town, and wanted to do something with it.”
When label Burnt Toast asked Matheny to make a one-sided piece of vinyl with some kind of art on the reverse surface, he conceived of The Blythe Archives, each volume of which has a lost half waiting to be un-archived in the art side’s clues. “I wrote GPS coordinates in an etching,” he explained of Blythe’s already released first volume, “and hoped someone found it.”
Concerned that things might go awry with the only physically existing copy of side two waiting patiently in a G-train station, Matheny designed it so that “when someone found the object containing the music on the lost side, it would have instructions on a card that would tell the finder how to unlock mp3s of the music on the Internet and allow everyone to download them. I’m in the middle of releasing a bunch of volumes of music like this.” The message really is the medium.
It’s astounding, indeed, that Matheny is comfortable releasing such personal music—things that I feel I can effortlessly appreciate but will perhaps never understand like he does, in so user-dependent a manner. Like many poets, Emperor X is speaking an intensely personal language; but he’s more than willing to recite it to as many as will listen. It’s not certain that listeners will take away exactly what Matheny had in mind; but whatever an audience gathers, expect the strength of the signal to be undiminished.
Emperor X plays the East River Amphitheatre on June 28, East River Amphitheater, Cherry St. (at FDR Drive), ermp.org/eastriver; 2, free.
