“I’m the Matthew Dear of our generation.”
This was tweeted rather irreverently by Mathew Dear himself on the day he returned to his infamous Audion alias for its first album in a decade. It was announced in a suitably droll manner, similar to the tone often used by his studio buddy Tiga (and which also seeps its way into the slammers they produce together, like 2014’s ubiquitous anthem “Let’s Go Dancing”).
Self-deprecating as the tweet might have been, Dear has a history behind him that is actually starting to look fairly formidable: a multi-faceted artist who, in his different incarnations, has held strong in US house and techno since rising from the Michigan scene 20 years ago.
This is true whether you’re talking about the experimental pop that characterizes the music under his own name, the fevered dancefloor techno of his Audion alias, or the otherwise eclectic assortment of music he’s helped bring to the world via Ghostly International and Spectral Sound , the labels he founded alongside Sam Valenti .
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If the five artist albums he’s released as Matthew Dear represent the Dr. Jekyll of his musical subconscious—with its warmer sounds, songwriting, guitars, and his own his own gravelly, heartfelt vocals employed over the top—then the full-bodied techno of Audion represents his Mr. Hyde, where he’s able to explore the darker possibilities of the dancefloor. Dear describes it himself as a “pendulum swing” between the two polarities of a schizophrenic musical identity.
After a quick listen to Alpha, it’s clear why he’s decided to resurrect the alias for a full-length conceptual affair. From the white-knuckle tension of “Dem,” which opens the album; the tunneling drive of “There Was a Button,” which establishes its momentum; and “Destroyer” and “Timewarp,” which represent the album’s most dancefloor-charged moments; to the quirky 3am mayhem of “Sucker”; the material on Alpha represents Audion distinctly.
Feeling the Detroit Spirit
When Insomniac speaks with Dear, he’s just returned home to Ann Arbor, following one of his regular visits to nearby Detroit—this time for its annual Movement Festival .
“It’s always a good time, and it’s always good to see it just flood with all sorts of people, which makes it look like an actual socially functioning city,” he laughs.
“I wouldn’t say Detroit is necessarily like that normally, but it’s coming around, and there is a good energy, a lot of investment. It does feel like it’s finally turning back into a nightlife hotspot. There’s still a lot of social injustice, obviously, but there’s also some big-money investors in there, at least trying to make it look like a functioning commercial environment.”
Dear lived only a short drive away from Detroit after moving to Michigan as a teenager, when he discovered his calling on the dancefloor of one of the city’s warehouse parties. Detroit techno played a formative role in his artistic development, like it did for so many others, and it was this legacy that was recognized by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan when he declared the final days of May as “Detroit Techno Week,” awarding the Spirit of Detroit award to its early pioneers.
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“There’s always been this vibe in Detroit, and when you’re there, you have to respect the history, and you have to understand the people who came before you and carried the torch,” Dear says.
“It was really cool just to finally let these guys know, ‘We see what you did, and we recognize your achievements.’” he adds. “For us, they’re the founders of a genre we associate with, but on a broader scale, they’re the guys who took what was happening in Europe with acts like Kraftwerk, and some of the experimental stuff, and embodied it and made it their own. They pushed themselves to create something new in their own bubble that resonated with them, and it turned into what it is now. Would there be techno now without those guys? Who knows. There might be other incarnations. But these guys were the first to really create the future they wanted to see.”
Of course, Dear was able to develop his own strand of techno when he ascended with the new wave of acts during the 2000s, which he channeled through his Audion alias.
The Audion sound is brimming with brute intensity and that balance of high-fidelity studio work and quirky weirdness that saw his 2006 smash Mouth to Mouth become one of techno’s truly enduring anthems. Mouth to Mouth celebrated its 10th anniversary this year with a remix package featuring everyone from Jamie Jones and Boys Noize to Guy Gerber and Dubfire .
While the Audion alias never really went away—lingering at the edge of Dear’s musical subconscious to manifest in occasional singles like 2014’s “Dem Howl,” an entry in the Fabric compilation series, plus regular live shows the past few years—up until now, there were no albums, with his last full-length effort as Audion being Suckfish way back in 2005.
“I had quite a few incarnations of the alias over the past decade, but this album really just came together in the last few years,” Dear says of Alpha.
“I was trying to find a place for all of these different influences, and it really solidified and coalesced just in the past year, when things really locked in and it became apparent there was a story being told—musically, at least… with what I was trying to evoke with the machines, as well as my idea of what techno music meant to me.”
Interestingly, it was actually in the live space that Alpha was hatched, with Dear playing a limited number of live shows as Audion the past few years, where he was able to put new material under the spotlight, work it through in front of a crowd, and develop the creative process that way.
“Honestly, it was maybe three or four years ago I said, ‘I need to make an Audion album.’ I started writing tracks, and I got together a new live show, and I toured that for a year off this new music that I was making. At the same time, I think I was just testing it all and seeing what really worked live and what didn’t work. In the end, I scrapped a lot of what I thought would have been the album, and just kept going back to the drawing board and reinventing it. A lot that made it on the album, I really don’t think existed more than a year ago. It’s pretty fresh.”
Usually, an artist writes an album and then takes it on the road. Dear did it the other way around.
“Yeah,” he laughs. “It’s kind of backward, to be honest. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Toward a Ghostly Future
Dear released Alpha with Germany’s !K7 Records this time around, representing a switch from his normal approach of dropping his music on one of his own record labels. He says the opportunity to work with new people gave him “a new lease on the Audion life.”
Otherwise, though, the Ghostly International stable is as strong as ever in its 17th year, responsible for a steady flow of eclectic musical delights.
“I’ve kind of taken more of a back seat at the label over the past few years. Just last night, I was hanging out with Sam [Valenti], who’s the co-owner and operator of the label. I did a show, and he was my dinner date. We just caught up and talked about the future of the label, and what he sees going on. In the past, it’s been about that sonic diversity, never feeling like we’ve been pigeonholed in one style or format. What we’ll see is more of stuff like that, I think.”
Photos by Chris Arace
