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MEANS WITHOUT ENDS
Keith Molin
The Wire, May 2006
!What is this notion of 'Basque'? It's a construction,
of course.! Mattin, the laptop improvisor from
Bilbao, is taking me to task for having once labelled
him 'the Basque primitivist' in this very magazine.
!Putting the words 'Basque' and 'primitivist'
together,! he asserts, !is what the right wing in
Spain has always done: everyone who wants a Basque
nation is a mindless terrorist. And at the same time the
PNV (the Basque Nationalist Party) also tries to feed
the myth of this pure, authentic and irreducible
Basque identity.!
Nevertheless, Mattin's music has an undeniable
roughness, a lack of politeness that sets him apart
from other more hi-tech, high-concept laptoppers. He's
a contrarian, intent on going against the grain at all
times, never doing what's expected of him. His albums
can dwell on hellish noise (such as his 2004 Pink
Noise collaboration with ex-Hijokaidan vocalist
Junko) or centre on the flimsiest wisps of sound - he
has recorded with both Taku Sugimoto and Radu
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has recorded with both Taku Sugimoto and Radu
Malfatti, probably the most restrained musicians
working today. !Most of my work has to do with
the preconceptions that people might have and trying
to contradict them, trying to put a different perspective
on what can be done in a performance situation,! he
says. !I try not to make a hierarchy of sounds, I try
to deal with the instrument against the way it was
conceived. Often with computer musicians it's a
macho kind of attitude, one guy with a laptop, very
enclosed. So I try to break this by playing with the lid
closed, or with the computer off, or with just the
speakers.!
Mattin refuses to see the laptop as an abstraction, a
magic box of algorithms. For him it's a tool, an object,
which he demystifies by dealing with its very
physicality as a simple plastic construction. Not only
does he use its internal microphone to produce
feedback, moving it around in the air to vary the
signal, but he also taps the keyboard and rubs, hits and
bows the casing. I ask him if he feels these techniques
run the risk of being considered mere gimmicks.
!I'm not a virtuoso,! he insists. !The techniques
are experiments at that moment, not attempts to
develop a trademark.! In fact, it was partly through
attending a series of improvisation workshops led by
that least gimmicky of musicians Eddie Prvost that
Mattin hit upon this methodology. !His workshops
were about having the opportunity to explore your
instrument without restrictions, and not just your
instrument, you could challenge situations, break the
structures that were holding the workshop together,!
he says. He has gone on to work regularly with
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Prvost in the group Sakada, who have performed
widely and recorded several albums, most recently
Askatuta (2005).
Mattin invokes Walter Benjamin's notion of
!means without ends! in his exploration of Improv
praxis and the whole issue of intervening in the
marketplace. !Benjamin said there are two kinds of
violence, mythical violence and divine violence.
Mythical violence is the foundation of law and
reinforces and preserves the law. Divine violence goes
beyond that which can be categorised and
bureaucratized. This violence is about pure mediality,
it's not about achieving a goal or an end. And in
certain ways this can be applied to improvised music.
It's about pure mediality, not trying to consolidate any
structures.!
I ask him to define what improvisation actually means
to him in the light of these notions. !It's not a
product, it's not trying to reach a goal, it's a matter of
constant process and struggle, and trying with other
people to develop something,! he replies. !That
'something' doesn't have to fit a definition, to be
identified as a language, it's research into finding
things that interest and motivate you, or conversely
you find problematic. Things are put in place
constantly, contradictions come all the time. If a bad
sound happens, you can't reject it. It's in the
performance, it's happened. You might not be happy
with it but you have to deal with it. Maybe you make
another bad sound!! Mattin is intent on applying
these ideas consistently, across the creative and
logistical aspects of his practice. For some time now
he has limited himself to working with free software,
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he has limited himself to working with free software,
because the collaborative nature of its development
and distribution reflects that of the improvising
collective and his anarchist principles. He also labels
his output as anti-copyright, and negotiates with the
various labels that release his work to be able to make
it available for free download on his website.
Mattin has a slew of releases imminent, including
superb duo albums with trumpeter Axel Drner,
Birchville Cat Motel man Campbell Kneale and a
further meeting with Radu Malfatti. Possibly the most
interesting development is his move into the rawest,
most ragged rock music with his Song Book series and
his group Billy Bao. I ask him if there's some satirical
intent behind these projects, cocking a snook at the
singer-songwriter boom and the continuing
commodification of punk rock. He denies that either
project is a joke, though he concedes that there's an
element of absurdity involved. !I describe Song
Book as me doing the cheapest Lou Reed that I can,!
he grins. !I mean Lou Reed has made some bad
records, but I'm sure I've managed to make much
worse. What I'm trying to do is use improvisation as a
way of exposing structural and ideological clichs
of rock music, and in turn use song structures to
demystify the so called spontaneous freedom of
improvisation. My lack of great singing and playing
ability adds a lot to making it sound not quite right,
which really fits the recording process - straight into
the internal microphone of a computer.!
While the Song Book releases sound almost wilfully
shaky, Billy Bao are a monstrously exciting noise
combo, particularly on the Auxilio album, recorded in
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front of an audience who sound like they can't quite
believe what they're hearing. A more different album
from the upcoming Malfatti collaboration would be
hard to imagine. !I really appreciate extremes, I'm
not into middle grounds,! asserts Mattin. !I like
testing people's reactions and even testing the speakers
when the noise gets very physical. For me that's very
liberating, noise free of rhythm and structure, the
things other music has. With noise everything can
have a place. But at the same time I remember getting
the first Bernhard G"nter record and thinking, wow,
this is really something. This is an extreme exploration
into a different territory. It can be equally interesting
to work with that kind of perception. I'm a binary kind
of guy.!
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