New Topographics is an aqueous collection of drum driven, ambient adjacent, hypnotic soundscapes that radiate from a liminal zone between the physical and the digital. Following an impulse toward percussive abstraction, Matt Evans (Tigue, Bearthoven, Man Forever) collages the sounds of writing, typing, morse code and others— swirling sonic byproducts from our communication systems— with percussive improvisations and synthesized “creatures” to trace imagined landscapes in a sea of noise. Synthetics and acoustics cross currents, unifying rubbery harmonies, wandering melodies, and incidental noises into a dreamy cybernetic ecology.

New Topographics was written and recorded in December 2018 during a month long artist residency program at Brooklyn art space, Pioneer Works. The tracks are a product of a 4 week deep dive into possible musical representations of the feeling and experience of “hyperobjects”— defined by Timothy Morton as “objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and the internet.” Matt found the absurd and transcendent feeling of this complex thought paralleled in a short poem by Richard Brautigan “All watched over by machines of loving grace,” a vaguely earnest/ironic and imaginative description of a cybernetic utopian future (see also the Adam Curtis mini series of the same name). Matt experimented with recording the sound of writing the poem by hand, re-imagining it as a musical language, later recording and layering other ambient and percussive tracks in response. This became the guiding process for nearly every track on the album; translating and sonifying the Brautigan text into foreign communication systems so as to re-interact with the text as a musical voice. Sound transcriptions include a braille translation performed as a graphic score ("Full Squid"), a translation to morse code frequencies ("An Infinite Cybernetic Meadow"), a recording of typing the text on a qwerty keyboard ("Spinning Blossoms"), and translating the text into radioteletype frequencies ("Data Fog", "Ongongos"). This sonic residue is redefined as a musical subject and takes on an extramusical quality, transcending it’s residual nature, and gaining empathetic value. With these finely tuned tracks, Matt offers a meditation on our current condition and a gateway toward a refined perspective on what we leave behind in our present age.

Matt Evans is a drummer / composer who’s been passionately listening to air conditioning units for as long as he can remember. Since moving to Brooklyn in 2012, he has maintained numerous musical projects, working in cross-disciplinary contexts, playing in bands, performing with new music ensembles, and producing performances that integrate music and physicality. As a composer, his work strives to capture the inexpressible absurdity of supermassive phenomenon (e.g. “global warming” or “the internet”) with a specific interest in the power of the human individual within these circumstances. Matt performs, records and co-leads collaborative projects with Tigue, Bearthoven, Man Forever and Private Elevators while performing and recording solo material under his own name. He has released recordings with New Amsterdam Records, NNA Tapes, Thrill Jockey, Cantaloupe Music and Perfect Wave. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, he studied percussion at the Eastman School of Music and the Ohio State University before landing in New York.

Artwork by Devra Freelander “Fluorescent Anomaly” (2014)

Press

“There’s a tradition of drummers branching out from rock settings to indulge in more exploratory solo ventures. A short list of recent examples includes Kid Millions (Oneida), Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Greg Fox (Zs/Guardian Alien/Liturgy). We can now add Brooklyn based drummer/composer Matt Evans to this mini-trend.

Evans has played with underground rock bands such as Tigue, Bearthoven, and Rokenri (as well as Kid Millions’s Man Forever) but New Topographics is his first solo album. It’s an idiosyncratic exploration of percussive timbres, unusual drones and intricate rhythms, often sounding like a logical progression from the Japanese environmental music collected on Light in The Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku compilation. The album stems from Evans’s interest in hyper objects, which philosopher Timothy Morton defines as “objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity”. 

Opener “Full Squid” establishes the vibe with a hurly-burly yet introspective scenario. Evans lays down and understands drone over which polyrhythms tinkle and blorp with Rube Goldberg illogic. It’s a kinetic and microbial wonder. The title “An Infinite Cybernetic Meadow” recalls Richard Brautigan’s poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (whose ironic utopianism Evans cites as influence) with its fusion of synthetic and organic elements. Insectoid blurts fidget amid a subtropical sound field in which ominous conga hits and torpid bass spar with well-timed triangle taps. A profusion of sonic otherness prevails, proving Evans to be one of the most inventive of Jon Hassell’s growing legion of adherents. “Cold Moon” and its companion piece “New Moon” generate unsettling factory floor drones similar to This Heat’s “24 Track Loop” while overlaying it with what sounds like amplified water droplets on tupperware and other unconventional effects. 

Suffused with bizarrely tuned percussion and synths, Evans’s uniquely strange and beautiful tracks thus the listener into hyperreal yet phantasmal realms.” — Dave Segal, Wire Magainze (July 2020)

“The drummer Matt Evans is a familiar presence in New York’s contemporary classical scene. As part of the percussion trio Tigue, in which Evans also plays keyboard, he has been heard in the drone-style works of artists like Randy Gibson. In the trio known as Bearthoven, with Karl Larson on piano and Pat Swoboda on bass, you can enjoy Evans’s propulsion in compositions by Shelley Washington and others.

But Evans also plays his own music. On his most recent album, “New Topographics,” the multi-instrumentalist displays a knack for constructing classical music’s analogue of a hip-hop producer’s beat tape. A track like “Full Squid” reveals Evans’s skill in pairing contrasting elements, as sustain-rich synth figures drift patiently over nimble rhythmic patterns.

Elsewhere on the album, “Ongongos” derives energy from resonant, metallic thwacks and waves of glitchy, digital chirping; the opening of “On Dracaena” seems ready-made for some music supervisor (perhaps one working on a playfully suspenseful film or television project). Even when the melodic profile turns a bit more agitated, as in “Spinning Blossoms,” a hazy tunefulness prevails — a form of chill complexity that is particularly welcome in the sweltering summer months.” — Seth Colter Walls, New York Times (July 2020)

“For me, there’s a link between these sonic byproducts and human empathy— a gateway towards a greater conversation on what it means to live the paradox of complicitness— a guide to re-focusing how we understand the consequences of our actions by way of sound. The first step toward any significant change in our behaviour is becoming aware of the object like significance of our actions. Making this record has been a way of tuning my ears to this phenomenon. To learn the language of these object-like byproducts so as to speak the language my own way and further empathize with that which I was not previously informed. Being aware, being sensitive to that awareness, and reflecting that experience outwards. This is how we can make a shift in how we see ourselves in the world. Making this music was a way to practice understanding what I leave behind. We put up walls to function, but if we make a habit of taking them down and really looking and listening to what’s happening around us, we will have greater empathy for the people and beings we share space with. Our ability to empathize with the earth itself will grow.”

The title “New Topographics” comes from a 70's photography exhibition of the same name — a landmark moment in american landscape photography that took the visual byproducts of suburban sprawl as it's subject, 2-dimensionalizing the perspective and drawing out the abstract expression in these human-altered landscapes.