Matthew Dear: Interview

Techno kingpin Matthew Dear first perked ears in 2003 with Leave Luck to Heaven, a funky debut dance record brimming with skipping clicks, cuts and enough introspection to even get furrow-browed indie rockers out shaking a leg. After releasing a slew of club-conquering techno singles under aliases like Audion and Jabberjaw, Dear returned this month with Asa Breed, an infectious collection of dark pop and brooding folk that's sure to earn him even more fans. Blender.com recently caught up with the affable beat-slinger to talk about his new album.

Asa Breed feels more vocals-driven than your last, Leave Luck to Heaven.
I've always made weird experimental pop music. I've been writing songs with words since I was about 15 years old, messing around in the basement or playing guitar and writing songs about, you know, long-lost girlfriends [laughs]. Electronic music wasn't my first start, but it did give me my first outlet to produce music on a global scale. So to write vocal-driven electronic music has just been a natural transition for me.

When you wrote the first single, "Deserter," did you feel pressured to pen a pop hit?
No, not at all. "Deserter" is the oldest song on the album. I wrote it three years ago, while I was living in a little university house just delivering pizzas and partying and whatever. I hadn't really done a lot of things that I sing about on the song, so I was warning myself of what was to come, trying to not get burnt out and hoping that I would have a chance to be proud.

Did you play everything on the record?
Yeah, I pretty much played everything except for the bass track and the guitar track on "Elementary Lover," that was done by my labelmates Mobius Band. You know, I'm not the best guitar player; I can't belt out riffs or jams. A lot of what I do is from the production perspective; I push record and I play a number of weird instruments, and then I'll go back and reedit so it sounds like I can actually play [laughs]!

Despite the record's cohesiveness, it still feels very diverse, especially for an electronic album. Where do these different sounds stem from?
I'm heavily influenced by the artists I listen to, but my sound also just reflects different periods of my life. With the poppier stuff, for instance, I'll be listening to more Talking Heads or even Arthur Russell. During other periods over the past three years I was listening to a lot of blues and folk by artists like John Kline and Lightnin' Hopkins. Really, I think tracks just reflect what I was particularly into during a specific period of production. But a lot of people are shocked to hear that I like down-south-street-edge basics, folk music.

Well, that makes sense, being that you were born in Texas. However, you moved to Michigan as a teenager. How soon did Detroit techno take a hold of you?
Not for a while. I moved to Michigan in '95 as a teenager, and my listening tastes shifted from rock radio to the R&B, hip-hop, soul and funk coming out of Detroit. I even started making random little hip-hop tunes for some of my friends. I thought I could make hip-hop, and they thought they could rap. But I didn't go to any techno clubs until '99, so it took four years for me to attend my first big actual "rave" — a warehouse party in Detroit. I had liked electronic music, but I didn't know about the whole underground movement of DJs and global techno tracks. That first party was a big awakening for me, seeing the whole system in action: the DJ, the people, the speakers. It all just clicked, and that's when I really started to focus on making 12-inch based dance music.

You met Ghostly International label head Sam Valenti IV while you were both students at the University of Michigan. Did Detroit techno have a hold on students or was it still a fringe sound/scene?
No, it was definitely still a fringe thing, but some house parties played techno. When Sam was a freshman, he came to this house party when I was playing and introduced himself. He told me he had a dream of starting a label. He really liked the music I was playing, and we just hit it off and became really good friends. I became the first artist on Ghostly's roster.

Has it been fun to remain part of Ghostly's indie family?
Yeah, I don't think I could have done this album if I didn't have as open a relationship with Sam as I do now, because he's seen everything that I've made. From the very beginning, I was showing him this weird other half of my production, something that wasn't necessarily techno, and he was always very supportive of it. He knew there'd eventually be a right time to release it, and that time is now. If I'd shown this music to another techno label they'd probably just look at me and be like, "What are we supposed to do with this?"

Being that you're constantly on the road DJing clubs and playing gigs, is it hard to find time to write and record?
Yeah, it can be. But you know, I just find my downtime to be more productive because I'm so hungry to get back into the studio. If I've been away for a while, it only makes it that much more exciting to get back in and start working on tracks. So it can be a good thing to have that absence and that loss of productivity in that it just makes you that much more excited to get back in the studio and do it.

You'll be touring Europe this summer with a support band titled the Big Hands Show. How does being a frontman differ from spinning records in the anonymity of a DJ booth?
When you DJ in a dark club, the people in the audience just want to listen and dance. But when you have a guy onstage with a microphone, he immediately becomes somebody to stare at. It's more of a visual show, and chances are people won't dance as much. In techno, if something happens in the middle of a song, people applaud and cheer, whereas when I do more of a rock show, it's different because people just sit there with their arms crossed and stare at you. That's not a sign that they don't like it, because at the end of the song they'll clap, but it kind of changes the whole system I'm used to. It definitely took some adapting for me, but it's been fun trying to figure out what works.

Are the crowds bigger when you DJ in Europe?
Yeah, for sure. But I really appreciate the challenge of America. I like trying to turn people over to these club environments, getting more people sucked in. In Europe, clubs and techno are understood culturally, and electronic music is just part of life there. So that mentality affects how many people come to your shows, and changes the energy of your shows.

A lot of contemporary pop music is heavily influenced by electronic dance music, yet it still remains a fringe genre. Do you ever think artists like yourself will enjoy crossover appeal?
It's tough to say, because tastes are always changing. But I'm not trying to cross any genre. I'm just trying to do the same thing Brian Eno did in the '70s: taking weird electronic stuff and making it into pop music. It's nothing new; Depeche Mode did the same thing. To me, that's ambient music, techno music, with pop overtones. Hopefully it gets to the point where people just accept electronic music for what it is. I'm not trying to cross over any genres. Who knows how many people in the '80s made the transition from Depeche Mode to techno? I just want to be an artist that stands on his own two feet. People like music for music, not necessarily for the genre crossing.