Lux Collapsing, again...
A reissued CD title, some rambling, and a few bits of news at the bottom.
Hello! Nice to see you and thanks for popping by.
Colorado has dramatically swung into Spring, a season of vivid skies and huge weather fluctuations. Mostly this year it is just hot and dry. I have been busy getting my starter trays full of baby tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and tons of herbs. Excited for this gardening season and our soon-to-be-built green house (more on that in a month or three). Hoping for late spring snow and lots of rain, please.
This post is kind of an advertisement. I am starting a slow and non-methodical reissuing of some of my back catalog on very cost-accessible CD editions.
I love CDs: they are affordable, they sound awesome, they are easy to ship, they are a design object that is both refined and also approachable. Low stakes, so far as physical media goes.
I have lots of older material in my back catalog that I have chosen to keep offline; I think this is one of the things we as artists/musicians in the 2020s have the privilege of doing as an act of both resistance and also self-curation. Saying “No” is part of my practice. I don’t think it serves me, you, or the material to make sure every album ever is on bandcamp or streaming.
If you fish through my discogs page you will see a litany of short-run releases, digital only experiments, and other random musical ephemera that is… not accessible now. I like it that way. Some of it is on SoulSeek; you have my blessing to download it there if you feel comfortable navigating that platform. Every artist is obviously allowed to paint their house as they see fit and share as much or as little as they want, and I’ve found that keeping select things mostly on my own archival hard drive is a nice way for me to provide you, “the audience,” with a kind of specificity. Towards that specificity…
Today I am announcing a reissue CD edition of my 2012 album Lux Collapsing on a new and very low-stakes self-publishing imprint, PM Enterprise.
The notion isn’t “Matt started a new label,” no, far from that…but more “Matt puts some of his own stuff out sometimes and that imprint needs a name.” Hence: PM Enterprise. The PM stands for “Physical Media” but also “Post Meridian.” I am doing this because it is my job to manage my back catalog for the most part, and it felt right to start here. There isn’t a website or specific bandcamp… it isn’t “a label” so much as just a way to casually keep track of things archivally.
I like how Lux Collapsing sits in my discography, and I think having a new CD version of the album feels nice in the framework of that specificity I aim for.
Some rambling about Lux Collapsing:
This album was originally issued on Patient Sounds as a cassette edition of 50 homedubbed tapes in 2012. I also did some lathe cut editions with Meep Records… a microscopic run really. Later, for a five year anniversary, I re-released Lux Collapsing on a double-loaded cassette where one side was Lux and the other had the album Camouflage Repertoire (maybe I will reissue Camouflage Repertoire eventually too…). Both were from the same era, and got a 5 year pro-dubbed treatment.
For Lux, it was 2012 and I was becoming very interested in plunderphonics and electro acoustics and the ability to take a tiny slice of sound from an analog recording (usually from a record player plugged into my DAW) and explode it into a billion shimmering digital pieces. I wanted to make something that felt like a “Western” but also sort of informed by abstraction, impressionism, atmosphere before subjects. I wasn’t super familiar with the terms then, but it was Hauntilogical for sure. Something about a place in a memory, but pushing that place to the borders of its recognition. “Something about light in the West” has always been the tagline for this one in my mind. I had spent years working in Ableton (I still work in Ableton), but with this album, I really leaned into the DAW as a sandbox rather than a gridded system. I became enamored with the Simpler instrument in Ableton; a sampler that is impossibly precise in ways, and also allowed to be incredibly random or even clumsy in ways too. I was learning as I went, failing a lot, and most of all just having fun exploring sound. I would do anything to get back into these production files, but they disappeared forever when an external hard drive burned out. BACK UP YOUR FILES, KIDS.
After building some songs and feeling confident in how the album was standing, I asked some friends to come over and record parts. I had been in bands for a long time before this, but this was a new thing for me in my solo practice, and it felt right. I would go on to do a string of super collaborator-centric projects under the M. Sage umbrella. That all started here…
For this one, Marti and Aaron, both excellent guitarists, came over and played lovely parts buried in their own unique pedal magic. I remember there being an EHQ POG at the session. A rare thing but here is a photo from that day, of Marti in that old studio bedroom.
Allison Sheldon plays cello throughout the album; they’d later play prominently on A Singular Continent; their playing on that album shaped its sound immensely. Also, Chris Jusell plays a lot on Lux Collapsing, and I think this is where our musical friendship started; he’d go on to be on A Singular Continent, Catch a Blessing, and The Wind of Things. Also, duh, he is in Fuubutsushi.
Also, Lynette, my partner, plays flute on this album. We’d been dating for about two years at this point, but she finally accepted my offer to set up the DAW to record and leave the room while she did her takes. Her flute playing moments are some of my favorites in the whole album.
Now, looking back on it, it is interesting to see how some of these themes and motifs have evolved, grown, or disappeared. In some ways I feel like Lux Collapsing is a distant cousin of Tender / Wading. I also think Lux was the precursor to A Singular Continent in that everything I learned making Lux came into full development on Continent. Fourteen years is a very long time for a person, but not very long for a place. All to say, after Tender / Wading came out, I revisited Lux and enjoyed holding them next to one another. They are dramatically different, but I think they telegraph a mutual interest in the terrain and atmospheres.
Snag a CD from my bandcamp if you so see fit. I love mailing goodies and will include mysteries in your packages.
Also, I made a few new bumperstickers and posted them for sale on my bandcamp.
Here is a drill down of some news items, events, and other stuff.
I put out a digital “super single” extended version of a song from Tender / Wading with RVNG intl. My friend told me he worked for three hours in his flower garden listening to it on loop, which is the most resoundingly complimentary thing I could hope for.
Onestraw, the event group coop I am part of, is hosting Sandy Ewen on April 10th. The show is at Leon Gallery in Denver. Doors at 7! Get your tickets in person (cash or venmo)
Onestraw also started a substack, give it a follow!
I made an album with Chaz Prymek called Shelter that is coming out April 11th. Preorder it from AKP recordings.
Fuubutsushi is playing a show as a trio on May 8th at 2220 Arts and Archive in Los Angeles!!!!! Also, I am playing a duo set with Chaz Prymek. Patrick Shiroishi is playing with his trio with Dave Harrington and Max Jaffe too. A whopper. Get tickets at that link up there! Thanks to Pehrspace, KCRW and AKP Recordings!
Chaz and I are also opening for Windy and Carl at one of their two shows in Colorado on May 16th and 17th, also put on by Onestraw with collaboration from Ghost Canyon Fest. Get tix for one or both of those shows here.
I think that’s all!!
Thank you!
For now, from the Tall Grass.
-Matt