Matt Weston
This Is Broken
USA 7272MUSIC #16 VINYL LP (2023)
American one-musician-orchestra Weston known over time for his feisty attitude and go-it-alone approach to making music, composing and performing everything himself with a decidedly non-collaborative stance.
Previous outings have revealed his dark and pessimistic take on modern society, especially American society, but on today’s single LP he seems to surrendered even more to the black clouds of despair, not even showing any signs of struggling. On the long A-side I’d say it’s all-acoustic, his attempt to reincarnate the works of Japanese improvising group Taj-Mahal Travellers according to his own lights and on his own terms, electing to play in a vast abandoned warehouse and make sounds by dragging furniture across the dusty floor, and perhaps wailing into a traffic cone he found out on the street. While this may seem slightly less jolting and exciting than other large-scale works where he’s taken on the shell of a building (muttering “it’s you or me” under his breath) and emerged with paranoid and noirish streaked canvasses, the starkness of this one is growing on me. All that natural echo puts us at one remove from the source. We might be witnessing an unsupervised torture session by a CIA grunt. Or Yoshi Wada in his empty swimming pool, of which this is somewhat reminiscent. The dimensions of the space open up for us, and quickly close down again too. Where the Taj-Mahal Travellers needed seven restrained Japanese fellows to get to a similar place, Weston is determined to show he doesn’t need any help….the outtakes from the session record him wheeling a 25-foot ladder into place so he could scale up to a remote balcony in the warehouse. It did not end well. The name of this ambigunero is ‘You have to question the validity of your sneer’, which could be anything from a stab found on social media to a carefully-worded dig at the blasé post-modernists that thrive in New York City, whom Weston probably regards as The Enemy.
The shorter B-side is more accessible, but only because it’s enriched with 12 kettles of near-brutal electronic sound. It’s not especially noisy electric buzz and burr, but it’s very full-on and very insistent. Once again we seem to be inside an enclosed space and this alien metallic presence just won’t go away, pulling us into its evil orbit. At times it appears to be attempting to reverse time, or disrupt the laws of gravity. Given that album art concentrates on human hands turning a knob on your hifi (front) or attempting to flick a light switch, the true poignant meaning of “This Is Broken” might refer to a gradual breakdown in domestic arrangements, starting with a cut-off of utilities, or a general outbreak of unpredictable behaviours among everything in the home – refrigerator, cooker, and toaster. No use in asking Weston if he thinks “society” is broken, too; he’s aiming to illustrate his thesis through tangible realities, not through grand abstractions. Moments of this B-side – ‘Half-Suburban Waltz’ it’s called – succeed in generating an increasing sense of alarm as the music increases in pitch and intensity. Very good.
Well, this piece has been the result of a very creative process where the composer rewrote and destroyed his original scores several times over; I regard this as a very healthy way to work, and I wish more artists would do it. Visual artists are often afraid to do it, because they’re afraid to lose all the lovely work they’ve done on a drawing or painting; but if they sacrificed boldly, they would find it a transformative learning experience, and the art would be so much better. Weston confirms “the songs’ final realisations are a far cry from their origins” on this release, and it’s true to say here are two monstrinos that have assumed a life of their own, almost crawling off the vinyl to slurp off our faces. In terms of technical input, it seems to have involved “fully immersive initiatives and philosophies” and “a new series of orchestral variables”, showing once again that boldly throwing everything into the melting pot – or breaking up your own statues before gluing the pieces back together in a new order – has served our man well. From Dec 2023.