'God is a DJ' / MTLDA [Interview]
Naarm label Girl On Road is excited to announce Matilda’s debut EP as MTLDA, God is a DJ. This entrancing, six track EP explores the ritualistic nature of club music and the DJ role in creating moments of dance floor transcendence.
Each track on God is a DJ was recorded live and in a single take, with effects added sparingly in post-production—with inconstant kicks, they feature up to four layers of vocal samples pitched up or down. These vocal samples are repeated continuously creating a mesmerizing, occasionally discordant, but undeniably angelic chant-like sound.
The first song on the EP is named ‘Above the Clouds’ as that is where MTLDA imagines it takes place. Interestingly, ‘Above the Clouds’ marks the desired destination, and every following track is a point on the ascension into the sky. Matilda says, “the overarching ethos in the composition is Simple as Sacred” —accordingly, ‘Above the Clouds’ is the simplest song on the EP—consisting of a sparser arrangement of vocal samples and less modulation. As the EP progresses however the songs become more manipulated and urgent, as though this ascent is imperative.
Matilda’s EP is looking to communicate the tremendous value in slowing down and not over complicating things. Gladys and Jill Milroy wrote that “the British valued the wheel, but they did not value its connection to the tree.” Their chapter in Heartsick for Country asks: have we, in the pursuit of leisure and efficiency, forgotten ourselves and misplaced what is sacred? And if so, how can we reconnect with ourselves and our spirituality? Technology professes to make our lives easier but seems often to only make things endlessly more complicated. ‘The invention of the wheel is tied inexorably to the progress of Western civilisation, but at the heart of the wheel, was the death of the tree’. It seems more and more we are moving away from simple.
The dance floor has the ability to connect us to these older, simpler things. In God is a DJ, Matilda explores the primordial, ritualistic impulses of which dance music culture is only the latest expression. She says, “When you're DJing and running parties, sometimes you find yourself asking what it's all about, and I guess, as we enter into societies that are less defined by religion … I think people find religion and ritual in the club and that's why they go weekly—that's their connecting tissue to other people”.
David Mancuso, host of the groundbreaking Loft parties in his 1970s New York apartment, dubbed by Jeremy Gilbert ‘the psychedelic godfather of Disco (and so of all modern dance cultures)’, once said he often felt that all parties were just local expressions of the ‘one big party’ taking place everywhere, all the time, and which occasionally we manage to tune into.
A concept not so different from Eris Drew’s philosophy of the Motherbeat—what Sybil Gillespie, in her Resident Advisor interview with Eris Drew, describes as ‘an ancient healing technology embedded in all music’. Matilda, who has taken a keen interested in the Motherbeat the last few years, says Eris Drew has been incredibly influential in the way she thinks about music and DJing.
“When Eris DJs she plays songs which create space and air in the set—something beatless and euphoric. And hearing that is definitely something that really lasted with me. When you create these moments there is this opening up which happens—this is something that I do in all my sets now. You can be going pretty hard, and it is good to take people out of that trance state for a second—it helps people become aware of themselves again, and from that place of awareness you can take people deeper.
While God is a DJ is not what Matilda solely plays when she is DJing, I can see how these tracks have been designed for these euphoric, airy moments during a techno set.
Drawing from her digital media design degree, Matilda has recorded God is a DJ using a Pure Data patch mapped to a DJM-500 mixer. A way of customizing the mixer to have different live capabilities—what Matilda calls “hacking the mixer”. Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language designed for musicians and digital artists which Matilda described as similar to Ableton but without the fancy interface. You can download the Pure Data patch to hack your own mixer via opensource platform, Github here.
“When you are making music with Pure Data you are seeing how it is actually working behind the scenes … rather than just dragging and dropping instruments. In Pure Data if something isn’t connecting the right way it simply won’t work, so you need to be really intentional about what you’re connecting”
It seems that as technology advances, and hardware and software starts to take on the brunt of the load, that people are required to think less. Or as B(if)tek aptly put it in their 2000 hit ‘Machine Work’, “machines can do the work, so that people have time to think”, and then later in the song, “people can do the work, so machines have time to think”.
It seems everywhere in the modern world barriers are being erected between us and the thing we are interacting with.
“In club environments, people’s personal responsibility is taken away from them to an extent—I think that's when people are less responsible with drugs and alcohol, because they're in this place that they perceived to be safe … There is more at stake at a rave because there are OH&S concerns, and there is the potential for them to be shut down”.
The barriers in a club, put in place for our protection and benefit, are in some ways not so dissimilar from the sleek Ableton interface—both rob us of a certain degree of personal responsibility. One possible suggestion found in this EP is that we remove as many of these barriers as possible, until we are left with what is both simple and sacred.
Whether listened to in the quiet of our bedrooms or during a euphoric dance floor experience, this EP will help us to realise ourselves and our participation in this one big party taking place everywhere all the time, in doing so we can connect the Motherbeat and the God who dances. As Jeremy Gilbert says, “to acknowledge the God who dances is to acknowledge them all”.
Stay up to date with MTLDA on SoundCloud and Instagram.
Words by Jack Long (@patrick.di_henning)
Photos by Caitlin Wong (@c8tleen)
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