“I love playing different personas, multiple different times,” Dear says. “I love being the guy that wears leather pants on stage one night and I love being just a guy who loves to play groovy dance music the next night, when I’m DJing.”
It’s the latter pursuit that brings the Detroit-bred musician (currently residing in upstate New York) back to Australia next month. He’ll join Hot Chip DJs, Henry Saiz and plenty more for the inaugural HOLEANDCORNER indoor dance event, taking place at Melbourne’s Shed 14 on June 7. Of course, a Matthew Dear DJ set isn’t going to be an exercise in inert playlist activation. No, with Dear manning the decks it promises to be a shrewdly curated experience
“I’m still playing stuff that’s totally inspired by my upbringing in Detroit, going to Detroit electronic parties,” he explains. “It’s all about the groove, it’s all about building moods and energies. That’s what I do when I DJ. I don’t play quick transitions, I’m not about crazy party records. It’s just a slow, building groove, it’s just house and techno and I just try to make people dance.”
Dear relocated from Texas to Detroit as a teenager and after discovering the city’s buzzing electronic underground, he quickly developed a flair for DJing. Although Detroit’s late-’90s scene remains a chief influence, that doesn’t mean he’s stuck in that era. “I definitely play some classics and try to go back, but I like to play a lot of new stuff. It’s dance music so I like to keep up with what’s going on.”
Dear’s diverse career output strongly intimates a seasoned music fan. And it looks like he takes the practice of listening just as seriously as creating. “I usually pick an artist and just latch onto them for a good six months to a year,” he says, “and play as much as I possibly can and dig through the archives and really try to ingest as much as possible.
“[There’s] people I can’t kick; Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan I keep coming back to, just trying to dig deeper into the rarities and the bootlegs. Then I love my Can and I love my Brian Eno. Those are the foundations, people I can’t get away from. You dig on those guys and you start to hear their influences and people they were crediting as inspirations and you can go further and deeper.”
Die-hard music fanatics don’t simply cherish the records. Rather, the transcendent nature of the performer is also infinitely fascinating. Details of the ordinary situation surrounding, for example, David Bowie’s Hunky Dory or Nas’ Illmatic won’t overcome the alternate dimension envisaged as the birthplace of totemic pop music. Even though Dear’s been a professional musician for more than a decade, he still feels awe-struck reverence for his idols.
“I love feeling that way about certain people. Like Tom Waits – what’s going on in his head? I could sit down across from Tom Waits at a dinner table or at an airport and I want to be scared out of my mind. I want to be impressed by the persona in my head. I think it’s fun to have those types of relationships with some of your favourite artists. You don’t always want them to be sharing all of their thoughts socially. I’m not going to follow Tom Waits on Twitter. I think there’s a healthy distance that we should keep.”
Dear’s constant moniker maneuvering constructs a particularly enigmatic portrait of the artist. Despite averaging at least one release per year for the last decade, he faces no dilemma conjuring new ideas.
“I’m about to make the new Audion album and I’ve got too much material,” he reveals. “Right now it’s just a matter of shortening everything and picking which stuff really works and which stuff doesn’t.”
Having had several outlets concurrently active over a number of years, determining where certain ideas appropriately belong could inevitably become blurry. “I usually turn on the machines and go and whatever comes out comes out,” Dear says. “But when it is album time I really have to focus on all things Audion. Then, my free time I spend just kind of doodling with stuff for my own weird albums.”
The rapidity of Dear’s costume changes has been slightly less frenetic in recent years. He seems like an intrinsically amorphous character, but the manifold departments of exploration mightn’t subsist forever.
“When I was younger, I had so many different aliases because I just had so much output and different styles of music that I wanted to do. Now that I’ve slowed down a bit I do question whether or not I should maybe pull the plug on all these other monikers and just do one thing and focus on that for the rest of my life. I’m happy, I have a studio, I have a house. I feel like now I could relax and do one thing and be that for the rest of my life.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
