Matthewdavid - Mycelium Music (Leaving Records, April 28 2023)

[toaoaoad]

The latest from Matthewdavid. Almost missed this. Very textural, mostly beatless, psychedelic, gorgeous. Based on experiences with psychedelic mushrooms.

There's a montly-subscription to LEAVING RECORDS option that includes a massive slab of back catalogue and access to everything new they release. I was really into their stuff about ten years ago and feeling a big revival coming. Fantastic label, and MD always delivers.

Spoiler

From bc:

 

"The Mycelium is a vast, subterranean fungal network, through which plant-life, and, by extension, all living beings communicate. Individual mycelia are purported to be the largest organic entities on the planet. However, these networks simultaneously distort and disrupt our pre-existing understanding of individual, discrete organisms. Rather, the mycelium has emerged as empirical proof of longstanding “cliches” about nature and being: namely, that all life is interconnected; that we, as human animals, are porous — indebted to the very earth we tread.


Having emerged as a luminary of the Los Angeles Beat Scene, MatthewDavid immersed himself for several years in the rich, neglected, and all-too-often-derided archive of New Age sound/culture, stewarding a kind of New New Age sensibility into being. Mycelium Music constitutes a synthesis of these aesthetics, an alchemical marriage of sorts, in which the digital and the organic, the earthen and the aethereal, the bloom and the rot all collide and coexist.


How might the Mycelium sing? Where other sound artists might be tempted to capture the phenomena, reaching for a field recorder, MatthewDavid responds with a succinct, impressionistic, and diaristic suite of “songs” (although, as with the mycelium itself, one cannot easily distinguish where one song/organism ends and another begins).


Norns, Mycelium Music’s opening track, is named, appropriately, after the script-based, open-source instrument with which much of the record was composed. Allowing for both improvisation and accident, the Norns (whose online DIY community MatthewDavid has long supported) has here been utilized to produce generative music in multiple senses: autosynthetic, yes, but also, music that sounds like cyclical generation and decay. Sonically rendered, Mycelium Music conjures a familiar form of the uncanny, not dissimilar to time-lapse photography — a single toadstool stalk bursts from the ground, blooms, then swiftly dies away.


And of course it is beautifully textural. And of course there are moments and hits here to thrill the old heads. But what really does strike one, on first listen, is that the record is a product of serious contemplation on the meaning, the problems, and the promises of interdependence. Having started a family, having lost biological and chosen parents, having struggled with aging and embodiment, having launched a record label and cultivated (against all the usual odds and incentives) an enriching and expanding community of musicians, artists, and enthusiasts, MatthewDavid’s fingernails are pretty damn caked with the soil of life. Sifting through these experiences, Mycelium Music is a humble offering that eschews the ego of the DJ/Producer myth. It is a record predicated upon careful attention. And, to paraphrase Simone Weil, attention is a form of prayer."

-Emmett Shoemaker, May 7th 2022 3:08pm

 

 

He also put out "On Mushrooms" earlier this year

Spoiler

From bc:

"Leaving Records founderperson Matthewdavid presents the On Mushrooms EP, a primer for the Mycelium Music album to be released Q2 2023. Both works are expressed from the same ecosystem, cut from the same cloth.

The following is a listening experience testimonial written by Matt Baldwin - esteemed Californian guitarist, writer, and psychotherapist trained in psychedelic psychotherapy.

— — —

“When you go out for mushrooms in the hills of California there is an experience in which you wander for hours, scanning low until your eyes are fatigued and then suddenly there is a break in the chaparral and a cluster of immaculate King Boletes appears before you, posed with an almost hieratic intensity. If you pay close attention to that moment of perception, it is almost always accompanied by a telepathic whispering voice that says:


Oh hello, we’ve been waiting for you.


Dropping into the ketamine space (200 mg oral lozenge) while listening to Matthewdavid’s new music, I had a distinctly similar impression; specifically, that this music knew about me before I knew about it and that it had been waiting for very a long time to meet me - perhaps on a timescale in which a human lifetime would pass in a split second. This music had been waiting and dreaming of the opportunity to finally express its wholeness through the medium of another’s consciousness. Music is a kind of ordinary day-to-day telepathy that uses pressure waves in the air as the path to convey meaning into another person’s interior. As the waves of color-sound rippled thru me I was overwhelmed with a very clear message about deep interconnection that formulated itself in exactly these words:


We spend most of our time pretending that we are not the same person.


The overlapping circles of our communities lie before us as a radiant living mandala.


All we ask is that you acknowledge what you have felt here and promise never to forget."

 

[toaoaoad]

In case anyone was wondering, these are really good