Artist of the Week: Matthew Dear

Hometown: Detroit, Mich.
Fun Fact: Dear’s third album, Asa Breed, is named after a minor character from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, though Dear says there is no thematic connection. "I was looking for a title, and both words were capitalized because it was his name, and it really looked good and immediately jumped off the page.”
Why He's Worth Watching: Dear creates sophisticated, resonant electronic music with a strong human presence.
For Fans Of: Brian Eno, Talking Heads, The Postal Service

World-famous DJ and producer Matthew Dear sees the distinction between vocals and music as an artificial one. As False, Jabberjaw, and especially Audion, Dear has released popular twelve-minute instrumental-dance tracks and critically-lauded remixes. But in the work he does under his own name, including his just-released third album, Asa Breed, Dear writes lyrics and deploys them with his own voice in an effort to expand the accepted notions of electronic music. Still, he is a producer at heart.

“I treat the voice like it’s an instrument in and of itself, almost like a synthesizer or something,” Dear says. This notion helps bridge the rift of sorts between the instrumental minimalism of Audion and the expansive warmth of the work made under his given name. On Asa Breed, just as on his other Matthew Dear albums, he is simply expanding his range of samples.

The lyrics on Asa Breed are both elusive and resonant. Although Dear avoids specificity (“I like there to be absolutely no meaning to a certain extent,” he says.), his words are ultimately generous and democratic, allowing for multiple interpretations. “I like thinking that each listener can kind of create their own world or story with the words that I tell,” he explains.

Asa Breed is a warm record, but one that is still adventurous and experimental. Aside from the Mobius Band’s contributions on “Elementary Lover,” the record is a solo album in the truest sense, though Dear is far more modest. “A lot of it is only my music—I’m not sampling a lot of external music,” he says. “It’s really just me in the studio messing around with various noisemakers and guitars and whatnot.” Dear’s interests and repertoire are wide-ranging, so the furious “Elementary Lover,” which is indebted to Afrobeat, can comfortably coexist with “Give Me More,” which is slow and large, like a challenging Air song.

Surprisingly, the most unconventional element of Asa Breed is the acoustic guitar. Dear lives in Detroit currently, but grew up in Texas, a state that left a strong musical impression on him, especially since his father was a folk musician. Indicative of this upbringing is the rough, unpolished acoustic guitar on “Vine to Vine,” the album's languid final track. Revelatory in the context of so much clean precision, it just goes to show how Dear's songwriting ability is expanding. Fresh and immediate, Asa Breed is much like the crisp sensation of new strings being strummed. “It was the first instrument I learned how to play,” Dear says of the acoustic guitar. “It’s always been sacred to me, and growing up in Texas, you get that whole songwriter approach to things.”