http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3432/artsbooks/5515/crude_effective.html...
Outside the moveable but reassuring guidelines of genre and tradition – perhaps especially in the white-guy tradition that likes to think it’s always about boldly going beyond them – choice paralysis and worse confront the musician who takes seriously the possibility that anything goes. Self-conscious experimentation collapses easily into convention: clownish genre hybrids, or genre fare in thin disguise (self-important club music, conspicuously).
There are good reasons to hesitate to use that awkward word “experimental” to describe Matt Middleton’s music, then, but it is hard to know where else to start. Precisely, the possible horror of “anything goes” – confronted by staring past the obvious options into the giddying abyss of everything that music could be – is something he gives the impression of having successfully lived through.
Outside his band projects (the main one being the Aesthetics, with releases on US labels Mental Telemetry and Ecstatic Peace), Matt Middleton is Crude (once briefly on Flying Nun). His first recordings in this name were teenage DIY indie rock (as a drummer/singer/guitarist) 12 years ago. His exposure to a wider world of recorded music saw him take on two main, depthless areas of further musical possibility: free jazz (learning clarinet and saxophone) and absolute sound and noise (experimenting with synthesisers and recording gear).
Combining sound-as-sound abstraction with a rock’n’roll entertainment imperative, it’s through these means (guitar, saxophone, noise, rhythm) that Crude has found its own discernable parameters, from song-like sweetness to its most bleakly formless variations. Most of all, concerted practice has shaped the chaos. Rather than conceptual whims, Crude ideas have been hammered out in hours and years of playing and editing. Alongside single disc albums and various free downloads, the website he launched last year to consolidate the promotion and distribution of his recordings (www.crude.co.nz) offers Complete: the complete works of Crude from 1994-2005, no fewer than 64 albums encoded onto one DVD-R disc; a tally that indicates the scale of the restless energy he’s sustained.
The discs listed below are a selection of highlights that gives an idea of the range of ideas Crude works with: an intro scream announces that we’re live in “nine-teen-nine-tee-sev-en!” and a sonic impasto of overloaded levels conveys an instant hit of manic punk-rock energy. “Market Crash” on Crude Live is driven by great drumming, screams and squealing sax, giving way to a twangy staccato guitar part, all buried in a beautiful blur and faded out before anything fumbles. By contrast, Sax Serpentine Remix opens with a series of noise atmospheres, like machine-age fanfares. Beat-locked “tekno” forms another strand. The constants are room for accident and old-school instrumental feel. Even at its most synthetic, the music is allowed to have a life of its own.
Partly responsible for the way that today any conceivable sound experience can be put up for the listener’s consideration, long before complex sound manipulations became the stuff of free shareware, the Italian Futurist Luigi Rossolo invented machines that would produce rattles, booms, whistles, whispers and screams. His early-20th-century intonorumori, noise-intoners, were not innovation for the sake of it, but to help him make music that was about the world as he experienced it, the sounds of the street. Another way that Crude avoids empty musical novelty recalls this early modernist ambition to make music about the way things are.
Through a range of associations, from titling to direct aural references, an information aesthetic preoccupies recent works like The Gel. Evoking messages racing through short-wave static, the sound of the political, technological world around us, the background noise of the world’s stock markets and surveillance systems is suggested. Before it risks suggesting a cheesy Matrix/Neuromancer empowerment fantasy, though, we’re brought back to what sounds more like someone repeatedly knocking their head against a tape recorder, microphone-in-the-wind bumps. This again reshapes into a pattern like a commercial dance-music track and – before it gets too predictable – collapses into an equally lovely grind and whisper, an angelic chattering whirr.
CRUDE LIVE, Crude (Artless Intent).
SAX SERPENTINE REMIX, Crude (Artless Intent).BEST OF TEKNO, Matthew Middleton (Artless Intent Tek).
THE MINE, Crude (Artless Intent Techno).
THE GEL, Matthew Middleton (Artless Intent Abstracts).