‘New Topographics’ the debut album from Brooklyn-based percussionist Matt Evans that was written and recorded in December 2018 during a month-long artist residency program at Brooklyn art space, Pioneer Works. Throughout the project, Evans dives into possible musical representations of the feeling and experience of “hyperobjects”— defined by Timothy Morton as, “objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and the internet.”
Ahead of the album release, Evans has shared a video for Spinning Blossoms featuring an array of transposed images that shift with the abstract and hypnotic soundscape.
With the video is an in-depth look behind the images and Evans’ thought process. Watch it here and learn more below.
“In the video for ‘Spinning Blossoms’, Matt, who scored this song and video, performs the various percussive and melodic loops that steady the rhythm of the song, while simultaneously falling out of sync with the actual performance of sound. Mel, the video’s choreographer, performs in another form of abyss, an empty office supply warehouse overflowing with detritus of corporate America. Through video collage I wanted to show the subjectivity of all camera framing: Mel and Matt aren’t necessarily two different characters, but two sides of the same coin. Their performances have an in-the-moment energy that can be found falling in and out of rhythm with the mundane and in search for an escape of imagination. Their movements align at times and their universes finally feel in sync. Perhaps all other moments are and aren’t in sync as well.
As an artist and professional video editor who works in both traditional and non-traditional documentary formats, I am fascinated by the ways in which an individual plays a role in capturing ephemeral moments, in many cases live performances and improvised movement, and uses technology to mediate the production of an archive of said moments. In this project I focused that fascination into multi-channel edits of repetitive, improvised performances from performers Mel Stancato and Matt Evans.
To me the challenge for this video was: how can an ‘object’ of performance be both repetitive and improvised in both sound and movement? How can singular experiences happening in different times and places create a simulation of linear time? Matt composed Spinning Blossoms with self-made, sample-based, loops based on an internal rhythm that Matt himself created. I decided to follow that same framework.”
‘New Topographics’ by Matt Evans is due out April 17 through Whatever’s Clever records.