| Coin-Operated is the solo project of myself, Matt Dotson. It started around 1997 as noisy, primitive recordings of mostly bass and keyboard on a microcasette recorder. A year later I got my first 4-track recorder and was awe-struck by the endless possibilities of sound-on -sound recording offered by that little machine. I recorded constantly using bass, keyboards, microcassette recordings; anything I could find was fair game. Most of these early recordings were more concerned with creating textures than creating songs; I wanted to create a sort of audio sculpture. However, as I became more disciplined at the piano I began creating more structured work and as the world began to unfold around me I attempted to explain it through music. What resulted was a series of abstract concept pieces covering subjects from the role of musicians in modern life to a musical narrative about machine drones. This ultimately resulted in my first CD release: The Phonographer. This was essentially a self-portrait which musically conveyed all the trials and tribulations that created who I was. This CD ended a period of my life wherein I felt it necessary to attempt to explain the world via a musical magnifying glass. This also marked a end for me technically as I discarded my nearly destroyed 4-track in exchange for an 8-track recorder. At this point (around 2000) I found myself wandering back to my original territory of creating a textured environment, though this time with more of an emphasis on musical expression and improvisation. What resulted is the recently released Lost Year, which is a reflection of a difficult period of my life expressed through mostly chaotic keyboard improvisations with massive amounts of textural overdubbing. At this point my interests gradually started to shift from the analog recorder to the computer as a main means of recording. Most of my early computer work was chaotic and largely directionless until I rediscovered hip hop in the form of some old Public Enemy tapes. I had flirted with the notion of sampling before this, but hip-hop opened me up to the possibility of creating dense textures with layer upon layer of loops while simultaneously keeping it grounded enough to dance to. This helped sharpen my focus from creating a whole environment to creating fragments and layering them on top of one another. Thus, what resulted was a series of densely layered loops of my own and others music that was not only textural, it was danceable. Through the addition of an actual sampler (instead of computer-based sampling) I’ve been able to mold the sounds much more physically and I now find myself approaching what interested me in this whole music-making thing to begin with: the creation of an audio sculpture which fills both space and time. My newest release, Memory Anatomy, forms such a sculpture out of a tapestry of samples which serve to establish the elusive intangibility of memory. |
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