Fables of the Reconstruction: Matt Valentine Interview

MV+EE’s Space Homestead is the best release so far this year. It’s got everything a psych freak like me needs and loves: cozy downhome melodies spun from acoustic guitar; transcendent vocal harmonies; asymmetrical rhythms; wah-wah; slide/pedal steel; long fuzzed-out solos; some scary feedback; 4D stereo; and a plethora of ghost and starship sounds swirling all around. This week, I caught up with Matt Valentine, the MV of MV+EE, for an email chat, and he confessed that they’re a jam band. We talked quite a bit about Jerry Garcia because, for reasons that are probably better left unexplained, I recently got in touch with him and offered to send him a huge box of bootleg cassettes -- Jerry Garcia Band or Grateful Dead, his choice. He went with the JGB, and during the winter and spring months, while he and Erika Elder (the EE) were putting the finishing touches on the new record, he had those cassettes in constant rotation on the car stereo. Naturally, I wanted to know where ol’ Jer fits in with the whole MV+EE scheme. (Note: Matt’s style of writing in mostly lower caps is preserved here to maintain the MV+EE aesthetic even in the realm of the verbal.)

Why'd you go with the JGB over the Dead?

well i've heard a lotta live dead, there is something for me to love in ALL of it -> the jerry stuff is more elusive and in some ways more solid. what i really dig is hearing him stretch out and his phrasing. i can relate to the more ergonomic rig in the JGB, more real-people vibe, and somewhat tangible to my set up.

Which ones were your favorites, and why?

there are many faves, i particularly dig where he is at in the early solo stages, when he really started to get busy "solo" ('72-'73), but the late '70s -> early '80s have so many amazing shows, and there was one from '92 that blew me away. one of my desert-island ones was 7/8/76. i also dig when they launch unexpectedly on "lonesome and a long way from home," for example, in the late show at the warner theatre in D.C. - 3/18/78.

Photo: Cat Stevens

I've read interviews where you claim Garcia as a guitarist you admire but that he doesn't really influence your own playing. Why?

imagine if i named our dog jorma instead of zuma! sure, garcia is a big influence, but i try to transmute it. if i went around saying jerry was my main insp, that's all folks would rap about. garcia's and lou reed's extended solos are two major signposts for me. and then there's robbie basho. i try not to be too myopic with my playing; i've always eschewed copying because i wanted to develop my own voice; it's a choice and there are sacrifices one makes by doing it that way. i try and recycle all the sweet spots to my ears from all the players i dig, so what went into the hopper as a cardboard cowboy might come out as a lonesome cowgirl, moonlight on vermont. nothing is really "new" in music. it's like speech. there are breakthroughs with little vowels, arcane words. i try my best to secede from the banal within a very rigid structure of western tonality.

we've been a "jam band" all along. we just never came out and said it that brazenly, you dig?  all of our records have exploratory sections and we've always embraced mixed modes and improvisations, even on the studio recordings. that's a massive garcia influence right there. he is also really measured and articulate even when to lesser ears it might seem random. same is true with our music. for example "cold rain" from our "mother of thousands" double LP has a line that sounds like a long rambling solo to undisciplined ears. it's actually a lengthy phrase that i've been playing the exact same way for 10+ years! and it's still a staple in the live show, i guess it isn't finished! it's become a springboard for all sorts of inspired jams. that same record had our "cover" of "death don't have no mercy" as well – a whole side long. erika has always really been into garcia’s choice of material. the dude has a great touch. chill...but really i'm just thankful that he gave so much music, that's probably the biggest jerry influence on me right there.

You’ve called the jams on Space Homestead "covert." What do you mean? 

let's just say all the tunes can have "vegas" arrangements live. so that's the deal with what inspired "space homestead"…it's a pleasure to play the material in concert as much as it was to craft and record.

Vegas?

i guess i mean a lotta things by saying "vegas"...but really i mean how we can vamp for a long time over the changes and explore before coming back in with the next vocal verse...

If you were planning a multi-course musical meal, with Space Homestead as the main course, what other records would you have on the menu?

we'd be servin' up that woods/amps for christ split, hissteria from purling hiss, robbie basho's twilight peaks, gunn-truscinski duo’s ocean parkway, J mascis's several shades of why, and the village of spaces’ alchemy and trust … man, then we'd let it rip. 

Fables of the Reconstruction: Best of 2011

The official selection process for my year’s best list began a week before Christmas when my wife Allie took off for a weekend trip with a friend and I had the whole house to myself. I took all my 2011 records off the shelf, leaned them against my stereo cabinet in two neat piles, and proceeded to pair them off in sudden-death match-ups, the volume cranked high. The competition began with a fury as I sipped my coffee on Saturday morning: White Fence’s Is Growing Faith vs. Peaking Lights’ 936. White Fence won easily and advanced past Spectre Folk’s The Blackest Medicine, Vol. II before falling in the third round to Ducktails’ III: Arcade Dynamics, whose victory was so decisive it left no doubt that this stony collection of ultra-echofied tunes by Real Estate’s lead guitarist would wind up in the top ten. By noon I had a bracket going and was tweeting all the action to my 23 loyal followers.

The tournament was more or less rigged. I knew going in what my final four would be, so I went through an entire legal pad trying to figure out a defensible way for these favorite records to make it to the semifinals. By sundown I was blissing out to a mismatch between Herbcraft’s Ashram to the Stars and Phish’s The White Tape when I began to see how absurd the whole venture was. I remembered what a famous guitarist once said as he was accepting a “best of the year” award, that music isn’t completion, and I felt a wave of guilt for imposing such capitalistic cutthroat-ness on egalitarian beauty. Plus so much of the music that came into my life this year is utterly incommensurable. Like that first match up. How can anyone honestly compare the highly distorted 60s pop revival of White Fence to the syncopated spaciness of Peaking Lights? It’s like turnips and pomegranates. It was fun to spend a day shuffling and sorting and celebrating all these wonderful new objects, trying to figure out how they defined this year in my life, but by bedtime I was fully repentant. I tweeted, “The brackets aren't a good idea. Tomorrow I'll swap ‘versus’ for ‘and’.”

The next day was one of creative coupling: Wet Hair’s über weird super synth freak out with Mississippi Records’ reissue of Fanfody, a collection of field recordings from Madagascar; the Record Store Day re-release of Country Joe and the Fish’s acid-rock masterpiece Electric Music for the Mind and Body with The Polyps’ Ants on the Golden Cone and its ambient clouds of feedback that billow and contort and dissipate to reveal the most lovely and quiet folk melodies; the savory international fusion flavor Julian Lynch’s Terra next to the widely acclaimed second LP by his good friends in Real Estate next to the no-nonsense pop rock of the Feelies, to whom Real Estate is often compared; Kurt Vile’s 7” next tohis 12” EP next to his LP.

By the time Allie returned I still had dozens of new releases to listen to, including two big contenders for Numero Uno that I wouldn’t for play for nearly two weeks because it was too painful to do so. A few days before my year’s best selection process began, our dog Maddie died after a long battle with cancer. Maddie had been the most consistent source of joy in our lives, and during the final stages of her illness we’d developed a daily ritual of “pack nights” where we’d dim the lights in our living room, cozy up and listen the best new psychedelic rock. Allie requested a moratorium on any sounds that called those evenings to mind, so we nursed our wounds with a binge of Delta blues and kept Woods’ Sun and Shade and Matt Valentine’s What I Became at bay because they were just too vivid of reminders of what we had just lost. Especially the Woods record. We’d listened to it over and over throughout the summer as tumors spread across Maddie’s body.

Then, on the last Friday of the year, my wife asked if we could hear the Grateful Dead’s Europe 72 Vol. 2, which she hadn’t been able to listen to since the night Maddie died, when we sat together and cried to its stunning version of “Sing Me Back Home.” It doesn’t get much more psychedelic than that, with its rare pairing of “Dark Star” and “The Other One” that sprawls across three sides of virgin 180 gram vinyl. And you don’t think music can ever get any better, but then Jerry Garcia slows it down and conjures all the beautiful sadness of life and death with an old Merle Haggard song, “Sing Me Back Home.” I looked over at Allie and she appeared to be contented, so I decided to push the envelope and put on Sun and Shade. At some point during side one, probably when Jeremy Earl sings, “Oh what falls apart and what won’t come back, lay it loose, let it love like that,” I realized that I had been listening to this album at the precise moment when I came to terms with the fact that Maddie would not only die but would die very soon. Allie had gone out with some friends so it was just me and the dogs. I petted Maddie during the first track, “Pushing Onlys,” and I found a half dozen new tumors and I just started bawling and I kept bawling and petting Maddie all the way through. With it playing again now, and with our pack down to three, I turned to Allie and I told her about this moment and the tears came again. I cried hard, so hard that my whole body tensed up and I had to gasp for breath, but when it was over I told Allie it felt good. And that was when I knew what was the best album of 2011.

My top ten:

10. Jovontaes Things Are Different Here

9. The Polyps Ants on the Golden Cone

8. Ryan Garbes Sweet Hassle

7. MV + EE Country Stash

6. TIE Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics | Real Estate Days

5. TIE Grateful Dead Europe 72 vol 2 | Conrad Schnitzler Live 1972

4. Wet Hair In Vogue Spirit

3. Kurt Vile Smoke Ring for My Halo

2. Matt Valentine What I Became

1. Woods Sun and Shade

Fables of the Reconstruction: Matt "MV" Valentine

I know you’re not supposed to judge a record by its cover, but the second I saw Matt Valentine’s What I Became I knew it was something I would own and love. What I didn’t know was that it would be first glittering jewel in a treasure trove of music that’ll likely take me years and lots of money to collect.

The cover itself is pretty simple: A picture of a longhaired, long-bearded guy who is leaning against an old Honda Civic and smiling like he totally loves his life. In the background there’s a big country barn-style house and a guy hunched down on the ground, going over a director’s chair with an electric sander. It’s obviously summertime in the picture, and tall trees tower all around. In other words, it screams “hippy,” and you know the music is going to be mellow or freaky or both, which, for my ears, is a good thing. The latter is the case here. The album’s seven tracks meander from folksy acoustic guitar strumming to cosmic synthesizer echoes to the infinite array of warbles and fuzz tones that a daisy chain of foot pedals can squeeze out of an electric guitar, with a few pinches of sitar and hand drums thrown in to make it a little more exotic. If I were to compare it to anything, I’d say it’s like something Neil Young might have made if he’d toured with Sonic Youth in 1974, after On the Beach, and if the tour had included a run through India and Nepal, and if Sonic Youth had been forced to meditate a lot. The songs are all songs; it’s not a free-form record, there are singing and inviting melodies, but all the songs tend to unravel at various points into blissful free-formed-ness.

Matt "MV" Valentine: "PK Dick" by alteredzones


 

One of the best things about the record is it comes with a full-color insert that’s covered with snapshots of Valentine and his wife (or life partner) Erika Elder, their dog and a few of their friends, and it’s clear from the photos that they have a life worth dying for. They appear to live in the country, judging from the images of barns and open spaces, and it looks like they just make music and art all the time. So I went poking around online and I learned that Valentine is the MV part of MV + EE, a two-person band that he’s in with Elder (EE). And they’ve been making music since the 1990s, starting out in New York with a band called Tower Recordings. Sometime around the turn of the millennium they abandoned the city for rural Vermont, where they’ve produced an extraordinary amount of music together, solo, and with a revolving cast of musicians such as J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. and bands with names like Bummer Road, The Golden Road and the MV + EE Medicine show. We’re talking tons and tons of stuff – LPs, 7” singles, cassettes, CDRs – on dozens of different small labels, including Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace. They even have their own Dick’s Picks-style series of live recordings called Heroine Celestial Agriculture Records.

Since picking up What I Became, I’ve added several MV + EE albums to my collection, and I’m really impressed with the range of sounds. Drone Trailer, by MV + EE and the Golden Road, is song-oriented like Valentine’s recent solo release, but with a bit more harmonica, while The MV + EE Medicine Show’s The Uranium Ray is mostly instrumental and very far out, while Ragas from the Culvert by plain old MV + EE is basically Indian music on acid, with veils of sitar strands wafting through a haze of electro-cosmic sounds. Among them all, though, Valentine’s new solo release stands the strongest. It conveys a level of confidence and cohesion that takes artists years and years to find, and I’m glad I got it first, because now as I collect every MV + EE related thing I can find I’ll be able to see how he became what he became.