Jack: Hello. Thank you guys for being here. We're in the Nina HQ right now and I'm happy to have you guys on. So how about let's start with Aaron. What was your early experience with music and how did you become enamored with music? Was it through parents, friends?
Aaron: Well, yeah, thanks for having us.
Jack: My pleasure.
Matthew: Yeah, we flew in, so I do appreciate it. [laughter]
Aaron: My earliest musical memories are Yiddish lullabies sung by my grandfather. I came from a family of cantors. They were first generation Ukrainian Jews, and music was a big part of their lives. And I think that was kind of the only part of the religion that really carried through to my family. He would sing a lot of those songs, and then my dad is a clarinetist and he has a klezmer band. The Byzantine minor scale was heavy in the house growing up, you know, between the lullabies and the klezmer band rehearsals and stuff like that. My older brother played piano and was shredding Bach and Chopin and stuff like that all the time at the house. He was really good and it made me want to play. So I took piano lessons when I was four or five, but I wasn't good and it didn't stick. I kind of hated sheet music and practicing, I didn't relate to that. I quit piano lessons and got into Magic: the Gathering, fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons stuff. I was doing magic shows too. I was a magician, I was really into magic. I would put on shows for other younger kids, birthday parties and stuff like that. Build my own pyrotechnics.
Jack: We're getting to the core right now.
Matthew: The original DNA.
Aaron: That was probably around the time I got my first CD, which was the double disc Phantom of the Opera, original cast recording. [laughter]
Matthew: Were your friends cool with that, or did you listen to this at home quietly with the door shut? [laughter]
Aaron: No, actually, my friends were. I made a friend and I showed up at his house, Mark Arthur, and he was literally wearing a phantom mask and a tux and a cape and the whole thing. We were probably nine years old. [laughter]
Jack: He was getting ready for you to bring it over.
Aaron: Yeah, he knew I was into that and wanted to show me his phantom costume. We made backyard movies with flash paper and stuff like that in his backyard. He was also into magic, we were doing magic.
Matthew: We gotta hit him for the remix.
Aaron: Yeah, that was kind of my only friend at the time, so that may have had something to do with it.
Jack: Where did you grow up, by the way?
Aaron: I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. I was probably in fourth or fifth grade, I think it was fifth grade, and these cool neighborhood girls decided that I needed "cool lessons," is what they called it. And I'm so glad I met them when I did because it really helped put things in perspective.
Jack: Do you remember what some of the cool lessons were?
Aaron: Well, the thing that I still really appreciated about their approach was that they were kind of goth-ish girls, but they presented cool in this kind of agnostic way of it's not a scene or a style or a look or a sound. It's just a feeling or something.
Jack: Just how you carry yourself.
Aaron: Right, exactly. And they were goth girls, but they told me to wear Nike's. You know what I mean?
Matthew: Was this 2012? [laughter]
Aaron: I probably was in fifth grade.
Jack: Fifth grade is a good transitional, prepubescent time.
Matthew: Yeah, if you're not cool by fifth grade, it's probably over honestly. [laughter]
Jack: Yeah, it's over.
Aaron: No, they saved me because I was definitely going down that road. I was still into the Dungeons and Dragons stuff and had very colorful sweats that I would insist on wearing to school up until then and they were like, "Jeans, jeans are cool." But I went to my first big concert with them, which was Korn and Rob Zombie, insane arena tour where there was a fire breathing dragon on stage.
Jack: It's not that far from Phantom of the Opera.
Aaron: No, honestly the spectacle is a consistent thread for sure. And yeah, all the pyro, it's giving very similar. And then, what would have that been? Early high school? Oh, middle school. I would hang out with them. They were into cool, dark music, but kind of mainstream. Nine Inch Nails stuff, you know? And then my school friends were into show tunes, literally. I was trying to square what I had learned about being cool with my show tune friends.
Jack: It was a little bit of cognitive dissonance I imagine. [laughter]
Aaron: Exactly. And then I met these guys who I thought were really cool, and they were rude boys. They would wear high water sharkskin suits and skinny ties and slick their hair back.
Jack: This is 2000 or?
Aaron: Exactly. '99, 2000. I wanted to be like them so I started wearing suits to school as a 13 year old.
Jack: Very performative!
Aaron: They didn't go to my school, though, they were these cool older kids that I knew, but I was into what they were doing. And yes, it was. Performative is kind of a thread. It's like, sometimes I would hang out with my skater friends and look like that. And sometimes I would hang out with my musical theater friends and completely pass.
Jack: A bit of a Zelig type character.
Aaron: Yeah, it never felt you were supposed to pick one subculture and stick to it. It was like, "Which one today?"
Jack: That's very 2023, in a way. Now we have all this history to draw from, why would you limit yourself to just the one, you know?
Matthew: You were always shuffling.
Aaron: I was always shuffling. Ska was a chapter, ska was probably a year. I was in ska bands. We had rival Tucson ska bands.
Jack: What did you play at this point?
Aaron: Keyboard. I remembered how to play piano sort of from when I was a kid and I would just play keys.
Jack: You played keys in a ska band!
Aaron: Multiple ska bands, rival ska bands. The rival band, my ska band's rival was called Los Locos Gringos.
Jack: What was your band called?
Aaron: The Hepocrites. But it was hard to compete with Los Locos Gringos because that's a pretty raging ska band name for a 16 year old. My first ska band was called the Plaidiators. [laughter] That's a zinger. I think the only show we ever played probably was in this guy's record store called Toxic Ranch. It was probably 200 square feet and for some reason he was letting high school bands play and his record store.
Jack: A liability.
Aaron: We were really, really young. We had probably more people in the band than at the show, you know, horn section... Ska bands are huge. And then through Toxic Ranch, that record store, and the venues around there, Scrappy's, this scene in Tucson... It's weird that Ska is also the same as hardcore is also the same as emo is also the same as...
Jack: It's the same general kind of mentality.
Matthew: They're like different political parties, they'll show up at the same convention.
Aaron: Right, but that kind of proved my own point to me that I wasn't a poser. I was like, "Look, all these people hang out." Their tastes kind of glitch between these various states of, you know, this same font works for all these different styles in music, the same band or whatever. But yeah, I was definitely in that world for most of high school, didn't find electronic music until I was a senior and it was the beginning of the hipster era with Ladytron and ADULT. and that kind of stuff. And that blew my mind.
Jack: How did you get into that? Just through friends?
Aaron: Yeah, it was just friends and local shows and stuff like that. I was working at the venue, sort of, and was there every night and it was just a scene, a very physical scene. Cool bands would come through there. I remember the Locust came through and played on the floor. I don't think we saw any cool electronic music there, that was not the vibe. But I remember I had a Skinny Puppy Too Dark Park cassette that my babysitter gave me. It was my only frame of reference for that, it was disconnected completely from a scene. But I remember that because I remember rediscovering it a decade later and being like, "Oh my God, I have this," because I remembered these songs. And she also - bad babysitter - took me to a rave, which was the only real rave I ever went to in Tucson.
Matthew: How old were you at the rave?
Aaron: I was trying to remember, because she wouldn't have been my babysitter anymore. So it's probably 12 or 13.
Matthew: This is when you were dating. [laughter]
Aaron: I mean, I'd always had a crush on her.
Jack: Damn, a Tucson rave.
Aaron: Yeah, I remember being a kid at the rave, like, not participating, but just observing.
Jack: Do you think she was on drugs?
Aaron: I'm sure she was. I don't know where she ended up.
Matthew: You should find out. Send her the new album. [laughter]
Aaron: Yeah. But that was cool that she gave me the Skinny Puppy tape.
Jack: That is cool.
Aaron: That and the Phantom of the Opera CDs are the artifacts that I'll keep from my childhood.
Matthew: Those are solid Venn diagrams. [laughter]
Aaron: That's on one side of the Venn diagram. Skinny Puppy and Phantom of the Opera are solidly on the same side of the Venn diagram.
Aaron: And then, yeah, I moved to Chicago, met Matt shortly after that when I was 18. When did we meet?
Matthew: 19? 2004 or so.
Jack: Where did you guys go to school?
Aaron: We went to Columbia and I was in the music program and studying composition. I was like, "Fine, I guess I'll learn sheet music again because it seems valuable to me." But there is where I learned that music didn't have to have a little cute beat behind it, you know? I remember meeting a guy in a coffee shop because I was working on sheet music on my laptop. And he came up behind me and he was like, "What are you working on?" He was really friendly, IRL relationship forging. I still keep in touch with him. He turned out to be my music daddy, he just showed me so much cool shit and taught me about so many interesting perspectives on music. I think that day we went back to his place and listened to Morton Feldman and it just kind of changed my whole perception of what music should be. That coupled with music history and regular music school stuff, I got a lot more interested in the weirder stuff and the history behind that, especially academic electronic music from the ages, that stuff really resonated. The scene in Chicago didn't really look like anything, right? There was, like, "hipster."
Matthew: Yeah, I think we were just not into any of it, which was kind of how we became friends. We were like, "We all agree this sucks kind of, right?"
Aaron: Oh yeah, because we would bond over Black Dice or Excepter.
Matthew: Yeah, you were really into experimental music and I was making beats, but also agreeing that everything was pretty unacceptable at the time. So it was natural, I think we met at Critical Mass or some vegan bike ride against Iraq or something. I was definitely a vegan during the Iraq war.
[Gatekeeper "Optimus Maximus"]
Jack: So then I think that's a good transitionary point to go to Matt. What was your experience as a young person getting into music, etc?
Matthew: Yeah, I mean to some degree I feel Aaron and I have always kind of come from opposite sides of the spectrum, which has been kind of entertaining. We are technically both born on opposite sides of the same desert in Arizona, Aaron from Tucson, and then I was born in Phoenix.
Jack: So it was meant to be!
Matthew: Yeah, totally. But I have no real memory of the place at all. I kind of moved around a lot all over the place, maybe ten different states when I was a kid. I mean, I do have pleasant memories of my parents blasting Vangelis in a Honda Civic in the late '80s with all the windows down.
Aaron: Which record?
Matthew: Probably Chariots of Fire. Definitely. And I'm like, "What is this?"
Jack: They're, like, really deep Vangelis heads. [laughter]
Matthew: "This is the b-side of Spiral."
Jack: Early stuff, Aphrodite's Child.
Matthew: No, I remember being five and I was like, "What is this music?" And they were like, "Some Greek guy, Van Jello, I don't know." So that was the importance paid to it. But yeah, being my age, I definitely came up watching MTV, you know, Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, all that early to mid-'90s sort of stuff was quite impactful on me. And then even just from an electronic music perspective, like a lot of little middle class twerps, I saw Mighty Ducks and I was like, "Yo, I need to play ice hockey. Don't you guys think you need to wake up at 7 a.m. on Saturday and drive me 40 miles to the ice rink?" I was seven or eight and I was getting really into the skate culture where they would just play all these early '90s, mega dance club hits, "Rhythm Is a Dancer" and all that, and it'd be a free skate session and I'd be four feet tall, skating 40 miles an hour trying to show off to the finest tracks possible. So that was the early childhood, which was pretty predictable, not really that different. But then middle school, I think at that point I was living in Iowa, Illinois, Quad Cities, pretty remote middle America.
Jack: Your folks moved around a lot?
Matthew: Yeah, my dad's a meteorologist.
Jack: Oh wow.
Matthew: Yeah, I had a scoop on the weather for sure.
Aaron: You got storm blood. [laughter]
Matthew: Yeah, that was always cool. It would definitely be like, "There's a severe thunderstorm coming into town, I need everyone to get their shoes on now. We're going to go outside and check it out." So that was cool. Then my mom was just a super pleasant librarian. So they were fine, but they weren't encouraging of the arts, if that makes sense. They had kind of already come from New York.
Jack: But they weren't explicitly discouraging.
Matthew: No, no. I mean, it depended. I was definitely a little hesher in elementary school, fifth grade onwards. I was really into death metal and super aggressive music. They would be like, "Okay, we found this CD by Sepultura called Chaos A.D. in your room. I just want you to know that chaos is not good. Society would fall apart." [laughter] You know, they're reading the lyrics in the booklet and I was like, "Uh, that's my friend's older brother's CD. I'm just borrowing it so I could burn it, honestly." So I was really into super aggressive music as a kid. I think that was just kind of a product of me moving around a lot and being a bit rebellious and aggressive and whatnot. I definitely gravitated towards death metal and more extreme music. And then in middle school, I do have a really pleasant memory of my friend's dad renting A Clockwork Orange for us and hearing Wendy Carlos for the first time and that music immediately radicalizing me a bit where I was just like, "Yeah, I could be a criminal. This is fine." [laughter]
Jack: Good conclusion to draw from that.
Matthew: "When this movie's over we should cut your neighbor's tree down. That would be awesome." [laughter] I kind of had a life of crime from maybe 10 or 11 to 15. I was pretty bad, honestly.
Jack: So it was duly influential to you, both Wendy Carlos, but also committing crimes, from the actual film.
Matthew: Yeah, it was just really inspirational and I look back on it now and I think I was radicalized by that soundtrack a little bit. It just felt really kind of dignified and sophisticated to be arrested.
Jack: Do you still associate electronic music with crime?
Matthew: No, but if some Wendy Carlos comes on and someone's reading me my rights and I get cuffed...
Jack: You might wake up 6 hours later.
Matthew: Yeah, it's like, "That's right, I'm a high-minded lowlife. I'm okay with this life." So that was pretty great. And then I think around middle school age I transitioned from extreme music to electronic music. I got pretty lucky, I had a neighbor who is this British character who was the senior captain of the soccer team, very cool guy. His car was one giant subwoofer. It was, like, a Ford Escort from 1988 that was just a subwoofer. And he's like, "I can pick you up for school for soccer practice." And I was like, "Alright, cool." So he pulls into my driveway and, like, "Around the World" by Daft Punk playing loud enough that you can hear it from a few miles away. And I was just like, "What? What is this kind of music?" You know? He's like, "Computers, mate." And I was like, "Oh, that's awesome because I'm a pretty lousy musician, so if I can just go to Best Buy and buy some software here and recreate this, that would be amazing." So I had this British pal who got me into big beat and all sort of the late '90s, early 2000s sort of canon, which was super important to me, Fatboy Slim and all of that really kind of amazing but kind of terrible sort of music. That's really where it was at for me. Then I transitioned a little more into experimental music. For me it was that my friends were always kind of just going with the flow, you know, it was like, "Oh, we like this kind of music because there's shows in our town for this kind of music." And I think because I was moving around a lot and not really enjoying where I was, there was a certain degree of trying to escape my environment and listen to some French electronic music or British electronic music. For me it was really fun because I was just imagining myself in that world, being 14 and putting Massive Attack on, to fall asleep being like, "Yeah, maybe I am a Scottish drug dealer, that could be." [laughter] So for me that was really fun. And I got lucky, there was a kid on my bus who ran a CD burning racket. I was still into extreme music and death metal and he was like, "You know, that music's not that good." And I was like, "Well, I don't know, man. Slipknot, honestly, is pretty cool in my opinion." And then I would go to the mall and see some couple with a Slipknot hoodie on and a stroller and I was like, "Huh, maybe metal isn't all that cool always." [laughter] You know? And he was like, "Yeah, that's right. You need to check out Primal Scream and all these other bands" and got me into slightly more experimental music. So I was lucky when I was 14 or 15, I had a few older friends that turned me on to some stuff that was outside the typical sort of MTV stuff. Oh I remember my first rave, I was 16. I drove to it by myself at 6 p.m.. You know, because I was like, "Oh, it starts at 6." [laughter] I drove to it at 6, I walk right in and there's some DJ playing some drum and bass. I don't know what the protocol is so I immediately just walk up to the DJ booth and I'm like, "What track is this? What track are you playing right now?" And I'm just taking little notes for myself to see if I can find it later at Best Buy.
Jack: What was he like?
Matthew: I think it was being polite to me. He didn't shoo me away. But I wasn't going to dance or to have fun, I was just trying to learn more about the music and take notes and research and maybe even figure if I could recreate that or something like that.
Jack: Do you still have some of your productions from that time?
Matthew: I was actually just thinking about that. I definitely had these really fun tracks from maybe the year 2000 where I was accidentally making acid house, where I was just taking these drum loops that already existed then I'd use the really shitty sequencer and just put distortion on it.
Jack: What DAW were you using?
Matthew: I started off with MTV Music Generator.
Jack: That was my first DAW! Oh my God, that's so crazy!
Matthew: It's such an amazing one. Because it's by MTV people kind of diminish it a bit, but honestly those loops are pretty strong. They let you edit the MIDI, so you could take something you were kind of into and then be like, "Yeah, but what if I put all these notes over here" and you were like, "I think we have a hit, I'm going to call my friend and play this for him on the phone for 5 minutes and make them listen to the entire 5 minutes."
Jack: Did you have it for computer?
Matthew: I had it on PC.
Jack: Yeah, I had it on PC too, because it was originally for PlayStation.
Matthew: Even when the intro comes on with the jester.
Jack: Oh my God, that's crazy.
Aaron: Let's see if we can run that.
Jack: Yes.
Matthew: Yeah, I mean, I didn't really get along so well with my parents, so I was definitely just retreating into the basement to go make music as often as possible. A lot of pleasant hours just spent really having no idea what I was doing because I didn't really have any formal musical training. But that was really fun. I mean, for me, the whole point was you could kind of just arrange in any manner and click move notes around until you were satisfied with it and put some shitty effects on it and you were kind of in.
Jack: That's kind of the mission statement.
Matthew: Totally, yes. So MTV Music Generator and then I tried upgrading a bit with mixed results. I got Magix Music Maker and whatnot, and I remember being like, "Huh, I should get some gear." I was on Ebay in the early 2000s looking at the price of a Juno 106, which I think the Locust also had. You know, if you're into vegan San Diego noise. But I was like, "Huh, this is so expensive. So maybe you play the music for the record label that you made, they agree it's really good, then they give you money to buy the gear, because I have no idea honestly how I'm supposed to buy this gear." So I think with a paper route or whatever I saved up as much money as I could and bought a Roland MC-303 groove box or just some totally amazing piece of shit. But yeah, that was kind of my first foray. But I pretty quickly realized I was just out of my element once I moved into gear, so I stayed working with computer software for making music, probably up until I met Aaron, you know, college age. And then it was kind of like, "Alright, Reason is not going to cut it. Ableton soft synths are not going to cut it."
Jack: So this brings us now to the meeting of the minds. How did you guys first meet? Do you remember the day?
Matthew: I think we met at Critical Mass.
Aaron: Did we really?
Jack: You were not kidding, it was actually Critical Mass.
Matthew: I remember being at Critical Mass and there's 10,000 obnoxious college students on bikes.
Aaron: All with the same haircut.
Matthew: Yeah, taking over Michigan Avenue in their little American Apparel deep Vs.
Jack: What an era.
Matthew: Yeah, this is pre-bloghouse. I think we were into, like, Gas and more atmospheric electronic music at the time we met Max Richter.
Aaron: Oh you were living in the dorms, so it would have been 2004.
Jack: This was first year of college?
Matthew: Second year. At that point I was kind of into dance music still, but more on the side.
Aaron: How were we finding out about music, though? I feel like part of it had started to become a little bit about hunting on Soulseek too, right? It was less about an all-IRL community.
Matthew: Totally. The Chicago scene at the time was kind of wild and fun, but musically it wasn't really what either of us were into.
Jack: This is 2004, 2005?
Matthew: 2005. I don't even know how to describe it. How would you describe it?
Aaron: Like, calypso math rock bands. [laughter] And they were really good, they were shredding, you know? But it just wasn't our aesthetic place at the time. That wasn't hitting. I think also it was an era, it was right after the millennium, so there was the sense, at least in experimental music or electronic music, that all of those extremes had been explored or the edges had kind of been reached. So it felt interesting to try to time travel or something to a time when that wasn't the case. I think that was maybe where our project originated from, it was a reaction to that, you know?
Matthew: Oh yeah, a lot of bands then were like, "What if we sounded like the Beach Boys?" And I was like, "Well, I definitely don't like that kind of music at all." Aaron and I had been friends for a little while but we didn't really work on music together. I think the first time we were sort of aligned really was we watched some Mark Shreeve video, who was this British dude who showed up on British public television with a giant PC monitor and did a cover of John Carpenter's "Assassin." We were just like, "This. This is what we want to do, honestly."
Aaron: Just like, black denim, fog machine, SD video, just really, really janky, but delivering this sort of intensity of the spectacle.
Matthew: And a mix of industrial meets New Age meets weird, '80s synth pop. It was just a fun fusion, and covering John Carpenter, which is deeper in the DNA from just being into horror movies. It was just a really easy place for Aaron and I to sync up.
Jack: So you were like, "This is what we have to do."
Aaron: It's still the template, honestly. We go back to it often. What's that concert video? Live at the...
Matthew: Yeah, it's some live footage from 1994 where at that point he's probably already slightly past the peak of his career and he's just wearing a leather jacket on public television just being like, "Yeah, we got a couple of computer monitors and towers here and we're going to play air guitar basically over 20 synths hooked up." But I think that vibe felt contrary to what else was going on in Chicago and we were like, "Well, let's just do this and we'll get a bunch of fog machines and we'll play slightly too loud." Honestly for 2007, 2008, that was kind of...
Aaron: Mykki Blanco threw some party and they were like, "Do you want to do a show?" And we literally made the whole thing...
Matthew: Was that the first show?
Aaron: Was Nanu and Mykki Blanco's party. And we made the whole set for that one show. We used Bach MIDI with electric guitar sounds and we wore turtlenecks. [laughter]
Matthew: Yeah, maybe sampling some Goblin, who could even say. [laughter]
Aaron: I feel like that wasn't even on our radar then.
Matthew: We kind of skipped over bloghouse, which also happened when we were like... So Aaron was still pretty into experimental music and I was like, "Yeah, I'm getting back into dance music," because when I was in high school French House, even like Round One, I was pretty into all of that. Les Rhythm Digitales was world-changing for me, I listened to that album four or five hundred times. So when all that started getting popular again, I was like, "Yes, I know this music, this is my thing also." So I was kind of drifting back more into dance music in general and trying to make really terrible house tracks.
Aaron: You were a bloghouse DJ, vinyl.
Jack: Yes! You weren't in New York, so you're not in any classic photos.
Matthew: No, but I would show up to a Chicago house party with, like, 40 lbs of imported records, you know, and everyone is just listening to trap or juke and I'd be like, "Yeah, but what if I put on some of this now?" And everyone would kind of be alright with it.
Jack: Like first gen Chicago house?
Matthew: Yeah, all that stuff. It was available and I was super into it. You know, Dancemania records and all that. I was trying to walk that fine line of not entirely appropriating the music, trying to connect it back to the French stuff I was into and bloghouse is happening, but I was really only super into bloghouse for the first year or two. Then it hit this weird wall where one day: American Apparel and Ed Banger Records and Steve Aoki in shutter shades and all of it. One day it was all just over, you know?
Jack: Yeah, the shutter shades.
Aaron: Justice came and justice went. [laughter]
Jack: Justice was served.
Matthew: Yeah, there was one day where you're just like, "Okay, this music's the worst music I've ever heard in my life."
Jack: It's officially jumped the shark.
Matthew: Yeah, totally.
Jack: So your first show was 2007, this Mykii Blanco party.
Matthew: Yeah, it was some loft party. But even then we were like, "We need candles, we need a fog machine, we need crazy lighting."
Aaron: We had some fake star background we somehow made.
Matthew: We were trying to bring the effects, from the very beginning.
Jack: From the get-go it's about the stage setup.
Aaron: It's like diorama style. Do you know what I mean? It was a miniature kind of window into something that you could look through.
Matthew: Yeah, it's like, "Is this strobe light $40 from RadioShack? Maybe, but we're using it and, you know, it's conceptual."
Jack: Did you guys play as Gatekeeper?
Matthew: Yeah.
Jack: Wow, you had the concept right from the get.
Matthew: I even remember having a funny vision for the name. We were trying to come up with a name and I remember for some of our other music even it was always kind of difficult because we were a little too picky. Everything kind of sucked, was the general idea. But I remember sitting on the kitchen table and having some really funny vision of some cave in Tuscany somewhere. It was two people sitting at the entrance of a cave. And I was like, "Yeah, Gatekeeper would be kind of fun." It was obviously before the word kind of changed meaning too.
Jack: Now it's as though you came with the band name last year.
Matthew: Yeah, we have to clarify.
Jack: "Gatekeeper! It's kind of anti-woke, you know?"
Matthew: Yeah, we have to be like, "The gate is open."
Jack: Yeah, Gateopener. [laughter]
Matthew: We were playing around with changing the title maybe.
Aaron: Girlboss. [laughter]
Jack: Girlboss is pretty good.
Matthew: I didn't sign off on that. [laughter] But I feel at this point clearly we're referencing other media in material. This is not a post-2015 kind of...
Aaron: There's also nine other Gatekeeper artists too, from dubstep to metal.
Jack: Oh yeah, like, still going, still popular artists. [laughter]
Matthew: Every once in a while someone will message us: "Totally amazing show in St. Louis last night. When is the next show?" I'm like, "Oh I'm so sorry, man, you're talking to the wrong guy."
Aaron: There wasn't really a scene, I mean there was the history of some of the stuff we were into in Chicago, but it wasn't really active at all.
Matthew: Yeah, there's one street named after Frankie Knuckles. The younger kids didn't really care about it as much. And I remember always, Aaron and I would play some random venue in Chicago and the sound guy was ten years older than us and was around doing the whole Wax Trax, industrial era, so we could always kind of geek out with them a little bit and be like, "Well, why yes, that was the Kawai R-100 drum kick that was used on that." And the sound guy would always kind of be into what we were doing and we were like, "Cool, thank you so much, this is way more meaningful to me than whatever twerps show up to see me." You know?
Aaron: But then you sent that mp3 to 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
Jack: Not the first time this story has come up in these interviews.
Matthew: Totally. I mean because you're from the bloghouse wars it was kind of...
Jack: A veteran of the bloghouse wars. [laughter]
Matthew: That was the ecosystem. And it was like 20 Jazz Funk Greats felt like a nice spot for slightly more out-there sort of tracks. Those people were always really friendly and receptive and we would send them mp3s and they would post them and Aaron and I would be super excited.
Aaron: And that's why it was a different era because we literally got a record deal off of one mp3 on 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
Jack: Was that the Hippos in Tanks record?
Aaron: No, that was the first record we put out, which was through the German label.
Matthew: Kompakt.
Aaron: It was a Kompakt subsidiary called Fright that they just made up for scary electronic music.
Matthew: Yeah, we were 24 and were like, "Yeah, we're going to do this release with Kompakt, but we'll see. Ever heard of minimal techno?" [laughter] You know? It wasn't really quite the reality, but we were super flattered. I mean, going back to when I was a high schooler even, one of my only life goals was like, "Yo, if I could put out a 12" on a European record label, that would be cool." That would be my, our, highest artistic aspiration, to just release something random like that on some esteemed label, you know?
Jack: But you guys have been successful.
Matthew: Oh yeah. We played Pitchfork Music Fest and we were like, "Yeah, maybe we could play at night and be a random surprise act at the end." And they're like, "Yeah, no, you're on at 11 a.m.." And we were like, "Goddamnit."
Jack: Where was that?
Matthew: Chicago. We'd already moved to New York, but we got to go back to play Pitchfork Fest, so all our Chicago friends were like, "Oh, these guys think they're fancy now."
Jack: You're like, "It's not what you think." [laughter]
Matthew: "You're playing at 9 a.m.. Here's your free bookbag."
Jack: Totally. You have to pay for drinks.
Matthew: Yeah, "You get two drink tickets. And we can't put your sister on the list, sorry."
Aaron: I remember my grad school era is when witch house started.
Matthew: Oh, that's a whole chapter, a little bit. We rebelled against the whole upbeat, iridescent kind of Beach Boys sound. It was like, "Yeah, darkness is cool," which for us was kind of embarrassing.
Jack: It's like, "We sort of fit into this a little bit."
Aaron: We were adjacent to it wasn't what we were doing.
Jack: But you kind of got lumped in, they made the circle big enough to that you were included in it.
Matthew: It's like, "Oh, do you want to play this show?" In 2010 we were like, "Yeah, sure."
Aaron: We played with Salem at Glasslands in 2009 when we lived in Chicago, we came here, and that was our first New York show and it literally got reviewed by The [New York] Times. And the Times called us... What did they call us?
Matthew: I don't know but they were generally complimenting us.
Aaron: No, they called us something cool.
Matthew: I was like, "You see that, mom?"
Aaron: You know, that made me think of this earlier, too, is the idea of us being successful was not... I had no sense of that at all at that time. It was very much just like, "Oh yeah, we're just doing this thing."
Matthew: Oh yeah, after that show we flew back to Chicago, it was five degrees outside, I was walking the dogs and going to grad school. It was not glamorous or any meaningful success obviously.
Aaron: I wasn't really aware. I think maybe that's how it is for probably anyone, you're not really aware of it while you're in it.
Jack: Because it's just your life.
Aaron: It's just reality, yeah. Once Gatekeeper got going in Chicago, there was a little scene that kind of formed around it that was White Car, Elon's project, some other italo-pop kind of adjacent bands. It started up live electronic music with vocals.
Matthew: There was a bit of an industrial kind of rehash. Late aughts Chicago kind of had a fun scene, some of our friends... Love Concept.
Aaron: Love Concept. Beau Wanzer.
Jack: Beau's great! He was just in town.
Matthew: Some kind of industrial groups that were sort of like, "Alright, so exactly how many Front 242 records do you actually have?" But actually I will admit, when we first started making this music there was one dude where I was like, "Well, as long as they're kind of okay with this that's fine with me." And Beau was like, "No, this is great," and we were like, "Okay, cool." Because in 2005 he was the one guy showing up with an 808 and making this kind of scuzzy industrial music and whatnot, so having him sign off on our Kawai R-100 kicks and references was kind of nice.
Aaron: Well, he was a hardware purist, so we kind of felt inadequate. Also we were sampling YouTube, we weren't analog purists, which was different, I think, than a lot of that, especially when we came to New York and the whole Wierd Records scene was going on then.
Matthew: Yeah, we were really not a part of that.
Aaron: Even though it was, like, similar bass synths, it was not at all the same reference.
Matthew: It's like, "You have an SH-101, I have an SH-101. I sampled this from YouTube, you created this painstakingly."
Jack: "We are not the same!"
Aaron: Yeah, you whisper into a microphone. And I really like all that music but I feel they didn't really take us seriously.
Matthew: We were never major gearheads. To some extent, that was like car culture. It was like, "Yeah, pop the hood on this, and here we got our CV gate."
Aaron: I'm a preset boy, I don't care.
Jack: But that's totally its own artistic statement, in a way.
Matthew: We would sample stuff, we were always just like, "However we can figure it, that's what we'll do."
Jack: Because the music wins out ultimately.
[Gatekeeper "The Soil Has Soured"]
Jack: So moving to New York.
Aaron: 2010.
Jack: And you had already been playing some shows.
Matthew: The New York Times is already writing about us.
Jack: You're like, "We gotta move to New York, we gotta make it."
Matthew: Also Chicago is -5°. You cannot live there as an adult unless you want to work for an insurance company or become an alcoholic. Lovely city, but it's hard. It's intense.
Aaron: It felt like people were just getting out.
Matthew: Yeah, West Coast if you're in film/video, if you're into music, you trekked off to the East Coast.
Aaron: I had a few friends that stayed, but almost everyone I know from that era moved away, a lot of them moved to New York. It didn't even seem like we made the choice to do that, it just seemed like that's what we were doing. You know what I mean?
Matthew: It was pretty natural. It was like, "Yeah, Mom, I live on Starr Street! Right off of Flushing." [laughter]
Aaron: Yeah, we moved to Bushwick. That's when the Hippos in Tanks era started, too. We met Barron.
Matthew: Barron was always a super nice guy. Literally just lost thousands of dollars working with us and didn't even care.
Aaron: They really thought we were Daft Punk. They really had this insanely unrealistic belief in us that was greater than any belief in ourselves or anybody's. And he kind of had that approach with all of his artists, he thought they were all superstars.
Jack: It's kind of how you have to do it, as a record label, if you're really going to do it. I mean, obviously there was this money and infrastructure being put into it. The story is kind of surreal, the story of the label, which we don't necessarily need to go into, but it's a pretty incredible story of this relatively short lived but extremely influential label. And that is kind of how you have to do it if you're really giving it your all. It's this old school idea of what an actual, real label is, you know?
Matthew: "Goes to Bushwick." [laughter] We got our first advance and we're like, "Yeah, we'll buy $5,000 worth of plants and a 303, thank you." And then two months later all the plants are dead and they're like, "Oh, also not very many people bought your records, so you have to sell your 303 as well." We're like, "Oh, okay." [laughter]
Jack: I wonder if anybody really bought a ton of those records.
Aaron: I don't think so.
Jack: I don't think so.
Matthew: But some people probably did, you know? Not a ton, but I feel it's the weird fans in Nowheresville, me as a 15 year old. Even though that's really corny, that would be the ideal audience.
Jack: Oh yeah, always. How many records did they end up putting out in total? What do you think, 30? So you even wonder, just thinking of any label where every interesting thing is the loss leader. Or it's not even a loss leader, you just have the one artist that makes up for all the 100 records by whomever.
Matthew: But it was really fun having that kind of more formal connection to the industry.
Aaron: Well, in between that we worked with Merok, which was another cool moment.
Matthew: Those guys were super chill, they didn't micromanage anything. It was just like, "Whatever you want to do is cool."
Aaron: It was a small run, it sold out really fast. It was probably at the height of our "hype" or something.
Matthew: Merok was one of those labels from the blogosphere.
Aaron: We never even met them really.
Jack: Just all email?
Matthew: All Gmail.
Aaron: And so with Barron, it felt really different because it was family style. We were going and staying at the house for three weeks.
Matthew: Yeah, he'll come to your house, leave his phone at your house and then try to meet up with you the next day to get his phone.
Aaron: We would stay at his guest house in L.A. for weeks at a time and just eat dinner with his mom every night. It was family stuff.
Jack: You really got the full treatment!
Aaron: And there were a lot of those other artists around and overlapping and there too.
Jack: Did it feel like a real scene at the time?
Aaron: It felt a little astroturfed just because of the money and Barron being this kind of outsider savant kind of character.
Jack: Did you guys all get together with people, you know, was he bringing all of these artists around, being like, "This is the label."
Matthew: Kind of, yeah. But honestly that part felt natural. It wasn't a farm where it was like, "I need more delay. I need it now."
Jack: Yeah, the Hippos factory.
Aaron: He had a guest house in the backyard in West Hollywood that everyone would stay at. I know James [Ferraro] lived there for months. We would stay there for a summer and overlap with Dean Blunt, we knew Daniel [Fisher] from Chicago, Physical Therapy and the Nguzunguzu people.
Matthew: That was all natural, you show up and James Ferraro and Dean Blunt are playing Mortal Kombat with each other. It's like, "Do you guys have a phone charger? I need a phone charger." It was just kind of natural, honestly.
Aaron: Yeah, and we would be playing shows with them. They were kind of California illuminati a little bit, so there would be weird meetings with people that would go nowhere.
Jack: It would be, like, an investor meeting or something.
Aaron: Or some meeting with some company.
Matthew: Barron was in on the joke too, which was cool. Barron was kind of always chuckling a little bit as we were just pissing away money. He had this really kind of innocent quality to him where he did just believe in the music, as corny as it sounds. He had such a long view of it.
Aaron: He wanted to make whatever vision we had a reality.
Matthew: He was like, "I'll get paid in 2025," was kind of his mindset, which I do genuinely appreciate and respect.
Aaron: Yeah, any of that happened because of just him. His taste, but also his kind of dragon energy, the thing that doesn't stop, the thing that just keeps pushing and keeps fighting and keeps uncovering deeper layers and it felt there was no limit to what was possible there, which is the opposite of every other experience I've ever had with any other label, which is all about the limits, all about the fixed boundaries of the reality.
Jack: Here's what you can do working within this structure.
Aaron: Exactly, and with Barron it was like, "No, dream it up."
Jack: "What do you want to do?"
Matthew: He had to put up with all these people, too. A lot of these people were annoying and difficult and self-obsessed. Even we were quite demanding and self-important, you know? And Barron just took it all in stride.
Aaron: It didn't phase him. He was excited about it.
Matthew: It really didn't phase him. I never saw the guy stressed out, really.
Aaron: And I remember I would call him and we would just talk for 3 hours and I would just pitch him weird ideas that would never go anywhere and just bounce things off of him and he was just such a support of positive energy that could be filtered anywhere, it didn't really matter. It wasn't really about an authenticity thing because it felt... I say Astroturfed almost in an endearing way. Barron really wanted to make something, so he did, out of his family's money. But the reality of it was insanely wholesome, he really was listening and believing and trusting in trying to facilitate people's dreams. There was nothing cynical about his perspective on it at all.
Jack: Right. Well, he was using those resources to bring all of these people together that he saw. Whether or not these things were coalescing on their own, of these different artists working, he saw something and brought a lot of people together under this roof that he made, literally a house. [laughter] But it's a pretty amazing thing, whether or not due to lack of resources anyone has, it's pretty incredible that he used that and did that and made these connections that maybe would not have been made without it.
Matthew: He never asked us for a dime, really. I mean, there's probably some random TV shows where some of our music went up on it and maybe we don't have the rights to that. So hopefully they got paid somehow, some way, but the vibe was always like, "We'll worry about that later."
Jack: You're paying it off, it's still a loss.
Matthew: We knew we were costing him quite a bit of money.
Aaron: He did a gatefold of Exo, which is crazy. It's a beautiful pressing.
Matthew: We could talk him into almost anything at 3 a.m. and he'd be like, "Definitely happening."
Jack: It's on the books the next day.
Matthew: Totally. That was special, honestly.
Jack: He had a hand in getting you guys on festivals and doing all this stuff.
Aaron: He got us a European booking agent.
Matthew: Yeah, he could put on his little business hat, for sure, and be like, "I got you a meeting with Apple." We're like, "Cool, we'll make some crap music for Apple for a second."
Aaron: But then that never goes anywhere. It's a lot of threads, you know? Many, many, many threads. And with the Europe stuff, I remember he got a flat in London and decided to temporarily move to London while we were over there playing shows and Laurel [Halo] was there, she was on the label at the time. There was a few other people we were touring with.
Matthew: We got him to rent a fog machine from rural England.
Jack: Seems like it's a through-line, fog machine rental.
Matthew: You're like, "I need you to drive 2 hours outside the city limits."
Aaron: That was hard, fog is not as easy as in Europe, unless you're in Germany, and then you've got the fog flowing.
Jack: Yeah, there's a fog infrastructure in Germany.
Exo is the last record you made, the last full length you guys did.
Aaron: That was the last vinyl, in 2011. We did a record after that in 2014 on Lorenzo Senni's label.
Matthew: On Lorenzo [Senni]'s label Presto!? But yeah, Exo was hilarious because we had the eye of sauron, the full industry, on us being like, "Alright, please make us some italo music again, like Giza"
Jack: "We need to be able to sell this."
Matthew: We're like, "Yeah, we're thinking more sci-fi space odyssey with sound effects." We were also trying to react a little bit against everything that was so popular at the time.
Aaron: The witch house thing was something we were trying to really distance ourselves from too. It was just a corny simplification of the tropes that had been...
Matthew: It was a super digital record, very heavy on Wavestation and all those kinds of mid-'90s vibes.
Aaron: Lots of IMAX sound effects and stuff. We both saw Avatar in 2009 and that changed a lot.
Jack: Well, this is also very James's music, Spencer Clark's, this whole era.
Matthew: Yeah, it was time to change the station for a second.
Jack: I feel like the big one was Far Side Virtual, that was one of the enduring ones that has really influenced a lot of culture after that, and this is that era that you guys are in.
Matthew: We definitely got some institutional love. All our immediate friend circles were like, "Oh, this is fun, cool." And then Barron was like, "I got people writing me hate messages about this album." People literally just wanted Giza part 2 and we were like, "Yeah, but that's not interesting, that was music we made in Chicago in 2009." So yeah, people were really not happy.
Aaron: It was a full 180. It was a rug pull moment and it was a reaction to a lot of things going on at the time. I also think we didn't really have a sense of obligation to anyone or anything.
Jack: When it's this free environment, when you're given the opportunity.
Aaron: We just assumed there were always going to be people who cared.
Jack: When there's an infrastructure and money for it, it's like, "Well, there's somebody out there, it's going to be continued."
Matthew: We were kind of pranksters and also just being a bit like, "Well, we should probably make the worst thing possible or exactly what people don't want to hear."
Jack: I feel like that's a common story I've been hearing of like, "Yeah, at my absolute peak of resources and success I decided to do the exact opposite of what everybody expected and I thought it was really going to work out for me!"
Matthew: "That's when I knew it was time to make the worst record of all time." [laughter] But we don't regret it at all. I mean, it was totally the right call for where we were at in our lives at that moment.
Aaron: There was more coverage of Exo than anything else we ever did, but it was very, very mixed. I mean, mostly negative, honestly. I would say I think there was some validation we got from people we really respected.
Matthew: We got institutional love, but then all the music media was quite mixed, mostly negative. I think Pitchfork was like, "Uh, wrong answer, guys."
Aaron: We got a bad Pitchfork review. And at that time, that kind of stuff really mattered. I think it did end up, within a year or so, dissolving most of the team in terms of the booking agents. We had a U.S. booking agent and a Europe one and all that kind of all disappeared over the next year.
Matthew: Yeah, we were kind of like Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff.
Aaron: Also it was a bit practical, we would go on tour and come back and have $90 to split for the next three months or something.
Jack: But those experiences were just...
Aaron: Well, they were! I mean, those are the stories we're telling right now, you know, but we couldn't survive on that. So we both got jobs in 2014, I think.
Matthew: Yeah, I think 2014 was when we stopped... Up until then, we were on tour kind of and would just live in Williamsburg and go work out at the gym in the morning and be like, "Alright, time to resample that operatic choir."
Aaron: Or be scrappy part-timers. And then in 2014, I started working for Yamaha, where I still work, which has been a great set up for me. We have a studio and I have some regular income and I meet cool jazz musicians, you know? So we kind of had to switch gears a little bit.
Matthew: We were in our late twenties at that point too, so it's just kind of tiring, honestly.
Aaron: We spent way less time shuffling, pushing it. We would still get together but I think you and I had a bit of a falling out after being like husbands for so many years.
Matthew: Yeah, after being gay married for five years I think we were kind of annoyed.
Aaron: We were living together, we were working together, we were traveling together. We would go to the gym together, cook all our meals together, watch all our movies together. So we just got sick of each other.
Jack: Just a bit of a burnout.
Matthew: Oh, for sure. I was like, "I'm back into metal now, I'm over electronic music, it's all boring now." I think in 2014 or 2015, I moved to Florida. I was just over it a little bit. I took a year or two off. I wasn't really doing anything musically too active. I had more or less gotten a day job back in the arts, kind of smuggling art work and doing whatever weird stuff I was getting up to. Musically it was kind of a reset for me. I remember jokingly thinking, when Arca had put out one or two amazing records, that they completed the idea of the trajectory a lot of the contemporaries at the time were on. I became uninspired by electronic music maybe around 2014 or 2015 and that's when I was just like, "Alright, I'm going to get back in the metal and kind of reset a little bit and wait until I'm excited again." You don't want to just be running on a treadmill here. So that was where I was at. And then Aaron and I moved out of Williamsburg and got our own spots. We both moved to the city and then after a year or two, we were ready to be friends again.
Jack: "Let's do it." You needed a little cooling off. So with the Yamaha job, I feel that's kind of a big part of your life now, at least on one side. I'm curious, how did you get that job, first of all? And then how has that changed your relationship to music and gear and everything? It's probably a pretty big part.
Aaron: Well, my email address is aross@yamaha.com, which is very sick. I got the job on musicjobs.com, literally.
Jack: I don't know about that website! Why didn't I know about that website?! [laughter]
Aaron: This is, like, 2014. Somehow I was on this website and I got hired as an admin person at their office. It was very classical music world which I hadn't really been in at all since college. But I needed a job, took the job as the admin assistant, did all of our Young Chronos graphic design and whatever admin work there. I was using those resources. Then I was about to quit after about a year because it was just an admin job and it was kind of draining and they were like, "Oh, we're building a studio here." And I was like, "I can has studio." So I kind of convinced them to make me the studio guy there, as they were building it out, and got hired full time then and have been ever since. It's been eight years, nine years.
Jack: Well, so maybe to kind of round it off, you guys came back together at a certain point and you've been working on a new record for some time now. I'm curious about that, if you guys want to talk about after ten years almost since that last Presto!? record. What was the genesis of this? Was this over Covid, you guys were like, "We have to just do it again."
Matthew: I think honestly just being friends. This is how we hang out, we work on music together, you know? We've done a few random commercial gigs and film scores here and there together in the midterm.
Aaron: We worked on Uncut Gems in 2018 and I think that was also a fun point for us to realize that sketching and improvising and kind of starting a new song idea every time we would hang out was a much more organic way of working than hammering away at the same 32 bars for years, which is the alternate way and that's what we had been doing. We had an EP of four songs, I don't think any of them made the cut of the record because they were all overworked so heavily that we had to just toss them and be like, "Okay, something new every day," and then make 30 starts and then go find ten that are something that can be, you know... It's so much more fun! It feels like the reason you're making music is actually in the studio with you while you're making it, as opposed to just refining or hammering away at some idea that's old, that's stale. You're looking for some fresh light in and you're going to delete the thing that made it good anyway because you've lost all sense of...
Jack: You've lost the beginning, you've lost the foundation.
Aaron: Right, exactly.
Jack: So now you guys are coming closer to having a record done.
Aaron: Yes, and we started a label.
Jack: You started the label, Legendarium. What was the genesis of that? You guys just wanted to have your own imprint?
Aaron: Yeah, outside of Gatekeeper I've done a bunch of solo records and worked with other vocalists and various collaborations and things. I've worked with a lot of labels and I just didn't feel a sense of home anywhere. I kind of missed that from the Barron days of this sense of a like-minded community that doesn't really even have to do with how anything sounds, it's just a kind of philosophy. And also getting excited about how much music was getting made and then lost to history in the context of art and soundtrack world, which I know there's a few other labels that are kind of trying to do too, but there's just so much of that stuff that gets tossed. Our first release was a release of Korakrit Arunanondchai soundtrack music that a lot of our friends had worked on, the kind of scene. And then we did one of my solo records, and then the next record will be Gatekeeper. Hopefully a few Gatekeeper records. Actually, we have this full length that we've been toiling away at forever and we have this music that we've made for Luar, the fashion designer, for the last several seasons.
Matthew: Vampiric acid fashion techno floating around. We have a lot of material.
Aaron: That really should be its own release. Hopefully we'll get to do it this year. So you've got a bunch of stuff percolating for the label and, well, I don't know when any of it's going to actually happen because it's all just our timeline.
Jack: That's the beauty of the label, you just line it up.
Matthew: Yeah, I'll try to bring some scuzzier stuff in as well, you know? So it'll be a good fusion I think.
Jack: This has been great. Thank you guys so much for talking with me today.
Matthew: Of course.
Aaron: Yeah, thanks for having us. Nina forever.
Jack: Let's go. [laughter]
