It's still a benchmark for what I aim for in terms of overall sound and feel. I don't think it's necessarily my best piece, but it's the one that started Matt Clark Three. Your favorite recording in your discography and why? I think it's probably "North Street 74" from my first EP, North Of No South (Self Released, 2020). I remember the sound (and sound crew) being pretty rubbish, but the atmosphere was fantastic with a really open-minded crowd. Bands played in the backyard and under a railway arch. The Pump and Tap in Leicester, England, was a spit-and-sawdust biker dive in the West End, a hive of live music in the mid-'90s with all sorts of music every night. Favorite venue Unfortunately, my favorite venue was razed to the ground to make way for a sports center. I'd love to collaborate with him on a duo album. The piano is almost used as a percussion instrument, and the tunes are based around simple grooves or motifs similar to my writing at the moment. I recently bought Buy The Numbers (Potions Music NYC, 2020) by Harry James, a solo album of him playing drums and piano. Your dream band I'm not sure I have a dream band, as my ideas are always fluid and developing, but at the moment, I'd love to jam with some of the Chicago avant-garde guys: Rob Mazurek, Dave Rempis, Chad Taylor, and Jeff Parker. That finds its way back into my playing and connects the diatonic bits.sometimes. I also practice completely free-form passages without regard to any scales. But when you get into their music, it's not! This made me think about how I play and led me to seek an off-kilter sound—as atonal as possible without straying outside a scale or mode. Listening to guitarists like Marc Ribot and Mary Halvorson, the music initially sounds really random. It also imploded quickly, but that was it: I was hooked! Your sound and approach to music I've consciously avoided playing jazz standards. I started a band in my final year that took off quickly with record and management deals on the horizon. I'd been playing guitar for around five years at that point but never really seriously. I was at art college and got tired of the pretentiousness of the whole thing. When I heard the first Chicago Underground Quartet, it felt like these guys were speaking the same language as me, and that gave me a lot of courage to continue with my own explorations of mixing different sounds. I love the interplay of jazz and electronics on those recordings. I've recently been heavily influenced by Rob Mazurek's Chicago Underground releases. Miles's book Fundamentals of Guitar (Mel Bay Publications, 2015) remains a constant resource. I've learned a lot in terms of developing my style and composition through lessons and interviews with them. I also love Mary Halvorson and Miles Okazaki. Teachers and/or influences I got into jazz guitar when I heard Marc Ribot. I tend to use Logic for composing, and most of my recent music has included some form of samples or loops. I'd also class my home recording setup as an instrument. It's a quirky guitar, but it has something special that I've never found in an off-the-shelf instrument. I also have a Telecaster Deluxe that I built myself. It was in pretty poor shape when I bought it, so I've completely rewired it and installed some hand-wound pickups that are much mellower than the stock ones and closer in sound to P90s. Instruments My main instrument is a Fender Jaguar—not a typical jazz guitar by any stretch! I like the short scale length, and it's comfortable to play. Since then, I've always been turned on by angular, offbeat guitar players, which ultimately led me to Marc Ribot and Mary Halvorson. The music has been described as "an ambulatory soundscape evoking big-city panoramas, twilight vistas, and populational bustle" or "a dynamic sonic quality, as if a laid-back street-level musical trio were performing their own structured and improvised material but also incorporating the ephemeral swell of sounds around them." I've been into avant-garde music since the early '90s, when I was listening to a lot of psychedelic bands. Lockdown restrictions and an underlying need to get out have led me to create sounds that blur the boundaries between recorded and live music. I'm currently working under the moniker "Matt Clark Three," a primarily solo project of jazz-influenced grooves combining lo-fi loops and samples with avant-garde jazz. Lack of live music and in-person collaboration has meant rethinking my musical output. The year of COVID-19 and lockdown has been both testing and inspiring. My career has spanned 35 years, encompassing genres as broad as jazz, blues, alternative, experimental, and electronic music. Meet Matt Clark I'm a guitarist and composer from Brighton, England.
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