Drew Daniel
Where are you now?
I’m at home in Baltimore.
Where would you be ?
So far academic / personal trips to Denver, Colorado and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Ellsworth, Maine do not exist anymore, so plenty of work travel for conferences and talks won’t happen. The same goes for festival performances for Matmos across Europe and the United States and solo performances for The Soft Pink Truth that won’t happen. Pretty much all of the next four or five months just got vaporized.
What have you been doing lately?
Every day has a very ritualized set of routines. I make coffee, take medication, make breakfast, feed the cat, work on academic stuff or music stuff, make lunch, go for some kind of walk outside with a mask on and keeping a distance from everyone, come home, work on academic stuff and/or musical stuff and maybe do some fake ass version of “working out” that I make up, make dinner with Martin, watch some kind of film or program, go back to working / reading, do some brushing up on my Latin with language software, watch another movie, get in bed, read, go to sleep, and repeat. It seems to speed up the rhythm of these endlessly interchangeable days that they are on a kind of tight but totally self-imposed schedule.
What are you hearing right now?
I am listening to the birds and cars outside my window in front of the hospital, which has a helicopter landing pad on its roof and which, with, increasing frequency has helicopters bringing critically ill people in for care.
Are you taking advantage of this containment period to make music?
For the first two weeks, not at all. I was just dog paddling, as we say in English, barely getting across the emergency “to do” list from work and absorbing home-related tasks, or just numbing myself. I was mostly recording 11 hours of lectures on Shakespeare and then editing them with Martin and uploading them for my students. But then I became inspired to start to make field recordings during my daily walks, and I started a new piece at home as well. So it took time, but now I am using this time to make music again.
How will the world be after all this?
I have hopes and fears. My hope is that people are reminded of how much they can live without, and of what really matters (health, love, community, collective belonging and care), and that people’s relationship to the state shifts towards an anarchist, self-led, community-based approach. It would be great if people realized that “normal” wasn’t working well and was actually bad for us all, and so we started to want different things out of the rhythms of our lives. My fear is that there will be a collective amnesia, or even a backlash: it will polarize US/China relations or prompt a worldwide economic depression that furthers fascist and authoritarian demagogues who promise to punish imaginary “enemies” and to shore up ethno-nationalist narrowness. It could go really well or really badly, in other words.
How can we support the music community?
I have “attended” virtual quarantine concerts where you can donate to artists and chat with other members of the virtual audience. I have also bought a LOT of music on Bandcamp, which cuts in artists more directly than streaming platforms. So giving attention and money, basically.
Five musical recommendations ?
Costin Miereanu “Luna Cinese” (1975)
Human Flesh “A Collection of Ambiant Music” (1986)
Mauve Sideshow “Mauve Sideshow” (1993)
Id M Theft Able “Endless Blooper” (2011)
Khaki Blazer “Coco Nara Deezer” (2016)
A book ?
Is it pretentious if I say Spinoza’s “Ethics”? I have been reading George Eliot’s translation and it is very moving to return to it. It’s always confounding, brilliant, alien, provocative, demanding, worthwhile. So, yeah, read that.
What will you do when you're out?
I hope I don’t go back to being the stressed out pompous self important mess I used to be? But I probably will.
Links:
https://matmos.bandcamp.com/music
