in Vacuo | Matthew Dotson

“For better or worse, in Vacuo (to be cut off from context or suspended in a vacuum) is a pandemic record. Although I’ve been interested in taking symbols and genres out of their original form and re-contextualizing them for some time, in Vacuo is the first time that I have went into such depth (with the possible exception of my vaporwave explorations on Sublimation….also released on ADT). I’m going to focus on the first track New Life Plaza because I think it is indicative of a similar process which happens opaquely elsewhere on the album. The title itself is an abstraction of a place that I worked at briefly in the San Gabriel Valley….lifted and transported in a vaporwave-esque way. The track itself, however, is nothing like vaporwave. The initial sound is a taiko practice-drum played in my empty apartment. I have been involved in taiko drumming on and off for the last five years or so as a means of staying physically connected with music (electronic music can be pretty abstract…hence this write-up). Once the pandemic hit we were given the option to take some practice drums home with us and do some virtual lessons. Although this never really happened (I succumbed to the same pandemic apathy and diffusion as everyone else) the sound of the drum was striking to me in that not only was it an incredibly bland sound that would basically just activate the space it occupied, its being played solo (taiko is rarely a solo instrument…it is actually antithetical to its purpose) was a poignant reminder of COVID isolation. I wanted to start with this swing-ji base pattern as it recalled the opening to my previous album Auto-Pilot in its droning forward momentum. What follows are allusions (some direct and fairly humorous, [I hope] and some more hidden) to jazz, baroque, VGM, “electronic”, and other forms that I culled together from a large amount of written-material (there is only one sample on this album and it is an in-theatre microcassette recording of Star Wars Episode 1 [lol]). My intention was to harken back to a late-90’s “high-post-modernism” as a way of escaping from the suffocating non-movement of pandemic life. My hope is that this is a pleasant bit of escapism for listeners and rewards in-depth as well as casual listening.”
– Matthew Dotson, 2022

ClientMatthew DotsonServicesMasteringYear2022