For more than 15 years, Matthew S operated under various pseudonyms, including Philo T. Farnsworth, Oh Astro, Hank Hoffler, and Jane Dowe, while founding Illegal Art, an important label that challenged ideas about copyright and sample-based music. The label not only helped launch artists' careers but also celebrated those who pushed creative boundaries, most notably releasing early work by Girl Talk, which brought increased attention to the label and its philosophy.
Matthew has spent more than two decades teaching music production at the university level, where his students continue to inspire and shape his perspective on creativity, collaboration, songwriting, and technologies, including the role AI plays in art and music-making. The culmination of Matthew's hiatus into academia is the four-song Tongues EP, which mixes experimental music with intimate lyrics and live instrumentation, with some inspiration from singer-songwriters such as Sufjan Stevens.
In preparation for Tongues' release, I spoke with Matthew about the evolution from Illegal Art to Myth Math, the role anonymity once played in his work, collaborating with a former student, the creative possibilities and ethical questions surrounding AI, and why teaching has changed the way he thinks about music. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Carl: From what I understand, for around 15 years you've operated under various pseudonyms. Was there a specific moment when you realized you didn't need to be anonymous anymore?
Matthew: It's kind of a process, but let me go back a little bit. So I spent a good decade and a half, or even longer, creating experimental music. Even up until five years ago, I was still doing some, even if it wasn't being published very broadly.
But going back to before the Illegal Art label went on hiatus, somewhere around 2010-ish, I was looking to create music that had more personal meaning for me. Doing experimental music or doing sample-based music has meaning in and of itself just by the nature of pushing against the grain, but I wanted to do something that had more of a literal meaning, and so I drifted more and more toward songs. I was really interested in the singer-songwriter tradition at the time, so it made less and less sense to be anonymous. That's something that fits more within the electronic music realm, to have all kinds of monikers and do things anonymously. I felt that as I'm making more of a personal statement, it made sense to be less anonymous. Does that make sense?
Carl: Yeah, it completely makes sense. Do you think that being anonymous changes how people interpret not just your music, but Illegal Art's message in general?
Matthew: Oh, for sure. Being anonymous leaned into the transgressiveness of Illegal Art, and some of that was practical. When I started at Illegal Art, I set up a PO Box on the Vermont/New Hampshire border. It was a very small town, and I was able to set that up without ever giving my real name, which I think is usually impossible. So I was untraceable at the time, and that was intentional, because I had no idea what the fallout of putting out our album, Deconstructing Beck, would be at the time. One of the artists on the compilation Deconstructing Beck, Steev Hise, was running a server, Detritus.net, so even our email was protected from people tracing us and what we were doing.
Carl: And if I remember off the top of my head, you were Farnsworth at one point, too.
Matthew: Yeah, so I was going under the pseudonym Philo T. Farnsworth, who was the inventor of television.
Carl: And then you were also known as Oh Astro.
Matthew: Around 2005, I put out an Oh Astro CD on Illegal Art, but, at the time, I was actually going as Jane Dowe, which had two tracks on the Deconstructing Beck compilation. I did a collaborative project with Terre Thaemlitz, a queer artist who released on Mille Plateaux and made a lot of electroacoustic, ambient-type music in the '90s and into the 2000s, and in certain circles is a pretty recognized artist who has released under the name DJ Sprinkles. Terre is someone I collaborated with, and we released a CD under Jane Dowe. When I did the Oh Astro project, I was initially doing it under Jane Dowe, and then I took on the name Hank Hoffler, so I have all these different names. I also had my wife pose as Jane Dowe, so that confused things further. Even to people who knew me, it was confusing, like, "What name are you going under, and like, is this your project, or your wife's project?"
Carl: It's very elusive.
Matthew: Besides the legal reasons for doing some of that stuff, I enjoyed being semi-anonymous because it allowed me to not worry about how the project was perceived. With the early internet culture, you could have a handle, and nobody knew who was behind it.
Carl: Was there ever a specific release that you wanted to put out, but you didn't because the legal risks might have been too high?
Matthew: When Deconstructing Beck came out, I wasn't necessarily perceiving the label as a label, just kind of a pretend label, but I leaned into that dialogue about copyright and embraced the idea. We never shied away from legal things. We initially just did compilations, but once we started doing artist releases, I viewed it as kind of the mandate of the label to treat artists the same as if they were on any other label: to promote and distribute it. A lot of this kind of music existed on the fringes because of the experimental nature of it and the legality of it. Part of the mission of the label became to push things as far out as we could, not necessarily legally, but just as far as promoting it and distributing it the same way any other label would.
Carl: How much of the original philosophy from Illegal Art do you think carried over to your current project as Myth Math?
Matthew: Well, one thing that's not intentional is that artists who use samples are often operating outside of genres. So with Myth Math, it doesn't fit neatly into a genre or a current musical trend. I wouldn't necessarily call it genre-less, although some people use that term, and it might even be in our bio. But Myth Math is still kind of pulling from all these different influences, even when I'm not sampling. It's still outsider art or music, in a way, which sampling always was, because when you start using samples to create music, especially when you're almost exclusively using samples, you end up mining new territory. This was always interesting to me, and part of the reason I thought it was important to create these new forms of expression that come from using samples. It's absurd that there's this legal hindrance to it.
Carl: In "Deep Down," you repeat the phrase, "Our tongues untie," many times, and I was curious: did you start from that line and build the song around that line, or did that line come later in the creation of the song?
Matthew: It came later. The way that track evolved, and this kind of relates to your other question about the transition from Illegal Art to Myth Math, but "Deep Down" was an important song to me because a couple of the other songs, like "Lift" and "Infinity," were written earlier and were more pure songwriting without using samples. "Deep Down" was a return to sampling because I didn't have a guitar. Instead of chords and melody, it started with samples, and then my main collaborator, Mitch, who has a very sharp musical mind, was able to map chords onto the samples. And so the chord progression doesn't sound weird, but it wasn't something you would come up with just sitting at the piano or playing a guitar. Once we had that, we let the samples drift a little bit into the background.
I wrote the melody and lyrics on top of those chords and samples; it was a very intuitive process. On verse 1, I just went line by line; I was imagining a scenario in my head and painting a picture, and it just ended with that refrain, "our tongues untie," and then I repeated that refrain with each verse.
Carl: If I recall, Mitch was one of your students.
Matthew: Mitch was a student who graduated around 2021, and he was a very interesting student, and we talked a bit outside of class about music and stuff. He had a few classes with me, and he knew what I was trying to do with my music, and he offered to help because I'd been struggling to feel comfortable going from experimental production to more straightforward production. So he was a very key figure in helping me with that.
Even though I view the project as a solo project, because they're my songs and my stories, Mitch is kind of . . . well, if Myth Math was a band, he'd be the second member of the band.
Carl: Has teaching students changed the way that you make music yourself?
Matthew: Oh, for sure. I've been teaching for over 20 years now, and I'm influenced by my students. They keep me surprised by how they approach and think about music. It's different than when I was their age. The way my generation used music was a marker of identity. This ties into the idea of it being genre-agnostic because that's something that I picked up from my students. I noticed that over the years, my students were more and more eclectic in their musical interests, not just genre-wise, but also by decade. I have students who like early 2000s emo, but simultaneously, they're interested in stuff from the '60s or '70s, and then also current stuff. They're all over the map.
I grew up in a time when it was very important to define your lane, like, "I'm really into goth," or "I'm really into ska," and that was your identity. With sample-based music, it's an attempt to define another lane, a new form of music that could become its own genre. Now, in retrospect, I'm viewing it like a lot of music is a hybrid of other music that came before, and things aren't so neatly contained in genres or subgenres.
Carl: Is there anything else your students are doing naturally today that you might have actually found—for lack of a better word—radical, 20 years ago?
Matthew: That's a good question, but tough too. They have this sense of freedom, and in some ways, they just don't care how they're perceived. They are very open. They're creating music, and they're going up in front of the class and sharing it, and they're open to each other in ways that I don't think my generation was. My generation's much more judgmental, like, "Oh, that's cool," or that's not. But they're not worried about being cool. I think that's pretty radical and . . .
Carl: Refreshing, too, I'd imagine.
Matthew: Yeah. Another interesting thing is that I'm teaching music production classes, and most of my students' focus is on music. However, and I don't know if this is radical or I'm more perplexed by it, but their common language is actually video games and internet memes. Those are the things that they share in common, whereas their musical tastes may be completely disconnected from each other. I think that's a very interesting climate to be in. It's not something that I could have predicted 20 years ago.
Carl: It sounds like it's more like a collaborative environment.
Matthew: That's another interesting thing: my students aren't as interested as I still am in being the individual artist, sort of the romantic notion of the creative genius. They're more interested in collaborating and just being part of something more that's more of a collective. I wish I thought more that way, and I also saw that when I was studying in Japan. Something that I observed in Japanese culture compared to American culture is that they think more collectively, and artists there are happier to be part of a larger scene without being a genius artist. They're happy to do this type of electronic ambient music or just be part of a larger puzzle and aren't as inclined to be the guy on the front of the magazine.
Carl: So I'd imagine there's not as much gatekeeping either. It's more inclusive.
Matthew: Things may be very different now than 25 years ago when I was there, but at the time, locally and regionally, it was like that; but on a higher level, there was a certain amount of gatekeeping. It's a very weird kind of gatekeeping, in that if you were an artist, particularly if you were a Japanese artist, you were typically validated by international recognition, so if you were someone like Otomo Yoshihide, with noise music, or Merzbow that made their names outside of Japan, either in Europe or in the United States, they became kind of like this other tier. So it operated on two levels, regionally or locally, and nationally. I think there was more of this sort of collective, non-individualistic approach to music, but then artists who became recognized abroad became kind of this upper tier, similar to artists from abroad who came and visited. Those artists gained a lot of respect.
Carl: AI, I think, has to be mentioned. Do you see it as a possible artistic tool in any kind of way? And second of all, what kind of ethical questions come to your mind as far as music making and AI, and how are they intertwined?
Matthew: I think AI is interesting. It has been part of music since computers appeared. You can go back to the early days of computers, and people, particularly in academia, were feeding things like Mozart into computers, and then having computers generate Mozart-like pieces. Music has been intertwined with AI and with algorithms for a long time. Computer-based music and electronic music have been very comfortable in this realm. But this newer moment of AI is presenting problems that people didn't even think about. I'm perplexed by it, because I am very sympathetic to the environmental concerns.
Carl: Oh, yeah, definitely.
Matthew: And there are a lot of ethical concerns with this newer iteration of AI. I'm both troubled by it and simultaneously thinking there are creative possibilities. I don't think we should ignore the possibilities to enhance our creative expression because of all the potential problems, particularly coming from sampling, where that was always viewed and is still sometimes viewed as problematic. I think sampling has advanced certain types of creative expression. I think it's just a matter of time, hopefully, that artists figure out how we can approach AI in a way that doesn't cause more harm to the world and to other artists. I think it's a quandary that hopefully some creative artists can solve, and some artists are approaching it. I'm not an expert on this, but I've seen examples of artists running an AI model on their own material and on their own computer. They're not using some huge database to process everything. And so there are ways to approach it that are reasonable. But in this moment, there's such a strong, and I think warranted, negative reaction to it.
The university where I teach doesn't want to get left behind; we need to embrace it. On the other hand, the students don't want to be doing AI. They view the problems as significant enough, and this is very much a generalization because there are students who are probably more pro-AI, but the feeling I get from my students is they're scared of AI, that it will take away their jobs and their future and destroy civilization as we know it. And I think it's pretty good that they're cautious about it because it's threatening to swallow us, pretty much.
Carl: I think approaching it with balance is good, but it's encouraging that so many young minds are as cautious as you say they are. Anyway, I wanted to get back to songwriting. I read that you were inspired by Sufjan Stevens and just wanted to know what about him was inspiring? And were there any other artists?
Matthew: I think I just connected to him emotionally, and his lyrics are very potent. Rock or pop music is often just stringing together words that kind of sound good or cool, or that have one-dimensional, love-type meaning, but with Sufjan Stevens, at least, my perception is that he's digging pretty deep to express something personal. I think that's what attracted me to him. He's a good songwriter, he's a good musician, his arrangements are sharp, and he can change from album to album.
Some of his albums have a folk-type sound, acoustic and with acoustic instruments; he's also done things like his Age of Adz album, which is more electronic and pretty far out there. Some of the tracks are several minutes long and go off on tangents. And so he has some experimental leanings. Seeing artists like that, who can blend electronics . . . because I was always interested in approaching songwriting as an electronic musician, so being able to create music that embraces the full possibilities of electronics is interesting.
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