“When I grew up, all my friends had these little Tomy mono cassette players,” he says. “Like a kid's tape player. They were brown. Made for five-year-olds. I always really wanted one. My parents refused to buy me one because the sound quality was so shit.
“They were like, 'we don't want you experiencing music on something that sounds like shit, because that's not what music is about'. I was lucky, I guess, that they had those kind of values. It's still the norm now though. Everybody wants to listen to music that is half the bitrate and just consume it like fast food.”
Jonson chats freely and quickly, like he wants to get all his ideas out there at once. Just don't get him started on chart music.
“I can't even listen to the radio anymore, at all. Pop
ecstasy and speed their whole lives. They might want to listen to music that they can enjoy without those things.”
THE BEGINNING But back to the beginning. Though many producers would dearly love to say they were doing the same, Jonson was fully immersing himself in the language of midi at the age of 9. “It wasn't by any means professional equipment,” he says, as if to temper the fact somehow. “But because it was so basic, it was perfect for someone who was nine-years-old to learn on because there were so many limitations.”
His father is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, his mother and her side of the family, all classical music buffs. “We grew up with a harpsichord in the house,” he says. “I don't think I've even seen another harpsichord
“They hated it! It drove them insane!” he recalls. “I'd come home from school, the equipment would go on, and I'd hit record on the tape player and start making music. When I first got the equipment, it would be like after an hour or a couple of hours that my mom would be shouting 'Mathew put the headphones on!' Eventually, that turned into about five minutes. After about six years of that, they just had zero patience. Listening to someone playing the same loop over and over and over for hours while they're writing is totally annoying. I wouldn't want to have to listen to it either. It must have been maddening.”
ROCKIT The music he was constructing at the time was basically anything to do with breakdancing. He heard Herbie Hancock's 'Rockit' on the TV and was transfixed.
music and EDM is almost exactly the same thing as far as I'm concerned these days,” he says. “Because of the all the plug-ins people are using, pop music has that same sound and same feeling as all this dance music. It's all super-compressed, super-loud, super-abrasive. Instead of having nice, warm synths, they all super- bright, the filters are wide open and everything is screaming.”
With EDM now pervasive in both the US clubs and the US charts, it's certainly hard to avoid 'the screaming'. That said, Jonson does see benefits coming down further down the line.
“I've no problem if people are into those sounds, because that means there's going to be this huge audience of people who are going to dig around, dig down and find the real gold underneath, find their own tastes, especially after they realize that they can't do
since.” His dad, now a guitar dealer and musician in New Zealand, plays around 20 instruments – as well as the guitar, mildly obscure folk-based things like the hammer dulcimer and the tin whistle. He educated him in everything from blues legend Robert Johnson to Brit electric folk types Steeleye Span.
When he was seven, his mum and dad sat him down and said perhaps, instead of taking all the pans out of the cupboard every day and battering them with chopsticks, he'd like to join a marching band. So that was that. And then a year or two later it was piano lessons. He still counts himself incredibly lucky at just how supportive they were of his early leanings towards music. Still, that didn't mean that they were necessarily sympathetic to the sounds coming from their basement in Victoria, British Columbia, where he set up what might loosely be described as his first studio.
But then it was gone and he had no way of finding out what it was. So he tried to make it himself. “I heard it on TV and I was like 'what the fuck was that?' and immediately went to try and recreate it on my sequencer. It was the only way that I could listen to the song,” he says.
He'd also try and copy the hip-hop he'd hear on MTV. “It was like I was remixing this music, like Bell Biv Devoe with classical piano,” he says. “I was obsessed with all that. Like Chaka Khan, everything in Breakdance The Movie, then trying to recreate it on my synthesizer.”
Though adept, he was never interested in academia. “In fact I was totally not interested in school. I was interested in girls and music,” he says. Such was his parents' support for his music that they turned over his whole college fund that they had been saving for
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