Matthew Pryce – An Xperience Interview

Matthew Pryce – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.

There is nothing like the joy of putting together a solo music project. You are limited to the equipment you use, your skill, and your imagination. Artist Matthew Pryce has just undergone the joys of the sonic birthing process, and he joins us to talk about his baby, his latest release, Wizard Music, released on October 21^st.

RRX: Tell me a little bit about Wizard Music that’s coming out.

MP: This is maybe my 7th album overall, but it’s my first solo effort. I did all of these, I wrote everything. I sang all the songs, I played all the instruments. There’s a couple of friends who added a few little bits and pieces, some backup vocals, one guitar solo on one of the songs, but primarily I did all of this for production: writing, performing, editing, mastering, the whole nine yards. It’s an interesting experimental learning process, I suppose. I’m still pretty new to working in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), and I’m learning lessons as I go. And as a result, I think the songs that I engineer and record chronologically later are better because I take with me the learning of how to better use the software.

RRX: So with the recording hardware and software, the DAW, doing it in that process; you’ve played many times, you play by yourself, you played in jams, you had the Purple Stuff. You’ve been all over and done all the different variations of how to do this. Do you think that putting everything together yourself allows you not only to geek out on the music, but also to geek out on the tech? Did you feel that? Did you feel like, as you’re learning this new stuff, it’s almost like that’s just as exciting as actually putting the music together? Did you find that at all?

MP: No, it’s tedious, man. I would rather write and perform rather than pour over things like MIDI tracks and adjust velocity and try different things and sound out how drum fills should feel naturally and then experiment to try other things. This is a mixture of digital and uh analog drums and I would much prefer to be the guy with just the instrument in my hand, rather than sitting at the computer and adjusting things. It’s fascinating to have an education in this, learning about how plugins work and how to EQ your tracks and what songs, you know, how, how to pan things so it sounds spatial and work within dynamics so it could get quiet, not in terms of dynamics, but not volume or vice versa. It’s fascinating to know and learn about all this sort of stuff, but I would much rather just play guitar solos.

RRX: There is a unique aspect when you do a solo project, especially when you’re doing all the instruments, is that at some point, you’re pushing Wizard Music out there. But you can’t yourself get on stage and perform it because you can’t play all those instruments yourself, obviously. Do you have plans on getting other people to learn the songs and then taking them on stage, or do you look at this purely as you’re pushing this music as something for people to buy and get on Spotify or whatever?

MP: So you did allude to Purple Stuff and I’ve played lots and lots of solo shows, and I’ve been in cover bands, original bands, metal and punk bands, jam bands, jazz trio, solo piano, solo acoustic. I’ve done Hawaiian music with ukulele. You name it, I’ve plugged it into an amp and performed it for some degree of live audience, adoring or otherwise. For this stuff, I don’t have any immediate plans to play live. I certainly could arrange these songs in a way that I could do them solo because typically when I played solo, I, I brought a series of keyboards and drum machines in addition to guitars, basses, mandolins, and stuff, some combination thereof. So there’s no doubt that I could arrange these songs in a way that they could be performed in a solo arrangement, but I’m not sure that I’m going to do that. I looked at this sort of like a Steely Dan kind of project where they just sort of played in the studio and that’s kind of what this exercise has been. I actually ended up with more songs than, than I thought was necessary, so I divided them into two and this Wizard Music album, which came out on the 21st of October, is mostly psychedelic jam band type of stuff, some dream pop. It’s all kind of experimental, a lot of fun guitar effects, things like that, you know, interesting arrangements and experimental sounds. But I also had a whole crop of songs that’s a little bit more punky, a little bit more folky, acoustic kind of based, more inspired by, say, Neil Young, Woody Guthrie, and some other punk type acts. And it’s a little bit more rustic. So I decided to divide them in half and I will have a second album coming out that’s a little bit less refined, a lot more political, a little bit more inspired by, say, Neil Young than compared to this one which has elements of Pink Floyd and Moe, Grateful Dead, Phish, Frank Zappa, that sort of thing on this one. So, you know, I do like to mix it up. I play all the instruments and I have a wide array of inspirations. I draw from all of them.

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