Though this is ostensibly a feature on Matt Wright, a lot of what follows will be about other people. Such is the life of a turntablist: Wright has spent his career weaving in and out of other people’s work. But it’s also just the way Wright does things; currently stowed away in a wooden-box studio attached to the end of his garden in Canterbury, he is decidedly out of the limelight, finishing off work on his new piece Locked Hybrids. Pulled from hours of material he recorded with legendary saxophonist Evan Parker, the work finds Wright retooling his improvisations into new shapes, thinking up ways to sample the endless archive of freewheeling improvisations he’s been given. ‘Making mirrors’, he calls it – he’s here to design the set and adjust the lights, giving Parker’s music something new to revel in.
A generous, thoughtful artist who has spent so much of his career listening, talking to Wright brings to life the music of everyone around him. You get intel on how to make the best edits on other artists’ work. You get reasons why certain improvisers are so special to work with. You get stories about how certain musicians have taught him new ways of approaching production. To dust off an old cliché, he is a teacher getting taught. Though he now lectures in composition and sonic art to students at Canterbury Christ University, he still finds himself learning from the artists he plays music with. Wright has been collaborating with Evan Parker, a stalwart of the UK’s experimental underground, since 2008. Through the saxophonist’s approach to playing his instrument, Wright has found new ways to approach production, drawing a line between Evan’s techniques and his. ‘Evan taught me to have sensitivity to frequency, to make sure all the bandwidths are alive, and that there’s variety and vitality in all levels of a mix. And also that transitions happen in so many different ways – that you can make sudden contrasts where you can almost hear the bar line’.
Wright met Parker in 2008, inviting the saxophonist to work on a new piece with his students. Before their first workshop, the duo developed some work together, playing with their set-up of turntables, laptop and saxophone. Parker enjoyed the way their music connected so much that he invited Wright to make something in the studio, and a serendipitous collaboration began. From this original session, the duo have continued to improvise together, eventually evolving their turntable-sax duo into Trance Map, for sax, record scratch, field recording and live processing. It’s since been expanded into Trance Map+, which doubles up the roster with a variety of musicians, including Toma Gouband, Peter Evans, Hannah Marshall, Barry Guy, Mark Nauseef, Spring Heel Jack and Adam Linson.
For Wright, Trance Map has been an incredible experience for both the improviser and producer in him. In fact, he’s found familial links between those two disciplines: ‘With improvisation you always listen for the music as it emerges, to what it could be. Even if the focus is on something in the middle of the texture, if you hear something on the outside, you might anticipate it as the next moment’. Wright has followed these connections, implementing improvisation into mixing and recording. When he puts together recordings of his work with Parker, he aims for certain guiding pathways for the listener – a high pitch at the top of the mix might lead the listener out of an anchored middle texture. In other cases, he might throw a curveball, sharply contrasting our expectations with something entirely new.
Wright has appeared in a lot of Parker performances, whether as a duo or in one of his frenzied, large-scale ensembles. He’s one on a longlist of horn players that Wright has played music with. Talking to him, he takes the time to run down his Top 4 Most Important Saxophone Players, crediting Andy Scott, Eric Sleichim, Keir Neuringer and Evan Parker as being artists who have both supported his work and helped him unlock new ideas. It’s not just the sound of the instrument that Wright appreciates, but the ‘mentality’, the hard creative graft that comes with being an improviser. As a soloist, there are fewer ready-made projects. There’s less repertoire to hide behind. ‘One of the reasons I work with these guys is the mentality of inventing and having to keep creating concepts. They have to work actively with composers’. He puts percussionists in the same bracket, nodding to his interest in playing against ‘hungry’ musicians who have to make their own stuff. And he’s keen to point out his numerous collaborations with Ensemble Klang, who have long nurtured his experimental spirit.
This leads us to Locked Hybrids, which has been made and then made again. Wright initially created a larger version of the project for the Relative Pitch label, encompassing his take on session recordings made with Parker, as well as with percussionists Mark Nauseef and Toma Gouband. A shorthand version for hcmf// sees him use just recordings of Parker, linking together their music in a new, slightly uncanny way. It’s the same old duo, but virtual, with Parker giving Wright free reign to do what he will to his recordings. It’s something of a challenge, considering the ‘relentlessly evolving’ way Parker plays; ‘he has a dialectic with his instrument which makes it evolve like a river’, Wright says, aware of the slightly strange thing he’s doing by restructuring the improvisations as they emerge.
The solution is found in DJing. Wright has no interest in trying to recreate Parker: ‘he does that enough for himself!’ he says’. Instead, Wright works with the music like he’s in the mix, stood over his digital audio workstation surveying his next move. It’s how he plays out, a lot of the time, taking things and splicing them together into a barrage of new expressions. With Parker’s music, Wright reckons it will give listeners the chance to hear things that aren’t immediately possible when listening to Parker acoustically. One of his recorded versions of Locked Hybrids, for instance, takes two notes on the saxophone and time-stretches them to nearly twenty minutes. You’ll hear Parker, but also how Wright hears him, his production revealing the joy of listening to listening.
Is Wright composing or improvising or producing or mixing? Mostly he’s just paying attention. He started out his career with notated music but just happened upon software samplers as they entered the frame, becoming more common in composition. Playing around with electronic tools, he discovered common sensibilities between his writing and the idea of sampling, contemplating a kind of contemporary music that could be based around sound banks. He has since been drawn to the idea of ‘little chunks of material’, the idea of focusing in with the precision of sampling, applying it to what you’d give to a contemporary ensemble. It’s how pieces like 2020’s Rebirth have come about; Wright rummaged through his drawers and found old sheets of music he’d written and then condemned to the bottom of an anonymous pile.
The message isn’t just that Wright likes to start projects and then conveniently lose them in his studio. It’s more that he can find a way to put lost things together, turning cutoffs from scrap to sound. Rebirth went missing and then got made in the same way Locked Hybrids will, its constituent parts reanimated after years of nothing. And though it stems from some very specific collaborations by a unique set-up of musicians, Locked Hybrids is as relatable as 2020 gets. It exists because Wright used lockdown to go and find any object in his house that could be unlocked.
Locked Hybrids will be released on Relative Pitch Records on November 20. You can order it from their Bandcamp page.