Matt & Kim : Interview

Where: Camden, London

For any fans out there of abrupt, electronic based pop with tinges of punk and hip-hop, then the severely underrated thus far dynamics of boy-girl duo Matt and Kim need to be heard.  Adhering to a genuine DIY stance, they have nurtured an army of fans throughout the USA and Europe through relentless touring, simple word of mouth and 2 very different album releases.

The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn was the conception of the duo in more ways than one.  After chasing down her man, Matt and Kim became romantically involved before they even started laying down the foundations for their musical project.  Then after inheriting a hand me down drum kit and purchasing a keyboard, the duo, were immediately booked to play various warehouse parties around New York.  All the while sketching out various demos and initiating the sound that they would become synonymous for. 

Now, 2 albums later, the most recent being the 11-track pop-punk spirited ‘Grand’, which elevates the principles of simplicity in music, yet succeeds in taking the listener on an uplifting journey across life-embracing sensibilities.  It’s not rocket-science by any means but works on a brilliant level and what Matt and Kim add to the live environment is nothing short of adrenaline inducing.  Loud with a punk-esque delivery courtesy of Matt’s unrelenting vocal in it’s American accented glory and underpinned by Kim’s frantic beats and toy-like keys.  It’s a vehement assault on ear drums and one that can’t fail to leave a smile firmly etched across your face.  Unless of course you like to be miserable.  But that’s an important point in the context of Matt and Kim because on their flying one show visit to London recently, they practically raised the roof on the Old Blue Last, notorious for it’s hipster values and too-cool-for-school Londoners who would rather raise an eyebrow than their arms in the air.  On this occasion however, arms were raised, crowd surfing encouraged and the venue became a sweaty hotbed of dance and lo-fi punk with an overwhelming sense of exhilaration.

Anthemic, hook laden, floor-filling and just plain fucking addictive. Matt and Kim are this years antidote to the utterly shit economic climate and the depressive nature of every single news day.  For me that’s an exciting prospect.

4or The Record met up with the couple during their 48 hours in London at very plush Camden apartment courtesy of their new label Nettwork and conducted what was quite possibly our favourite interview ever. Enjoy.

4TR: Before we start I have to say last nights show was epic by any standards, did you enjoy it as much as the crowd did?
Kim: Oh God yeah definitely, it was such a nice way to end the tour.
Matt: It was like one of those things at the end of the movie when all hell breaks loose, when you think everything is dead but then it just rises out of the ashes.  We had a hell of a day yesterday.  Just from sleeping 2 hours and flying in from Bergen and then having so many things get broken and going wrong.
Kim: Yeah on that flight they killed the amp and the keyboard.
Matt: And then we show up and there were no lights in the venue because someone had stolen the thing that turns the lights on, so when they were trying to fix that they made the whole sound system in the venue break.  So even until an hour before we played they were like we might have to move the show [laughs].  But there was such a good vibe, oh my god It was so hot, I wasn’t joking when I said I hadn’t sweated like that on the entire tour, literally if I had jumped in a swimming pool with all my clothes on it would have been exactly the same. 

4TR: So you guys met whilst studying at the Pratt Institute, but were a couple first and foremost before you started making music as Matt & Kim?
Matt: Yeah it was the Pratt Institute in 2002 and Kim was hollering at me a lot.
Kim: Oh yeah, I hollered and hollered and hollered.
Matt: Vulgarly, but she did and I was intimidated by her, [laughing] she was an older woman with tattoos so I was kind of scared.
Kim: In the most hot way right?
Matt: Oh yeah, and then 2 years later we actually started making music or noise together.
Kim: I basically wanted to learn how to play drums, and Matt had this cool keyboard, actually it was the cool keyboard that broke last night…
Matt: It has been like my fucking rock, that thing just never breaks and then at Gatwick airport Jesus Christ it broke.
4TR: is it irreparable?
Matt: [Laughing] No I fixed it, I was like what do I do, I mean I’m no electronics whizz but 40 years ago things were pretty simple.  So I opened it up and there was a couple of hamsters on wheels in there and one was dead so I just replaced the hamster and we were back on track again [laughs].  But we were just screwing around and making noise and a friend who was in a band found out and made us play a show in the basement of this art gallery in Queens when we didn’t actually have any songs, or even a name.
Kim: Yeah but the fact that we didn’t have a band name meant the promoter just put us down as Matt and Kim and it kind of just stuck.
Matt: Yeah we really struggled with the name thing.  It’s so hard to come up with a band name, its like coming up with your child’s name or something.

4TR: So what inspired you musically at the very beginning and are they the same inspirations now?
Matt: At the time it was more about the shows we were going to or the bands that would be playing at parties,where people would just go and be brown bagging and it was just about going to have fun.  So that gave us a more upbeat kind of party thing, which stuck.
Kim: But what influences us is basically top 40 Hip Hop and Pop Punk and I think we fit in the middle.
Matt: For a while we were having a tough time pinpointing our genre because we played with a lot of different kinds of bands, like we toured with Against Me and it worked, we did a tour with Girl Talk who is like a DJ and that worked, then there was a hip hop band Cool Kids and we also toured with Cut Copy who is more of a dance band.  So it just seems that anywhere people want to go and have fun and get wild that’s where our music fits.  It’s something more than genre; it’s about some sort of energy.

4TR: You have just put out your sophomore record ‘Grand’ in June, which was self-funded and self-produced.  Would you say things have evolved sound wise since the first record, or are you still channeling the same sound just at a more mature level?
Matt: No its very different; in a way it has that same energy we had on the first recording but we wrote very differently then, I mean this time we have had a couple of years to work on stuff.  We wanted to get more diverse but we didn’t have any time or any money for the first one and we were just in the studio for 9 days, but for ‘Grand’ we spent most of a year we were working on it whenever we weren’t touring.  If you go to our I-Tunes music page there’s a bunch of reviews of our first album and people were saying I like the album but you gotta see them to get it and it was true.  So I wanted something that would stand on its own, so we thought about the songs as recorded songs as opposed to the others which were live songs that we recorded.  People always talk about getting that live energy on the recording but its not like that, you cant play louder or faster or drunker and have the energy of a live thing, you just have to write differently and its very common that your best recorded song and your best live song aren’t the same thing.  Like when I go to a show I like to go to punk rock shows where people get crazy, but when I listen to recorded music I listen to mostly hip hop just because of the way they translate.
Kim: Except that T.I show was pretty epic.
Matt: Yeah that’s because you were drooling.  We were at this Diesel 30th anniversary party and we had a friend who was djing with M.I.A, so we were just hanging out on the stage and there were all these secret guests.   We are both big T.I fans especially Kim and then he came on and it was like Beatles Mania with her.
Kim: I was an arms length away from him but I couldn’t look over I was so nervous.
4TR: Did you talk to him?
Kim: [Smiles] Hell no, I was scared.  The thing is if you are really psyched on a band or an artist, like I love all his albums, so I think if I met him and he was an asshole it would crush it for me and that would be hours of music that I wouldn’t want to listen to anymore.  So I wouldn’t ever want to meet him and ruin it.
Matt: [Laughing] Spoken like a true fan girl.

4TR: How does the lyrical writing process work?
Kim: It’s bizarre, but this time we figured out how to do it finally.  Basically lyrics come last for us.

Matt: It’s so god damn hard, like I used to think people like Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam you don’t even play an instrument you’re just singing and you just write the words and that’s bullshit man, you’re such a poser, but now I've learnt that singing is one of the hardest things in the god damn world to do and writing the lyrics is the second hardest thing so Eddie Vedder I believe in you [laughs].

4TR: Do you both write?
Kim: Well I’ll listen to the songs and just from what I feel from them I write down pages and pages of one-liners – they don’t have to mean anything to the one above it and they don’t rhyme. Then I give them to Matt and he goes through and picks out the stuff that means something to him, adds lines in between and that’s kind of how the song will come together.
Matt: It just works better, we think much more from a compositional stand point, like a beat and a melody, the whole rhythm and stuff, so the song essentially ends up writing its own lyrics and makes its own meaning in the end.  Hopefully that meaning can then mean different things to different people.  We don’t write songs about boys and girls and shit like that, because sometimes they seem so deliberate, whereas our way gives us specific ideas and sentences which we piece together make it accumulate to one main idea.  It also suits our personalities, because Kim is the doer and I’m the dreamer.  Kim is take care of shit 24 hours a day and cant relax unless she is doing things, me I will just sit of the couch and stare at the ceiling if I have the time.  But on the other hand while she is the doer she doesn’t like to dwell on things, so will write these pages but not edit it down, but I’ll write like one word and then get so god damn hung up on that word I cant move on and the song will never get finished, so I think we use the best of what we can both do.

4TR: Lets talk about your videos, which all stem from quite imaginative concepts – is that all Matt & Kim’s work? 
Kim: [Laughing] they are all Matt’s ideas basically.
Matt: Well I went to film school and Kim did fine art, so they are both interesting to us but we cant do them unless they are related to the band because we have no more time in the day, so I get excited when it comes to videos.  But another helpful crutch we’ve had is that we never have much money to do it, so we have to be imaginative and call in favours and stuff like that.

4TR: ‘Lessons Learned’ specifically, which shows you both essentially streaking through Times Square in the day, has become a bit of a cult classic on sites like You Tube so must have introduced you to a wider audience.  How hard was that to film?
Matt: [Laughing] Well we did have a permit to shoot in Times Square that said ‘2 tourists walk through times square dressed inappropriately for the weather’.
Kim: But we couldn’t tell the permit office that it was for a music video, its not allowed for some reason.
Matt: I don’t know it was a pain in the ass to get that permit but it saved our ass as well because the cops kept coming up to us when we did the rehearsal takes before we shot it properly.  And then all these tourists kept coming up and looking because they thought it was a big movie shoot or something.
Kim: I don’t ever want to do that again, it was awful.
Matt: It took a lot of convincing on my behalf to get Kim to do it, actually I was even surprised that she agreed in the end.

4TR: To get naked somewhere like Times Square is a very brave thing to do.
Kim: Well if you watch the video I am in a blank out state, I really don’t remember doing it because I was so nervous and so terrified.  Total deer in headlights.

4TR: You have had some great press coverage from the single ‘Lessons Learned’ and subsequently the album ‘Grand’, so things seem to be amping up second time round – have you noticed a difference?
Matt: Yeah definitely, but it’s just really nice to have a proper partner on this release, which is Nettwerk. Our last release really just fell through the cracks, nothing was really set up and even the warehouse that distributed it last time went bankrupt and seized all of our records. So you think when you put something online that it’s out, but there’s so much online that its like the fucking universe and unless someone is saying look at that star there, you are never going to see it because there is 500 billion of the mother fuckers out there.  So we realised you need someone to help you pull it out from the masses of other things there are.

4TR: You produced ‘Grand’ yourselves, so it's 100% your baby from start to finish!
Kim: Oh yeah, it was like 9 months and then it just popped out.
Matt: Hey, nothing popped out, that thing was like breach and there were c-sections and it was dragged out.  You know they say the things you work hardest on are the things you are most proud of in the end and we worked so hard on this on all levels, not just with the writing but all aspects of editing and mixing and things we knew nothing about but learned along the way.
Kim: I will say that Matt kicked ass, he said we’re going to do this ourselves, I’m going to spend a shit ton of money and buy a lot of stuff and just figure it out and he did a really good job.
Matt: The thing was we didn’t want anyone breathing over our shoulder because we knew it was going to be a bit different to our first recording and didn’t want to do things conventionally.  So we did a lot of things the wrong way and I think that made it come out with the personality it now has, especially because we were so open minded to learning new things.

4TR: Was it ever hard to leave it alone and stop working on a track?
Matt: Oh my God yes, if it wasn’t for Kim I would still be working on it now, she was cracking the whip.
Kim: Yeah because there was a point when he would say ok I have this mix and I have this mix, which one do you like better?  And I was like you just played me the same mix Matt?
Matt: But Kim doesn’t pay attention to detail [laughing], we’re going to get into a couples squabble in a minute.
Kim: Yeah but it did get to the point when it was down to the tiniest things.  We had got to the point where we had to let it go and send it to the world to grow.
Matt: We knew we were going to step up our level so wanted to find our partners to work with after we were done because in the end when all was said and done we would have owned it, unlike our first album where we will never own those songs for the rest of our life.  So yeah we had to cut the cord.

4TR: And are you pleased with it?
Matt: Oh hell yeah, absolutely.  It’s a little bit different like it was more lo-fi when we started and I guess just learning how to do things changed it a bit.  Actually I have read things that say Matt and Kim obviously used their new fancy recording budget to go to a nice recording studio to make the album, but I’m like that’s a total compliment, seeing as we recorded it in my bedroom at my parents house in Vermont [laughing] but yeah we are definitely happy with it.

4TR: So after this fleeting London visit, you're off around the world again touring the record?
Matt: Yeah we go South America, then we’re back in the States and do some festivals and then we are talking about being back in this side of the Atlantic around October hopefully.  It’s very confusing to us how to fit the whole world into one year.
Kim: [Laughing] and we still haven’t figured it all out yet.  But we will! 
 


‘Grand’ is out now.

www.myspace.com/mattandkim

Amber Gujosa
Posts: 1

=)
Reply #1 on : Wed April 27, 2011, 18:51:09

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Matt and Kim have a brilliant unique sound and all I could say is that I will truly be a fan of this epic duo!!!! Keep kicking ass Matt & Kim! I can't wait to attend a show!

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