A new Dawn In a time of auto-tune, lip synching and posers, one man says he is putting some class back into the drum’n’bass scene.
Matt Harvey’s your typical kind of Kiwi guy. He’s down-to-earth, upfront, honest and not afraid to speak his mind. But living in Vienna for the last three or so years certainly shows – and he’s come a long way in 14 years of Concord Dawn. His is latest album, Air Chrysalis, definitely shows the influence of European culture. Based on “a book within a book” of Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s best-selling novel 1Q84, the album is more than just electronic beats and drums – it’s a metaphysical journey, a thinking man’s drum and bass, reflecting Matt’s wider philosophy that to make great music, you have to look outside yourself. “I didn’t want to call it Bass Monsters Volume 6 or some cheesy shit,” Matt says matter-of-factly. “I think it is good to have this relationship between art, music and literature. When you live in Vienna, you get out and see things, talk about things and absorb a lot. “That’s how music used to be, like back in the 1970s artists, musicians and writers were all dropping acid together, inspiring each other. I think that’s sort of lost these days. Music has become a bit insular, looking inward, not taking inspiration from the outside.” The sixth studio album is not so much a new style, but an evolution of the classic Concord Dawn sound. Although this is the direction he has always taken, crossing genre boundaries, Matt admits now he’s a oneman band (after the sudden departure of co-DJ Evan Short in 2009) he has the confidence to take it in a new direction.
a few ingredients, and then you taste it and think ‘this could use this or that’. With an album, you think, ‘I haven’t done a track like this’, or ‘this could be a bit harder’, so you play with it.” In a round-about sense, the new direction is also a return to “proper drum and bass”, a time Matt says didn’t involve the excessive use of auto-tune and the explosion of a little genre called dubstep. As an ode to this, he released Air Chrysalis free online – one of many reasons being to move away from the commercial aspect and get back to the real sound, unpolluted by all the rest. “A lot of people have supported me over the years so I thought, why not? It would be nice to give back. I have a studio of vintage equipment and I have enough clothes not to do washing for a week. To remove money from that process, I hoped to make something a bit truer. There is too much of that shit in modern music. Guys are too photoshopped or they have their name in six-foot lights behind them. “We have moved into this place where DJs have become caricatures, a kind of superhuman God-DJ-Mystro man. I’m just an ordinary guy that loves to make drum and bass.” WRITTEN BY LAURA WEASER
SEE THEM LIVE: CONCORD DAWN SAT 21 JUL STUDIO, AUCKLAND
“It was a hard thing to get out of the system,” Matt says. “With The Enemy Within, it was the first time I was doing the process by myself, but this time it was a lot easier. When you write tunes, it’s like cooking. You have 22
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