Saturday Night Magazine

Mute Math

Written by Mark Burnham

Tuesday, September 26 2006

Much of music-talk lately is about comparing, about genre and silly classifications (who isn’t sick of the word “vintage”?). Then enters a band doing something new, Mute Math: some will compare them to Bjork, because Bjork has a tendency to sound like fairies and aliens, and Mute Math has the aliens but they are fairyless (more on aliens in a moment). Some will compare them to The Police, because the police have a jazzy badass drummer, and Mute Math has a jazzy badass drummer.

But these comparers will shrug while doing this because Mute Math has their own thing going on. True, words like “retro” or “synth” seem fitting—they have the delay turned way up, they conjure the power of samples, and the singer Paul uses keytars, no shit—but through it all they manage some refreshing clarity, and they manage to keep the rock. They sound like a rock band that’s playing in a field of crop circles at night. Which is exciting.

When an older style becomes retrospectively popular, there’s a nice liberty in expanding the form, breaking it. And breaking all that fun-to-break gear, too. “The front row is where all the action happens at our shows,” singer Paul Meaney explains. “Having a lot of little trinkets and finicky electronics on stage that most of the time freak out or go wrong, coping with that becomes part of the show. And usually we want to just break stuff, whether we’re pissed off at it or happy about it.” Which means if you’re in the front, beware of the keytar-sword.

But Paul has earned his right to break things. Unlike those hipster bed-head bands who use samples like poseurs, Paul is your modern sample-scholar: “That was the first instrument I ever bought, a sampler. It was an ASR10.” What do sample scholars grow up on? “It was groups like Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill. Late ‘80s and early ‘90s hip-hop, everything in that time, it was blowing my mind, the way the beats sounded, and the vibe of the music, I was obsessed with it.” If it’s retro then it’s literally retro, because Mute Math uses the ASR10 (and other gadgets) to make music still, years later.

And if they couldn’t walk-the-walk any more, they really do believe in aliens, like you’d hope: “I do believe in UFO’s. If you’ve been to New Orleans, and you go to a particular part of town, called Shelmet, that’s where most of the unidentified flying objects tend to congregate. It’s kind of myth, but there is a chemical plant that’s in Shelmet. There were always weird glows coming from there. I’d like to believe they were UFOs, because that’s exciting.” What’s exciting is that there are some bands who understand the tasteful balance between the old and new, how to get passed the parody but still use the form, and Mute Math is one of those bands. Actually, I lied: aliens are probably more exciting than that.

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