We are back to Monday again and could probably use something soothing to get through the week. In March RUKUS label boss Matador released an expansive 20-track ambient album Tuesday.
The nearly 3-hour record is lengthy and meditative. There are times you can almost zone out and forget something is on, but it always is present in the back of your conscious. Matador is known for much more uptempo techno, but he has dialed things wayyy back with this album.
We decided to get a little more information on the record and his turn to ambient music. Get your copy of Tuesday here, listen to the record and keep on reading.
1. Why did you decide to do the ambient album?
The Tuesday LP began as folder of music I was writing to act as a backdrop for daily life – be it a dinner at home with friends, exercising, traveling, or just chilling out to. Initially it wasn’t something that I had planned on releasing as a collection, but I’d sent it out to a couple of artists and friends, and they enjoyed it so I thought why not?
2. Why do you think ambient music is having such a big moment now?
I guess in the times that we currently live in, ambient and downtempo electronica gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect, and take things at a slower pace. It’s much easier to listen to music from these genres throughout the day as we work from home, and try to relax whilst uncertainty engulfs the world around us.
3. How do you keep ambient music interesting, while also relaxing and chilled?
I generally like to allow the instruments to take over when I’m writing ambient music. They all have minds of their own, and heartbeats, so I set boundaries or parameters for them and let them do their own thing naturally. I find it quite liberating to let them speak and then hone in when they have something interesting to say. I also painted throughout writing this album and always had a canvas set up in the studio to change up the mood and flow of the music. The album artwork is one I painted myself.
4. Where did you gather the field recordings from and how did you know which to use?
Everything was recorded within a 5km distance of my home on the east coast of Ireland. I’m incredibly lucky to live beside the sea, which has served as an inspiration for so much of my music over the last few years. I gathered some of the bird song on walks with my dog, put microphones out on the balcony for hours to see what I could pick up, and sat in the forest at Deerpark with my phone to capture the wind through the trees. Evening strolls along the shoreline at the beach, timed with the tide coming in, enabled me to record the sound of the waves lapping on the shore. So I had a pretty extensive collection of field recordings, which I could place in some of the tracks I’d already written, and then some which inspired tracks that I wrote around them.
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