Matthew Mottel (Talibam!)
"[If] the Biden campaign embraced the ethos of DIY punk, and...just spent $100,000 into making an all-ages venue that was apolitical in every fucking town: that's how you win a fucking election!"
As far as we both know, Matthew Mottel and I met on Instagram in the fall of 2020, when I posted a photo of Silver Apples frontman Simeon Coxe that was taken by his father, the photographer Syeus Mottel. But I have a good feeling that Mottel and I actually met in 2005, when he was doing sound at the Bushwick venue/art space/coffee shop Goodbye Blue Monday. GBM is largely forgotten these days, probably because the booking was notoriously un-curated and the performances were horrible more often than they were good. Still, for weirdos who were making uncommercial music and couldn’t get booked anywhere else, the place was a godsend.
At the time, I would have been peripherally aware of Mottel’s band Talibam!, which formed in 2003, but I didn’t see them until at least a year or two later. Once I did, I was instantly a fan. Talibam!’s music is relentlessly experimental, with roots in free jazz, no wave, and noise (among other genres). Within the realm of avant-garde music, there’s often a self-seriousness and stoicism to the proceedings that I find alienating, but Talibam!’s performances were consistently and contagiously gleeful. It was obvious that Mottel and his bandmate Kevin Shea were having a blast and wanted the audience to have a blast too.
I interviewed Mottel shortly after we connected on Instagram, when my book was still in its earliest stages. Much like his music, our conversation was simultaneously heady and playful, with healthy doses of philosophizing and shit-stirring. You’ll notice that, unlike previous interviews I’ve shared, this one doesn’t begin with a question. That’s because I hadn’t asked one; as soon as I explained the book’s concept, Mottel was off to the races. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but his takes were well-considered and challenged me to go deeper.
Mottel’s enthusiasm for the project extended well beyond our interview, as he generously helped me set up several other interviews with a wide range of his contacts (including pianist Matthew Shipp, whose interview I’ve previously shared on here). The book would have been tangibly worse without help.
Mottel now lives upstate, but he remains a formidable presence among the city’s avant-garde. In fact, he’s got a residency coming up at the Stone in mid-April, where he’ll be improvising with a wide range of collaborators including experimental guitarist Loren Connors, Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks, and free jazz legend Cooper-Moore. Perhaps I’ll see you there!
In 1998-99, when I was 17, I went to see the No-Neck Blues Band at Roulette, when it was still at Jim Staley’s house on West Broadway. I'd known who No-Neck were through their connections to Sonic Youth and other things. Seeing No-Neck when you’re 17 and not yet culturally hip to what their process was, it was so mystical and magic. Five years later, when I lived in a house where I can get stoned and bang on bongos and broken guitars with my friends, I understood what they had been doing, but in 1998, it's really this mystical thing.
As a result of going to that show, I started getting invited up to the Hint House, which was their Harlem HQ/practice space/art studio. There’s a recording I made of the band Test, which was a free jazz quartet, led by drummer Tom Bruno with Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen and Matt Heyner from No-Neck. They played a benefit concert [at Hint House] that was for a van crash in that spring, [at which] Lee Ranaldo and John Fahey [also played]. I already knew some of the Sonic Youth people, but from more [of a place of] fandom. Here suddenly, Lee and I are in a loft together and we can talk sort of almost peer to peer, even though I'm 17 or whatever. [That’s indicative of] the sort of private art culture experiences that really makes New York be that special.
But to me, what No-Neck did versus the bands that emerged a couple years later, is sort of a general template for the way I divide artists in New York: There's both the New York canvas, and then there's the intention to be your own canvas in New York. For No-Neck, which is made of both guys from Brooklyn, and then transplants from Texas, Virginia, Japan, and elsewhere, everyone came to New York and gravitated to, let's say, the Knitting Factory in its original location - [No-Neck member] Dave Nuss worked the door there. All of these people were interested in being part of this New York cultural canvas. So in ‘99-2000, to me, what is representative of our art culture and band culture of people under 30 comes from No-Neck.
But then I leave to go to school, come back, and in ‘02-’03 you have Japanther, Black Dice, and Animal Collective and the emergence of these other things that really have nothing to do with the history of being in New York.
How so?
Well, Japanther were art students from Pratt that assimilated pop punk. Black Dice are artists, also from outside of New York City, that assimilated electronic music, noise, and psychedelia. There’s also that moment in ‘01 where the Strokes become made up as the biggest thing to emerge in the quote-unquote “underground.” That's the moment where it starts becoming more about using your own canvas in New York, and the Strokes do that under the mask of being part of the New York canvas.
[Fabrizio Moretti], the drummer of the Strokes, was my dorm-mate in college at [SUNY] New Paltz. He drops out after his sophomore year, but we were taking the bus from Port Authority back up to New Paltz [together]. In that first year that the Strokes are happening, they're playing at the Cooler and Mercury Lounge and such, and it's organic. But once he split town, we're suddenly seeing him in Rolling Stone every week. He still maintained his upstate girlfriend for like six months or whatever, so we'd see him around, and my friend would be like, “Man, we read about you on the shitter all the time.”
But then after the Strokes really blew up, and he's now with Drew Barrymore, I actually ran into Fabrizio in Times Square in the subway, and I'm like, “If you want to hang out again, let's do it!” He gives me a phone number, and it's his fucking management’s phone number.
So it's like, we've gone from being real with each other to now being like, “Oh, my level of Q is higher than yours.” To me what the chasing of Q is, is about putting forth your own personal canvas. So [Black] Dice, because they are artists first, they're [connected] to Deitch Projects as well. Deitch is very responsible for promoting individual artists at the cost of the New York canvas. Then someone like Todd P. comes along, who has zero interest in being part of New York history. Todd really believes in the national and international touring infrastructure of, quote-unquote, “DIY.”1
To me, the problem that started happening in this mid 2000s period, with the industry trying to define the situation, was that it was all based on these historical templates. The only way a band on Pitchfork blows up is for the writers to create the connection between Dirty Projectors and Talking Heads, or Dan Deacon and Devo, or Animal Collective and the Beach Boys, or especially Real Estate and Pavement. Look at the year Pavement [reunites] - it's the same year Real Estate blows up. Pitchfork, PR, all of these worlds never defined us in any of these historical terms, which leads me to not have a music career, in a way. And it's not bitterness about that, it's just a very basic observation I can make as someone who was peers with all these people.
So, to me, this whole moment from the Strokes onward is about replication versus reverence, and I always [saw a] difference between being referential and reverential. But then, in more recent years, I've played with guys like Steve Shelley, and Steve goes by the Oscar Wilde quote, “genius steals.” So it's possible even in my world in ‘03-‘05, that I was too stuck on being reverential rather than openly referential.
We also have to realize that this whole period of time in this mid-2000s period comes at a moment where we are actively at war. I would also then say that if you look at what the musics were of the quote-unquote “underground” that get brought into the mainstream during this time, it's the light AM versions of it - which is why Woods is successful, because [they] assimilate James Taylor and Neil Young. But I would say that the more political wing of the underground culture…like, the reason Talibam! is called Talibam! is because of the New York Post headline in ‘01.
When Kevin and I started the band in ‘03, we met playing at Free 103.9 on a free jazz gig organized by a saxophone player Ras Moshe. I'd known about Kevin in the peripheral because of [his band] Storm & Stress, and having a zine called Tuba Frenzy. At this point, I've been playing with various free jazz drummers around New York like Sean Meehan, Tim Barnes, Michael Evans, [Chris] Corsano, Tom Bruno from Test, but no one of these people was ready to be in a working band. I had really wanted to be in a working band. I’d seen the best musicians of that era, like Test or Masada, [John] Zorn's group at the time, still being a working unit, where I could be at the Knitting Factory for five nights in a row sitting in the front row seeing Masada every night.
So when Kevin and I meet, I see the connection of being with a peer drummer, even though he's eight years older than me. He’s someone that wants to play and is willing to get in the van and try things. But we were both very critical of what we called “hipster linguistics” of what band names were, where band names at that point were taking on the connotation of cool through language. So Black Dice as a name, Dirty Projectors as a name, Woods as a name - you have all of these names that are neutral, where Talibam! or USAISAMONSTER are band names that are defining the era.
It's certainly possible that we were omitted from a lot of these machinations of the industry through an unconscious rejection of our band name, because it was tying us to a political and cultural sphere that, to me, art and music should never be untethered to. But this whole moment of ‘01 onward, all of these groups that I'm talking about that come out of this other music era of publicity and promotion [that was] directly attempting to be explicitly non-political. The aesthetics of all of the independent music that was coming through this whole period [were] not about rebellion.
I started having a lot of different opinions based on my understanding of all of this, coming from this privileged point of being able to see Lee Ranaldo in front of 20 people. This goes back to that [idea] of reference versus replication: when I see the Magik Markers in ‘03-’04, I’m like, this is just a shitty no wave ripoff. But when Magik Markers go on tour and show up in Zagreb, Croatia, and get to do that…Or even the Rapture with “House of Jealous Lovers,” which I interpret as just a Gang of Four ripoff: if you watch their performance on David Letterman as a closed circuit, they're playing radical guitar, and so that influence on a kid in Iowa seeing that is as valuable as my negation of them at that moment.
In a way, the real perspective I gained was when I was a sound person at Goodbye Blue Monday in ‘05-’07. What was really special about Goodbye Blue Monday was that Steve [Trimboli, the owner] had zero judgment of the aesthetics of the bands, for good or for bad - mostly for bad. But as a result of that, I stopped wearing my own tastes to the door, and started judging [bands on] if they were nice people and had their shit together and could get off of the stage. Goodbye Blue Monday developed an identity [as] the oasis of all tastes happening at the same time - versus Todd, who is specifically hierarchical in his gatekeeping of scenes.
Todd starts what I also witnessed in New Paltz, which is what I call the “Tupperware mentality” of DIY. A DIY show starts feeling like a Tupperware party, where it's more about the rules and regulations of governing the show, versus letting the free vibes happen. Tonic [was] special and Zebulon [was] special because [they operated] without the intention of commerciality. Tonic still existed up until ‘07 with a door policy that's an 80/20 split, where there's no house manager or door person or sound people taken out of the band's cut. It's Todd who does that, and then across the board, that's why Union Pool’s deals are bad, why Silent Barn’s deals are bad, why Glasslands’ deals are bad, why all of these deals are bad for artists that are just trying to be in the New York canvas.2
In market capitalism, people would say to me, “Well, Matt, you failed to get 20 people that paid $10 to go to your gig.” I say, well, the things that get people to gigs are two things: fear and bureaucracy. It's fear that you're missing out on the hippest thing, and it's the bureaucracy - whether it's the flier, the record review, the media connection, the influence of Thurston [Moore] or whoever - [that creates] the allure that this event is this FOMO-enticing event.
Deitch, Todd, [h0l0 booker Sam] Hilmer, Secret Project Robot - all of these people are all about [using] FOMO to bring people to a room. [Whereas] the Vision Festival, Tonic, Knitting Factory until it moves to Williamsburg, Roulette until it becomes an institution, Issue Project Room before it becomes an institution [are all] venues that are just sites of stage and letting people be themselves. But it switches here in this moment, between all of these outside actors and places like Issue and Roulette getting opportunities to start being versions of BAM. That starts hyper-compartmentalizing the scene.
One of the things I think that would have separated Tonic in that realm was Alan Licht: He was both the in-house booker there and a regular performer, so he was on both sides of the equation, and he got a lot of free rein in terms of what he could book and how he could organize things.
I would say, though, that Alan did compartmentalize the Tonic scene. The way the Cooler booked shows, you'd have Blonde Redhead and William Hooker on a three band bill. Tonic, especially under Alan, moves to: set one at 8:00, set two at 10:00, and set three at midnight. Three different bills, three different ticket prices. So, in that moment, you lose that open forum where the people that want to see William Hooker don't get to interact with the people that want to see Blonde Redhead.
In a sense, that's why Goodbye Blue Monday becomes the valuable place. Steve comes from running Scrap Bar in the ‘80s - I never obviously went there, but from people that grew up that are from East Village/West Village culture, people described Scrap Bar as a hair metal bar that was kind of the spot that the bands on tour would blow out all of their steam. So Goodbye Blue Monday opens as this open, accepting spot. Skaters gigs happen at Goodbye Blue Monday before they happen at Tonic, and it's only then [when] Skaters get hipped by Wire that they then have the ability to fill Tonic. Because unfortunately, after ‘05-’07, Tonic started dealing with the real estate problem and the corruption of Lower East Side bar and liquor license authority shit.
[So] Tonic leaves on their own feet, in a similar way to Zebulon leaving on their own feet. Zebulon makes the choice, because they own their building, [but they] see the neighborhood changing. My band Alien Whale, which was my band with Colin [Langenus, guitarist and singer in USAISAMONSTER], we play there at 1:00 in the morning on a Monday night in like 2011 or ‘12, and the cops get called. It's clear that that free zone of Williamsburg isolation is no longer.
But that moment when Vice cannibalizes the South 1st/South 2nd block3 - to me, that was not as problematic for the fact that those venues were closing, but for the fact that Vice was getting a six and a half million dollar tax break from New York City to enable that. Because, at the end of the day, even though DBA [Death By Audio] or Glasslands was supportive of the infrastructure of the underground, the most I could have made in my entire life playing at all of those venues over 50 gigs was maybe a grand. There was no sustainability attached to playing in the DIY [spaces,] and there never really has been until the DIY and the institution started merging in the Roulette model or the Clocktower model.
There was that punk exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design, so I went to an artists talk that [museum] my friends had organized, and this is like maybe six months after [the presidential election in] 2016. I raised my hand and say, “Well, I'm born in New York City. I didn't move here. What about the premise that all y'all from Ohio and Indiana and everywhere else, you all moved here, and maybe the reason that Mike Pence was the fucking governor of Indiana was all of the artists and the people that could have been cultural innovators in their own scenes left?”
It's not for me to say “You guys should be fucking locked down in your own zones,” and especially people that are not heteronormative obviously have to leave situations where they're dealing with discrete discrimination or explicit discrimination. But to me, the Calvin Johnson maxim of build your own scene in your own town…if the Biden campaign embraced the ethos of DIY punk, and instead of spending money on fucking advertisements just spent $100,000 into making an all ages venue that was apolitical in every fucking town: that's how you win a fucking election!
I agree, with the caveat that people have been coming here from other places to be artists for a very long time. Bob Dylan's from Minnesota, and what's New York without Bob Dylan? Or Andy Warhol’s from Pittsburgh, and who’s more “New York” than him?
Absolutely. But I think especially in these last 20 years, we really do have to start asking ourselves that question of, is the reason that these states are red states and blue states because of that magnetism? And again, Dylan comes to be part of the New York canvas, right? He doesn't come to be his own canvas in New York - you could say in some ways he was, but he originally he wants to follow what the folk music community of New York City was doing. But there is that moment once people like Dylan are able to define their own canvas for themselves, that then starts giving [people] the idea that every Joe Schmo from around the world [should move] to New York City.
But again, with a band like Grizzly Bear…me, Lucas [Crane, tape manipulator in Woods], and [Grizzly Bear multi-instrumentalist] Chris Taylor had a trio called the Beatles. People at that time were like, “Why are you called the Beatles?,” and we're like, “Well, we're just the other Beatles.” Chris had not yet joined Grizzly Bear. We're making a record, and Chris goes for a weekend to Cape Cod, and comes back and says, “This guy that I went to school with is asking me and Chris Bear to join this project. I'm gonna have to play my pedals with settings,” versus the Beatles being three improvisers just going at.
So sure enough, the fact that Chris is on the island that [Grizzly Bear frontman] Ed [Droste]'s family owns, because the Drostes are the Forbes [family]…Chris looks at his options at that moment: Does he focus on the Beatles, or does he join a band that has instant fame from the jump because of Ed Droste’s family's connections? It's not a hard question. Or like, [Haela Hunt-Hendrix] from Liturgy, [she's one of] the Hunts, the oil industry family. Liturgy has the veracity to do the things they can do because of that back end of money.
I come from a middle class background, where I have some agency and privilege. But the thing that I'm pissed off about now that my dad is dead, is that in like ‘08 or ‘09, my father is talking to me [saying], “Matthew, why aren't you in the New York Times with your music? What is this thing that I'm reading about in Brooklyn that you're not part of?” He was criticizing me all the time on this. My father was also buying shitty watches as a hoarding collector, watches that were $250 or $500 at a time. He leaves them all to me, so when he dies I suddenly have like, 60 watches. And now my thought is, “Pop, if you had wanted me to really be successful, you could have stopped buying watches and paid for my PR.” When I see him at some point in the deep future, I'm gonna address this with my dad.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, brevity, and context.
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Learn more about Matthew Mottel at his website and follow him on Instagram
Buy my book This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City here
Promoter Todd Patrick moved to Brooklyn in the late ‘90s after having run an all-ages venue in Portland, OR. He began throwing all-ages shows in Brooklyn post-9/11, drawing heavily from the network of touring bands he already knew, but he also championed several up-and-coming Brooklyn bands (many of whom Mottel names over the course of this interview). When I interviewed Todd, I found him to be deeply knowledgeable and respectful of NYC’s musical and cultural history, so I don’t really agree with Matt here. But it’s true that in the ‘00s, Todd seemed to be booking shows for touring bands as much he was for local acts.
A counterargument would be that Todd is famously transparent with performers about how a show’s payouts break down. He would always tell artists about the cut being taken out for people working at the show - who, because his shows weren’t tethered to a single venue, were rarely salaried venue staff. And even if other venues and promoters weren’t openly telling performers where the sound person’s money was coming from, it would have had to come from somewhere.
In 2014, Vice took over a large complex on Kent Avenue between South 1st and South 2nd in Williamsburg, forcibly evicting several tenants including the venues Death By Audio, Glasslands, and 285 Kent.