Muting Mathematics
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Last night I went to possibly one of the most outragous, energy packed and fun concerts I’ve attended in my lifetime. My favourite band over the past three or four years is the New Orleans, Alt-Electro-Rock band MuteMath and they, for the first time, were playing in Toronto at the El Macambo. So not only was my favourite band in town but it was also at a venue near and dear to my heart because Function Magazine holds their fundraising concerts there and have had a few memories there in my young School of Image Arts studies…


Anyways, the band consists of four multi-talented musicians, the lead Singer/Keytarist/Rhodes Player/Sound Modder is Paul Meany, Greg Hill plays the guitar and keys, Roy Mitchell-Cardenas is on bass guitar and upright bass, and lastly Darren King infuses his insane drums with samples and loops. They combine their skills to create a unique sound by playing their instruments (or any object for that matter) in unique ways and are known for their improvisations showing their true New Orleans Jazz roots. They started the show playing their tight, thumping instrumental track “Collapse”. Driven by a marching bass drum, played by Roy Mitchell-Cardenas, the song contains unique old school analog rhodes that are long forgotten in todays digitally driven music. As the concert went on the way they played their instruments evolved. Greg Hill began to play his guitar with a timpani mallet, Roy Mitchell-Cardenas brought out a fretless bass guitar, Darren King even stood up on the rhodes with several microphone stands angled together and began to play the drum piece on the metal stands. Along with that the band begins to become more and more chaotic as they start jumping off of speakers, throwing their instruments, switching instruments among band members and so on all to try and create unique sounds not worrying what the process of sound creation looks like. Perhaps the most creative and original sounds came from when Paul Meany left his keytar and began to loop his own voice into a drum beat on a looping machine and then as the beat grew his band mates joined in layering unique digital sounds ontop through their computer in the back corner of the stage.
The crowd sang along to the lyrics and burst into cheering and screaming after every song. They played their more popular hits in the first 20 minutes of the performance. Except one, Reset, their spy-style instrumental track which they played as an encore. The song builds with digitals “wahs” and is shaped around Darren’s 50’s-bond style riff. Towards the end of the song Paul Meany left the stage and came back with what is known to fans as “The Atari”. The Atari was a homemade device that consisted of the MIDI audio board from an Atari ST gaming system. Having grown up with circuits and floppies himself, Paul circuit bent the audio board into a device with nobs and buttons that would emit 80’s style electro bloops and beeps. This then grew into a box with a touch sensitive strip that acted sort of as a neck for a guitar. Unfortunately since this was homemade it was held together by duct tape and well the band members aren’t exactly gentle with thier instruments. So they hired the help of a small company “Elektrokraft” the specializes in analog synthesizers and midi controllers. So Elektrokraft fabricated a custom device based on teh original. Paul Meany came out whacking away making blurps and bleeps to the track and to finish the song, threw the atari into the crowd who madly mashed the buttons creating totally random sounds to the other musicians parts of the song.
Overall an exhiliarting performance that was high energy start to finish. In my opinion this band has no where to go but up. They truly focus on creating beautiful sounding music whether that involves jumping on Rhodes pianos or quietly humming into their microphone and whispering lyrics to the audience.
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