UPFRONTBEATS

Matador makes his debut appearance on Crosstown Rebels with his absorbing new EP ‘My Yellow Coat’, accompanied by a rare remix from NYC house and techno favourite Levon Vincent.

An outstandingly technical live artist, DJ and producer, Matador, real name Gavin Lynch, has a prolific discography with releases on renowned labels such as Minus, Hot Creations, and Cocoon. A resident at Richie Hawtin’s iconic ENTER series in Ibiza, the past decade has seen the Irish talent tour the globe consistently with performances at some of the world’s most prestigious festivals and clubs, including Awakenings, TimeWarp, and Neopop, while featuring in Resident Advisor’s ‘Tip 20 Live Acts’ on three separate occasions. ‘My Yellow Coat’ marks his first appearance on Damian Lazarus’ Crosstown Rebels, describing the debut as ‘a result all round’ with the imprint featuring as a personal favourite of his over the years.

‘I wrote the EP as one of the first projects in my new studio in Ibiza in 2021. I’d been listening to a lot of LCD Soundsystem and more electronic rock-leaning sounds, really good riffs and wonky synths. I have a Roland VP330 here that was running slightly out of tune at times, the oscillators in the string section, so I used that and played everything in for both tracks and recorded some vocals processing them through various effects. Then I tied it all together with an 808. It was a limited set-up using old equipment and utilising the imperfections, and that’s what it was all about ‘ not correcting or quantising everything but letting the instruments speak as they were. So that’s pretty much how the tracks came about, and I’m so happy that Damian connected with them and that the EP is going out on Crosstown, one of my favourite labels’ – Matador.

The EP features two original tracks, ‘My Yellow Coat’ and ‘What You Say Is So’, showcasing a dynamic approach to electronic music with a deep dive into rich beds of emotive and spellbinding tones. Title track ‘My Yellow Coat’ is a slow-blooming and delightfully suspenseful production guided by the track’s charming vocals as soft synth melodies and refined percussion build gracefully across its eight-minute duration. ‘What You Say Is So’ is again rooted amongst captivating tones and subtle background textures before the lead melody emerges and places itself at the forefront of the mix.

Novel Sound boss Levon Vincent‘s dynamic interpretation of the title cut welcomes a new side to his expansive sound, building on his distinctive sound palette and welcoming a shift towards faster realms. He explains, ‘I saw the remix as an opportunity to step out of my comfort zone, musically speaking, and to make something at a faster tempo. I wanted to do this to at least recognise what has happened in techno in recent years with faster BPMs. It just seems a little rude to live in Germany and not even comment once on these fascinating beats happening in techno. I don’t play that fast, but for me, it was an opportunity to make something that shows I’ve not disregarded any dialogues happening around me‘.

He adds, ‘It was exciting to work with these vocals from Matador and to mix ’em up and get creative with them. I kept the same fundamental frequency of the original tune and used it as a foundation to build my own tonal universe, a scale which consists of several just intervals and some that reflect PHI, or 1x 1.618- and the square root of PHI, which is 1×1.2720‘.

Credited - Dispersion PR