Mat Lo
Written by James Davis
November 25, 2009 5:53PM

Seymour and Dunsmuir.  Seven minutes early: 5:53PM.  Another glossy deluge washing over a wet neon streetscape.  I escape the peninsular nimbostratus blanket into The Railway Club, climb the newel stairway to the second level into the popular poplar match stick flame tavern.  Birch tables.  Oak planks.  Maple wood wainscot panels.  Zones of flat dirty maroon carpeting with humid cinematic footlights.  I had heard that anything can happen here—conversation, music, film, meetings, beer chugging, dancing, et cetera, or all of the above—an alternating current.  This time: quietly dirty; quietly authentic.  Hickory sticks tapped hi-hats and cymbals under neon ionic beam ceiling pots.  One $5.10 long neck Sleeman’s Honey Brown.  Beforehand, I cast a net and collected biographical information from the subject of my interview—Mat Lo:

Bachelor of Arts in Film from York St. John University: academic.  Mat Lo Music & Buddu Productions: he’s established.  He’s producing his own debut solo album and tracks for the Tea Bag Attack band: he’s busy.  He has a broadband spectrum of abilities: singer, songwriter, screenplay writer, film director, photographer, music producer, video producer, graphic designer: a modern day renaissance man.  He has a cosmopolitan mantra: “Peace, Love and Rock and Roll.”  He has a prolific output: screenplays: Clear Out (1997), The Die (2002), The DiaryAngels of the Night (2004); Albums: Real Love (2005), Acoustic (2007).  www.matlomusic.com,  www.buddu.com: two signboards which advertise slipstream desiderata with panegyric (un-referenced) testimonials: “Mat Lo is such a brilliant songwriter and is as yet unheard of.  The potential on this album is mindblowingly awesome.  Just wait and see.”  [The Tea Bag Attack] “trio is made up of nothing shy of pure talent.  When they are together the electricity in the room could power a small country:” he’s confident.  At www.myspace.com/matlomusic Trying to Get to You and Hindsight are salient and satisfying trial balloon peeks at his impending series which is, as cited in the comments field: “in production.

(2004),

The impression Mat’s impressing is clear beforehand: 1) his exterior: a high courage quotient and 2) his interior: kernels of potential popping with heat.  However, his audience sees a Rorschach ink-blot test.  And this is what I see:

You could write an article about Mat’s eyes.  He thinks with them: dark, alpine white scleras.  A satyr?  Yes and no.  More sphinx-like: quiet, mysterious, and private.  A flat affect, sudden fits of laughter, and no in between—flat or laughing—that’s it.  He leans, looks away, moves his head with his eyes.  Very little emotion.  Serious.  More specifically, cerebral.  Integument: Navy pull-over, with blue, red, and white bands.  His boots, loaves of wet, buttery leather.  But when he walks it’s like he’s tip-toeing.  He’s twenty-eight, but he looks twenty-three: clean cut, smooth skin: handsome.  If he isn’t a uvula waggling power-singer, he might possibly be a vulva waggling pop/folk/rock-singer.  [Sorry editors.]

When I meet him, it’s a unique time.  He’s been tinkering, tucked hermitage into a repository, an attic atelier with an abat jour skylight earmarking reference books, a proverbial launch pad.  Mat is common in that, like a lot of musicians, their oeuvre and magnum opus isn’t fait accompli but rather de novo—buried under construction cranes and scaffolding.

Breaking rocks at home, that’s the direction our conversation gravitated towards…the segment of his artistic career where he has struggled: sixteen until twenty-eight years old.  A Kunstlerroman saga—(see James Joyce).  In other words, not a laser beam to the top but a curly wavelength averaging upwards.  Since then, he’s been coping with a weighted ingress of impediments, the same ones entire species of artists face.  We are reminded that retardant dilemmas are the precepts not the exceptions.  No artist is sacrosanct from the quandaries.  Until resolved, imagined reality eludes.  A labyrinth of sultry dreams; a labyrinth of swirling dilemmas.  And so, rather than satiate questions, Mat’s odyssey enticed me to pose more questions to myself as I, and our audiences, endure their own creative odysseys.

From what preconditions is Mat propelled towards silver screen dreams?  A pull: Superman, Top Gun, Indiana Jones, Leaving Las Vegas, The Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Pulp Fiction, and the Robert Rodriquez films.  A push: Mat’s teenage impression of his “artistically oppressive” home city Derby (pronounced Darbie).  More push: “Raw, intense human emotion induced mainly by females.”  Justice: “[I’ve] always had a sickening reaction to violence and the mistreatment of others, like when watching the news or witnessing things on the street around Derby.”  Social conscience: “There was a stage in childhood when I believed that I could influence people through the art of filmmaking to be nicer to others, and make the world a peaceful place.”  Aesthetic: “This, as well as the exciting lifestyle was a major influence in my decision to pursue a career in filmmaking.”  Lastly, ethics: “[I] sometimes [have] the natural impulse to say what I think is good and right.”  His wagon was hitched to a star.  Even though his degree, he confesses, taught him a little bit of everything, his emancipation medium was in fact university.  What Mat didn’t realize at the time was that during annual longitudinal hop hither and skip thither jumps on from point of departure Derby to Vancouver en route to summer(-fallow) exchanges at the University of Regina (2004), he was contracting a highly contagious west coast bug called Vancouverrickettsii.  While affiliate dormitory Luther College, prairie silo, squeaky weather vane, lily hinterland University of Regina was his first-contact with easier-going friendlier Canadians—[ironically, most of his comrades were international students, not Canadians]—it made his decisive decision to migrate and bunk with a friend in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver in 2005 less disorientating.  Mat immediately found work serving at the grande dame Metropolitan Hotel Vancouver, which is the work that pays for his sub-alpine purlieu precinct apartment in North Vancouver.  But his dream to become a screen writer and film director persist in the open market, open season, open system, and sometimes open secret society of Vancouver.  His drive un-weaning, his modus vivendi elegantly simple: eat, sleep, serve, then write, compose, and produce.

Mat concedes Vancouver artists, and future partners, are tricky to attract.  Generally speaking, they are private, busy, cliquey.  He has an urge to collaborate, yet a compulsion to be alone.  Dilemma #1: In spite of a broadband resume, does one stick to their own private agenda, or become a part of someone else’s?  Does one continue to seek collaboration, or does one disentangle and disengage from other startups by the Other?

Writing private start-ups, Mat was faced with Dilemma #2: Do you trust your voice, writing without inhibition (ID), or do you let your mind critique and filter as you go (Superego)?  When you are confronted with your shortcomings, what do you do?  Which leads to Dilemma #3: If one discovers a less-than-satisfactory product, does one keep producing or stop production altogether to tinker?  Do we gentrify, emend, and iterate old projects, or simply start again?  Do we rectify, recast, restyle, and repackage old screenplays to recuperate lost income?  If current work is a precursor from your past, that makes current work a precursor to your future, which means that your work is a menu of progenitors, the polish never-ending, old phrases but residue for later songs.  Never-never land looms.  Sure we can intercept atrophic or entropic futures by preparing.  But if preparation is prophylactic, when do we perform?  If our audience is a looking glass mirror, two-way, when are we ready to see them and, ultimately, ourselves?

Since Mat was sixteen, composition was more passion than patience.  Increasingly, however, self-criticism has been the head that’s been butting the simplicity.  Upon 2004 graduation, Mat returned to Regina with a self-written screenplay called The Die to direct.  He recruited other students from the Luther College cafeteria.  It wasn’t up to Mat’s standard.  Dilemma #4: How do you improve the finish of a film at a time when audiences expect towering-film-industry-hi –def?  Without the capital for production technology and hirable actors and actresses, the film appeared, as Mat suggested, low budget, rough cut and amateur.  What’s more, the voice that critiques, his own, was becoming louder and louder.  He realized what Jon Franklin (two-time Pulitzer Prize winner knows): “A story is not a line of dominoes, it is a web of details, and tugging on any filaments causes the whole thing to vibrate.”  Yet he wrote more screenplays—fantasy, drama, sci-fi, drama.  Again in 2005, his pro bono actors/actresses walked off.  He cites: they weren’t getting paid.  Mat’s been on a sabbatical from film ever since, his saga bifurcating back into time, film weaning and now music waxing.

Mat has been playing guitar chord progressions and composing songs since sixteen vocationally—casually depending on both Howard Wallach’s Chord Progression Encyclopedia and Karl Coryat’s Guerrilla Home Recording.  The guitar became an emotion-conveying instrument of intuition after a brief two-day stint and sting with a girl which spawned his first album: a menu of ten legato smooth, tenderized, romantically-charged songs, his plectrum… plucking heartstrings.  It didn’t trade.  Much later, in 2007, Mat banded and collaborated with two women to form the menage a trios Tea Bag Attack band which wrote an impressive three songs in three days.  Since, one girl migrated to Australia, the other to Spain, the band dismembered.  “Do you collaborate?”  He has jammed occasionally with Vancouver Artists Collective Association members.  He has performed at amateurs night but has since stopped.  “There’s no CD,” Mat says.  And so he has rappelled down into production.  Now, independent and armed with musical machinist MacLogic software—if the overture needs a maraca, he adds one—Mat expects himself to have completed an inaugural solo album in 2010.  This break from film created space for him to resurrect what he calls “an old friend…[a] carbon fiber guitar.”  I asked if he has had any recurring itches to film; he does and is aimed to break into the film industry through another door with post-2012 horror and humor films.  “They’re cheap to make and don’t require lead actors/actresses.”  [What’s more, he’s hoping to get backed by financing and a direction team so that he doesn’t have to take the hit if the film folds].  Sticking to sound, I suggest contingency plan innuendo: “What if your music makes money?”  “It goes straight into film.”  There’s a saying I have: If you want to know what people value, watch how they spend their money.  An offshoot cliché: If at first you don’t succeed, try again.

I asked him: What about breaking into film through someone else’s project?  Reconcile roughcast sound and rough cut movies with new know-how?  Even though Mat confesses not to have needed much of his film schooling for practical purposes, instead confessing to have learned more about film from listening to directors and more about music by hands on immersion he refuses to be a part of anyone else’s projects; an apparent contradiction.  For Mat, preparation is a private activity, not a communal one.  Musically, however, in spite of admiring solo performers—John Mayer and David Gray—he is looking for a committed, ready-to-jam, musical partner.  He loves The Beatles and Coldplay.  I envision other famed duos—Duran Duran, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, the Proclaimers, Tears for Fears—and calibrate.  Mat says he hasn’t met anyone else who he feels comfortable creating music with.  As such, for now, Mat’s a solo performer.  He has no interest being matriculated into other people’s projects, his name but a mere “footnote [to some other artist’s] vast obscure unfinished masterpiece” (Vladimir Nabokov).

Dilemma #5: Is mastery about spreading or about nucleating?  Does one focus on one domain and learn vertically, or does one hedge time’n energy, side-stepping horizontally into multiple cross-curricular domains?  Is broadband ability distractively handicapping?  Does being interdisciplinary augment or obtrude mastery?  Painting?  Fighter pilot?  When do we stop?  To what end are we striving?  For what moment?  For what day?  Towards what arrival bay?  At what landmark?  Unto which vertex?  To what zenith?  How do we consummate the career?  Some artists, not Mat, think that a post-GQ-photo-shoot dinner smoking a Havana over blue ice in a black tie and brogues after lawn tennis constitutes arrival?  Is celebrity the endpoint?  How do artists tally scores?  Has Mat already succeeded?
 
Even though Mat’s songs are impending offings, the fingerprint of Mat’s art is a whorl worth watching and listening to.  Whether it’s gaslight, milk and honey, acoustic folk, neatly carved intaglio, or rock and roll, his audience is ready to sample the tidal pool of yields, to see and hear the phoenix reborn.  Mat’s dreams aren’t his manacles as his enjoyment is nourished by the artistic process, the tuning of the rudder.  The song isn’t pyrrhic if the preparation is pleasurable.  It’s impossible to overexert if you enjoy your exertion.  Regardless, the halo around his future shimmers, he enjoys the fight, he relishes the suspense.

“Railway rafters as dark as the night sky;
the darker the firmament,
the brighter the starry diamond flecks;
the darkness disguises the rhinestones;
the firmament deludes the eye.”

November 25, 2009 7:44PM

James Davis