Matthew Conley

Independent Review - October 30, 2013

Matthew Conley

Help Yourself EP

Self-Released

Review by Kent Manthie

Just out is the self-released debut by Matthew Conley, Help Yourself.  It’s a five-song EP that is filled with instrumental, electronic, atmospheric tunes that seamlessly go from one track to the next.
It’s a hypnotic delight.  Conley has great talent.  This is a self-made EP that shimmers with a multitude of layered electronic sounds.  Not only is there lots of slick synths glimmering, but behind that there’s sampled “found sounds”, voices and a smattering of various synthesized horns, strings, and even choir-like chants in the background.  The latter is especially prominent on “The Hierarchy”.  But on that tune as well as all the rest of them, nothing is static; it goes from programmed sound to sample to keyboards back to synth-ed jams.
The aforementioned “The Hierarchy” is a 5 1/2 minute busy electronica anthem that pulses and pops in and out of various bits and pieces that Conley has woven together.  Another great tune on here is the last tune, “Drone VI”, a heavenly, brilliant floating-on-a-cloud meditation.
But I can’t really say which one is the best tune, as they all go together to create a suite of electronica for the current decade; not looking backward, copying House music or Techno but wiring together a forward looking computer love letter.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, then I’d keep a watch out for Matthew Conley.  He’s just beginning his foray into a new wave of crafty, electronic music; made entirely from his own imagination and composed and performed solely by himself.
If you’d like to watch a video of Matt working on printing up copies of CD and vinyl record jackets, with a sampling of the music from Help Yourself, then click here to check it out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FshtMh_epe8
 Also – if you’d like to get more information on Matt, visit his webpage, at http://www.matthewconley.com
Have a spooky Halloween everyone!!!!
-KM - Kent Manthie

So much music today is linear, it’s uniform, it’s mass produced, mass marketed pop. So it’s refreshing to hear Dubai producer Matthew Conley is at the opposite end of that sonic spectrum. Just take opening track, ‘Imaginary Places,’ which sounds like he’s trying to percolate of all Warp Records’ back catalogue into 6 minutes of fizzing electronic skirmishes.

Written and created while on discovery in Goa, Imaginary Places is a lush, downtempo, but challenging album, featuring nine tracks of discordant sonic weaponary that all have a rock-solid melodic grounding.

Some of the wilder tracks, like ‘Oort Cloud’ and ‘Hyperspaced’ could have been a co-production with Bjork and Squarepusher, thanks to their simple/complex structure and fluctuating rhythm, while ‘Chime In’ has a subtle Arabic swing to it, and skipping Four Tet style beats. Dubai based beats with a real difference
- See more at: http://www.infusion.ae/en/review/music-news-1/album-reviews/matthew-conley-imaginary-places.html#sthash.0bhFRxWK.dpuf - Infusion Magazine