Dario Matta | Bases 2019

The prolific label of demos and plus, 5tracks, shares a new work, with sound to tapes by his CEO, Dario Matta. Almost “quoting” Alberdi, a manifesto and starting point.

  Dario Matta | Vaporwave en Vivo

Currently, Cuyo’s netlabel, 5tracks hosts almost 60 works under a common denominator, 5 songs, all must be models, demos, half-born or half-dead tracks. A solid idea in an endless sound universe where polyphony is order and where many, little dare to share processes or make them public.

Dario Matta is from La Rioja, born and raised, but his sound becoming deep in Mendoza where he went and is part of several projects, in addition to his own, teacher and a curious tireless sound.

Bases is a series of models with which he was working throughout 2019 for the “assembly” of some live presentations. On these models he was improvising and incorporating audios of different kinds, sometimes randomly and others, previously selected. Both the bases and the sounds are played in cassettes players that are connected in a chain of reverbs, delays, distortions, etc.

Interesting aspect, we are in the presence of tracks or bases, which are played in a concert where the orchestra is led by Matta (alone or in company), which also adds other sounds to the creation, thought of by and for the work or improvised . In his opinion, the idea is to create live and spontaneously a music similar or related to the Vaporwave genre, a paradoxical thing because this genre was not conceived to be performed live.

 Dario Matta | BASES 2019

“In 2017 I started doing this kind of “Argentine vaporwave”, improvising with live cassettes, mixed with some electronic bases, sometimes playing alone, sometimes with friends like Diego Monton, Andrés Musolino, Kari Villalba or Iara Woods. Always with quite satisfactory results. One day my sister told me that this music was interesting but that it lacked a base, of something more harmonically stable, rhythmically. That’s why I put myself in the job of looking for songs, and punctually, fragments, that would call my attention to make loops, modify their speed, equalize them in different ways, and that would serve as support for live concerts.”

These “bases” of support, were composed on a computer with Audacity, sadly criticized, but with very interesting features, it is cross-platform, open source, free and highly configurable thanks to all its aforementioned features. In addition, it is more stable than many proprietary editing software.

Matta knows the existence of other digital workstations, perhaps more professional and complex, but chose the recommendation over other options such as Sonar, Cubase or Logic. Audacity was recommended by a friend, is quite light and learned to use it in an afternoon. Then he recorded the bases and tracks on cassette and again digitized all the material. A fairly vaporwave way of working.

I feel that this work sounds “incomplete” because it is only about bases that I use to play live, therefore other sounds are missing, other frequencies. Perhaps all that is missing, may be implicit, may be other (frequencies), may not be, may be left to the imagination of those who listen to this work. And that can be an apprenticeship: there are things in music that can be present or absent, implicit or explicit, and that does not change the experience that someone can have with this album … or quite the opposite, it can modify absolutely everything. Listening, perception, sounds, everything can be subject to change.

And it is precisely what BASES lets us hear, an incomplete album, waiting for its complement, a starting point for many listeners, many forms not determined and willing to listen, where we can expand the sense of the moment when sharing the pleasure of contemplate a work as complete as half, not finished. Where the adventure lies in conjunction with the composer. We rarely go to these types of shows, where we are part without being mere spectators.