When I first put on Matthew’s record, I felt like a kid again—lying on the floor of the living room, dreading the moment when a song would end. Matthew and his band of musicians—Kit Downes on organ, Hanno Busch on guitar, Sean Carpio on drums, and Sergio Martinez on percussion—embody present, past, and future. They expand and contract, maneuver past impossible hairpin turns, and interact with kaleidoscopic intricacy.
The result is a glimpse into Halpin’s vertiginous inner life. On “Dancing with the Devil,” Downes’s organ shrieks above the fray as the band builds into a Boschian orgy. On “To Do,” the same organ paints planar surfaces and hallucinatory shapes, weaving a retrofuturist fugue state in the song's second half. Martinez and Carpio propel “The Beach'' forward with a groove at once relentless and weightless, scintillating like the light that reflects off the water on a perfect summer’s day. In “Treetown,” Halpin and Busch’s electroacoustic bird calls remind me of the Brooklyn mockingbirds that have learned to imitate car alarms: nature adapting to technology. The track recedes like the natural world it represents, increasingly silent in the wake of destruction.
1. To-Do Today, To-Do Dismay
2. Dancing with the Devil
3. Dog Day Afternoon
4. The Beach
5. Swings and Roundabouts
6. Sit Up and Shut Down
7. Awkward Handshakes
8. Pop Fiction
9. Treetown
10. Sigh For Sam
11. Sleep
Matthew Halpin - tenor saxophone, composition
Kit Downes - hammond organ
Hanno Busch - electric guitar
Sergio Martinez - percussion
Sean Carpio - drums
Veronika Morscher, Rebekka Salomea Ziegler, Laura Totenhagen - voices on “Sleep"
Recorded at Riverside Studios, Cologne
Engineered by Julian David
Mixed and mastered by Oliver Bergner
Artwork by Janet Cruise Halpin
Graphic design by Daniel F. Hirth
Released with Frutex Tracks
Distribution by Hey!Blau
Supported by Generations Jazz Festival and SRF
