Superfluous selves

>>Radio Slave, aka Matthew Edwards of
Quiet Village, prepares to shed his alter egos

WRECK IT: Matthew Edwards

By JACK OATMON

U.K.-born, Berlin-based Matthew Edwards has too many damn monikers and collab projects to properly discuss here, but even between the two that are billed for this year’s Mutek festival, his artistic breadth is sufficiently evident. Take the eerie sounds of Radio Slave—a name lauded by lovers of the finicky strand of minimal techno that gauges its bangers almost solely on the finesse of production values—and compare it with the ooey-gooey nostalgia and evocative stereotype-mining of his work with Joel Martin under the name Quiet Village.

“I’ve always loved all sorts of music,” explains Edwards. “I try to buy lots of rock and pop, hip hop and R&B. I buy a lot of modern soundtracks. I try to consume as much music as possible and not be too elitist. I take in as much music as I can, because there’s great music in every genre. You might not like all of it, but it’s always interesting to see what’s going on in different areas of production.”

Quiet Village, much like the Martin Denny track after which it is named, is steeped in the film and television scores of the ’50s and ’60s, when tiki culture was all the rage and exotic instrumentation was made to seem fantastical by way of accompaniment with then-novel electronic music gear, as if a ukulele- and Theremin-playing duo backed by a small brass section were what awaited mankind at the mysterious far reaches of the universe. Edwards and Martin evoke that 16mm frame of seaside daydreaming via innumerable sampled rarities, like DJ Shadow arranging an album based entirely on the works of cruise-ship bands. And to make the equation complete, they’ve reverse-engineered a short film of clips based on the music, to play the part of the fictitious film the album scores.

“With the musical styles, I guess all of it is very hypnotic,” says Edwards of the connection between his projects. “Even with the Quiet Village sound, and especially with Rekid and Radio Slave, there’s this hypnotic element. It’s all interlinked, but it’s just about good music.”

Good music is generally what people turn to Edwards for, whether in his own productions or from his fantastic record label, Rekids—not to be confused with his aforementioned alias, Rekid. The U.K.-based label is now nearly two years old and stands as one of the most exciting new outfits in England. And according to Edwards, the confusion over all the varying and overlapping names is about to end, as his next big project as a producer is likely to be called, well, Matthew Edwards.

“I’m probably going to kill the Radio Slave name because it really means pretty much nothing to me. I want to just start producing stuff under my own name. I could put it all into one at the moment, though Joel and I do the Quiet Village thing, which is separate. I think people have an understanding of what I do as a producer. I don’t think they’d be surprised if I was to make a weird hip hop track or a house track anymore.”

Radio Slave and Quiet Village
join DJ Olive, Kode 9 & Space Ape,
the Field and more at Metropolis
on Saturday, May 31, 10 p.m., $35