Matthew Evan Taylor: The Unheard Mixtapes — Metropolis Ensemble

“Matthew reconciled his artistic identity as a classical composer focused on social justice, Black expressive culture, and experimentalism.”

(I Care If You Listen)

 
 

 
 

About the Album

Released September 29, 2020 on New Amsterdam Records

A five-part series commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble, released on New Amsterdam Records. Composer and saxophonist Matthew Evan Taylor’s The Unheard Mixtapes — his self-described artistic manifesto during the pandemic — was unveiled over five months from September 29, 2020 to January 26, 2021. Artwork by Juniper Creative LLC (Will Kasso Condry, Jennifer Herrera-Condry, Alexa Herrera-Condry).

Taylor has a long and ongoing fascination with the dissemination of art through underground or backdoor channels, such as zines and mixtapes. He explains that “not only have these methods proved to be effective means of delivering art to people without the focus on commercial gain, but they often give insight into the character and taste of the curators of the material. I see the mixtape, especially as it is used in the hip hop community, as a wholly American (specifically African American) genre akin to the string quartet or song cycle.”

  • Mixtape 1: Follow to the End, begins a plaintive and epic odyssey in which Taylor explores, and ultimately achieves, the fraught goal of being himself. He boldly states in his notes for the project: “I am Matthew Evan Taylor, a musician who composes; a composer who performs; a performer who improvises. I am all of these things and more. The Unheard Mixtapes are my manifesto.”

  • Mixtape 2: Language of the Unheard begins a plaintive and epic odyssey in which Taylor explores, and ultimately achieves, the fraught goal of being himself.

  • Mixtape 3: Chamber Music as a collection of works, stands as the sole [mixtape] with overt references to Western classical music. The music however lies in a space that transcends Western classical music, drawing upon the visual, physical, and spiritual worlds in a richly unique tapestry of color, movement, time and space.

  • Mixtape 4: Isolation Blues, as writer Rick Moody writes in the project's liner notes, "The thing about Matthew EvanTaylor is the emotional intensity of what comes out of him, which is mostly associated with his horn, but not exclusively, at all, because it’s like his every gesture is consistent with the practice."

  • Mixtape 5: Abstractions in Sound, as composer Anthony R. Green writes in his liner notes for the project, "In Matthew Evan Taylor's Abstractions in Sound, his intimate musical crevices are laid bare for listeners to examine, absorb, intimate. The album, though separated into six distinct improvisations, suggests a journey containing a single path through various terrains, each with their own unique, rich crevices. Suffice it to say, this ultimately left-to-right journey is rife with micro- and macro-wanderings through space and time via musical phenomena: microtonal inflections, multiphonics, licks, vibrato extremes, tone beauty, tone ugliness, the harmonic series, vocal modulations, interruption, saturation, and so much more."

 

 

Recent Reviews

 

 
 

“I felt connected to much older traditions and wisdoms about sound, and the relationship that the act of making music has to connecting with the past.”

Matthew Evan Taylor

Matthew Evan Taylor has collaborated closely with Metropolis since 2016, with projects that include Biophony, For the Birds, and our multi-year partnership with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Life Returns / Postcards to The Met.

 
 

 

WATCH: Trailer for the five-part album series, The Unheard Mixtapes.

Project In-Depth

Though recorded during our current pandemic reality, the lo-fi/DIY mixtape ethos is the confluence of a longstanding aesthetic to which Taylor has been drawn. Each album features original art from the team at Juniper Creative, LLC which includes renowned street artist and muralist Will Kasso Condry, his wife Jennifer Herrera-Condry, and daughter Alexa Herrera-Condry.

 

 

Matthew Evan Taylor

Composer

Composer and saxophonist Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) has been hailed as “a promising new voice” (Miami Herald) and a “risk taker” (Huffington Post) whose music is “insistent and defiant ... envelopingly hypnotic” (Lucid Culture). A southern kid who worshiped at the altar of Cannonball Adderly, Ornette Coleman, Carla Bley and Charles Mingus, Matthew’s music has been performed across the United States and Europe by such ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the Metropolis Ensemble, the Imani Winds, and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. As a performer, Matthew has worked with musicians Elliott Sharp, Marilyn Crispell, Tatsuya Nakatani, Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson; visual artists Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and Dannielle Tegeder; and dancers Katherine Kramer, Sara Shelton, Laurel Jenkins, and Lida Winfield.

His most recent project, New Century | New Voices, is a concert series in Middlebury, Vermont celebrating the continued contributions of women and composers of color to the classical music canon. The inaugural season, which began in January 2019, included collaborations with composers Carlos Simon, Marcos Balter, and Gabriela Lena Frank and the Vermont- based new music ensemble TURNmusic. Matthew is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College in Vermont. More »