Matthew Collings

While looking back to an extensive period of creating music with his ambient project “Sketches for Albinos” Matthew Collings felt the urgent necessity of starting with a completely different approach to music, as the ambient aesthetic didn’t match any longer with new ideas burgeoning in his head. He wanted to create a more direct sound to involve a much grander and more dangerous range of emotions. The composition process of “Splintered Instruments” came out of personally reckoning with two contrary forces, something vicious and unrelenting challenging with a soft and kind energy – getting to their core and the dynamic interrelation to one another Filtered through melody and vaguely resembling songs, driven by nested rhythm patterns, one can imagine that the first sound Collings picked up on as a leading impulse “was like Sonic Youth’s ‘The Diamond Sea’ meeting ‘Music for 18 Musicians’. I wanted to take songs and kind of dissolve them and then bring them back again, with everything just being on the edge of these various types of structures.”

He worked closely with Ben Frost on the creation of “Splintered Instruments”, who took influence in the physicality and size of sound and helped to achieve him to reach into the deepest parts of human nature, pulling it out in a hybrid-pop- experimental-noise form. According to Collings, the record is “a revolt against machines” understanding the sense of preci- sion as something pretty unnatural. He avoids working with computers only using them for convenience, not as a principle. 90% of the record is organic sourced from or played on acoustic instruments or objects, being drawn to sound of every kind which is more human, more imperfect in its subtle variations. Splintered Instruments '...is not about noise or the decibel levels – it’s about the sheer uncompromised approach to raw sound design' (Headphone Commute).