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MAGNET EXCLUSIVE

MAGNET Exclusive: Matt Pond PA’s “Closer (Demo)”

Matt Pond PA is dead. Long live Collected Lakes! But in the meantime, Matt Pond PA (the band) is clearing out its old hard drives and planning to release one posthumous album a year for the near future. Matt Pond (the man) explains.

My streetwalking how-do-you-do is a series of choreographed spasms that culminate in a curvature of lips and teeth akin to a frightened cartoon fox. My bravery at the post office often feels profound. 

Our modern existence might be a little askew—and these electronic proclamations may not be all that profound—but still, I insist on shouting from the top of this dirty snow bank. I have to believe my modest broadcasts matter more than the undone dishes or the bills building a fortress around the front door.

I mostly speak through music because I don’t totally know how to rely on human contact. For me, trusting people is terrifying. Yet, I like human beings. I do. I like their unedited faces, their messed-up thoughts and hair. I like their ability to survive themselves. That is the most important application in myself: a setting of survival. I like sitting across the table from you. Even when you have spinach in your teeth, and my laughter resembles a wild boar snuffling in your garden. 

And love. Love is an amazing supernatural muscle. (Cue Spectral Display’s “It Takes A Muscle.”)

We’ve uncovered overgrown mountains of Matt Pond PA songs. Hence, we’re going to release an album every year until all the past lyrical ranges have been revealed. Here is a free one: “Closer (Demo)” from A Collection of Bees Part 1, out in February. (All the way back to when Mike Kennedy slapped the mattress as a kick drum, tapped a piece of paper with a pencil eraser for the snare. The reverberations led to words, that led to guitars, which turned a studio bedroom shuffle into a proper song.)

Chris Hansen and I were chosen to score two films in the upcoming three-program screening series Other Histories: Amateur Films On The National Film Registry. The series, which is curated by the Center For Home Movies, premieres on the weekend of January 10-12, 2020, at the Roy And Niuta Titus Theater as part of MoMA’s landmark Private Lives Public Spaces exhibition of amateur films and home movies from their collection.  

In the future—and as it has previously been proclaimed—we shall be called Collected Lakes. It’s a shout-out to the collaborative efforts in all our musical undertakings. The part I love about your note, resting right on top of my note. 

These trajectories have many arcs. There are so many different ways to see ourselves; there are so many different ways to be seen. The simple truth is that I’m sitting in a winter coat next to my canine rescue empress, mouthing these words as I type, hoping to get through a maze of algorithms to somehow make sense to you.

Can anyone believe how strange it is to be anything at all? 

((((Happy Holidays!))) 

End proclamation