MTVoid — the duo comprised of Tool bassist Justin Chancellor and Sweet Noise vocalist Peter Mohamed — unveiled their debut album, Nothing’s Matter, in 2013. The LP saw the pair (alongside some guests) incorporating their revered specialities into new musical and theoretical paths. Bursting with philosophical insights, culturally specific attributes, and avant-garde techniques, it was a refreshing and rewarding art rock journey as only they could’ve created.
For various reasons, however, the project had been silent until this past November, when MTVoid unleashed the follow-up, Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1.
A “pan-dynamic tapestry of sound and thought, twisted together and pulled taut, a connection of ideas remotely fused between Los Angeles, California and Swarzędz, Poland” – as Chancellor states in the album’s official press release – the new LP sees the duo pushing themselves further creatively and conceptually. With help from Isabel Munoz-Newsome (Pumarosa), Andy Morin (Death Grips), and Aric Improta (Night Verses, ex-Fever 333), Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1 absolutely delivers everything fans could’ve expected (and then some).
The duo recently caught up with Heavy Consequence to discuss what led to the project’s resurrection, what makes Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1 a fitting yet surprising successor to Nothing’s Matter, and more. Pick up MTVoid’s new album here, and read our full interview with the duo below.
Can you speak a bit about the decade-long break between albums and what led to restarting the project?
Justin Chancellor: Well, I mean, I was very busy with my day job. Obviously, Peter had a lot of stuff going on, too. Multiple sound projects. So, yeah, the first album we did was kind of a bit of an experiment. Consider it more like it’s us getting our feet wet. Just a demo. It was us trying to understand how to use a proper mixing desk together. We actually did it together in L.A. Once we’d done that, Peter went back to Poland and we just kind of got on with our lives.
We did a few tracks together, but it was COVID that really pushed us into doing this next album. We found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands and we’d accumulated some ideas along the way. Because we’d already gotten quite good at file sharing and doing some other tracks with some friends of Peter’s, we realized that we could make quite a lot of progress quite quickly just doing this in our own studios in Poland and L.A. So, that kind of spurred us on.
We were just, like, “Oh, wow, now’s the time.” We never really had a schedule before that because we had a lot of other stuff going on, but very quickly, we realized that this was the moment to seize, and we got on with it.
That’s great. Carpe diem.
JC: Exactly.
Obviously, the title connects to its predecessor, so I wonder how they’re related stylistically, thematically, narratively. I know that the last album was sung entirely in Polish, for example.
Peter Mohamed: The main difference is the choice in language. With the first album, it was Justin’s idea to keep it in Polish. I was kind of fresh from moving to L.A. to do a project with Toshi Kasai. We worked for a couple of months and then I started talking with Justin about possibly making some music. It was supposed to be, like, a pure noise soundscapey thing. Then, we realized that if there is this opportunity, we must figure out how to write songs to just, you know, memorize the moment and just give it importance.
We’d been waiting a long time to start making music in one spot. Before that, we never really collaborated on any sounds. When we moved to writing this second album, during COVID, I was really trying to get back into the idea of really communicating with a broader audience and by using English.
It was quite a trip to find the right method to write the lyrics. I chose a method called the “cut-up technique” to make it as weird as the stuff we were making musically, which is nonlinear. And, you know, I was kind of thinking that it might work in this scenario. I didn’t want to just start doing what I was doing for years in my own project by just writing words.
That’s interesting. I have to admit, though, that I’ve never heard of the “cut-up technique.”
PM: It’s a method invented during the Dada movement of the 1920s. A couple of people I admire, like William Burroughs and David Bowie, used it a lot. I pretty much followed that formula of having a program that I fed different sources of texts into to make it randomize the thing.
I used that for lyrical content on this record, and to my – maybe not surprise, but it made me happy that Justin was like, “Okay, this is so weird and so strange.” He didn’t know about the methods. I introduced him to my workflow.
That was the main difference in my in my case when approaching this album. We just took it from there.
JC: That method scrambles these ideas, and it makes it a lot more open to interpretation. It’s closer to poetry, where it’s more thought-provoking, with little phrases that allow you to pick up on different things. Plus, the way that they’ve been randomized – the words or phrases – means that interact differently every time you listen to it. It really works.
PM: Our music is pretty glitchy and it’s based on soundscapes and textures that, as initial ideas, they’re mostly composed in not a typical [way] that people work with. I use Ableton Live and Logic to mix, but to just spit those ideas out, it’s different stuff that is told nonlinear. There is no sequencer for that. So, I’m a fan of noise sound machines that I also put different textures into, and some of my field recordings and stuff. That created, like, a context, and the first things I sent to Justin and asked him how he felt about them. He reacted to those textures with beats and baselines, and that’s why the non-linearity allows for words to fit in different ways and vice versa. I think we did a lot more to move away from the typical song structure on this album.
There’s definitely a collage aspect that gives the album a distinctive flavor. It sounds like making it was an evenly split collaboration, too.
JC: Yeah, we tried to do that as much as possible. We did a little bit of it on the last go around, though, as we were already sending files back and forth. We also collaborated with a bunch of other people, and just as they came into view – as we were writing songs and we’d have something going on with someone, whoever it was coming into town – we’d say, “Well, why don’t you get involved in this idea right now?”
We pretty much followed our noses as everything was colliding. It started with the first record, but this was a lot more – I mean, it’s always been very 50/50 with the two of us, with the notion that as we progress through an idea and try to give it life and grow it, we’d both discuss where we think it should go and what we think it should sound like. You know, like, I’m adding guitars while he’s working on his lyrics.
This album was much more that way because when he’d send the files, I’d have a few days to react to it on my own, and then I’d have plenty of time to do everything I wanted. We both knew that the other person was eagerly awaiting a response, though.
So, that really balances out the workload because it’s just, like, you go hard for a few days and then it’s the other person’s turn to go hard. Even when we were mixing – I mean, Peter was pretty much mixing it, but he’d be sending the mixes to me. Then, we’d have to chat and Zoom or FaceTime about it and try and explain things.
I’d have to explain what I was hearing that I wanted to hear differently and then he’d work on it again. So, yeah, that’s just the nature of it and what really evened out the workflow, I think, in a strange way.
PM: There was no strict method, though. Each track was almost like a different kind of experiment, and that’s what I feel like is the best thing about the project. There are no limitations. I can send Justin anything with a beat or without a beat, texture, or soundscape. I love that, and when he sends back his take on bass (which comes first), we can start talking about maybe adding some more input on his side, like guitars or even cymbals and stuff like that.
When I get the bass lines, it’s usually around five tracks, which can be overwhelming. But, I’m usually fast with that, so within an hour, I’d have a sketch of a baseline from those five takes and I’d polish it and make it sound like a proper baseline and send it over to him.
It sounds like a very efficient process, as if you two are working as a collective mind with a shared vision. You almost know what the other person’s thinking or what the other person wants. Can you speak a bit about how the guests came into play?
JC: As we completed each track and started the next one, we were deciding what we needed to add. With “Propagator,” we thought it’d be great to have a great drum track. We’d done a few songs with the synthesized beats and stuff that Peter put together, but we wanted a real drummer to add more flavor. I’d met Aric Improta on tour and he’s a real prodigy. He’s an up-and-coming drummer and he can really rip. He’s a lovely guy. That’s just the way of life, you know? It leads you and bumps you into people.
I’d already done some stuff with Isabel on her Pumarosa album a few years ago, so I just asked if she’d return the favor. As for Andy from Death Grips, I did a track with them years ago and I called him and asked if he’d be into it.
