John Gagliano and Mathieu Fortin, better known as John & Matt are quickly becoming one of the fastest moving duos within the current electronic music panorama. Having started their musical paths exploring the live music scene, they have quickly fallen in love with Dance music and started the John & Matt duo back in 2013.
Within such a short period of time the eclectic tandem have already landed deals with some top labels like: Sullivan Room Records, Natura Viva, Dear Deer Records, Da Way, Sex Panda White, Esclama Records and Reloaded Recordings and have managed to reach chart placement with their first releases.
John & Matt are lining up some interesting projects to end 2015 in style and build-up towards an even bigger 2016, so we’ve decided to have a chat with the duo to get to know them better and reveal their plans for the months ahead.
Hey guys, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. How are you and what are you up to at the moment?
Hi guys, thank you for this interview. We’re great – we’re making music, as usual! At the moment we are focused on implementing some analogue gear into our studio setup, and we’re writing some new tracks with it.
Where are you guys based?
John lives in London, Matt lives in northern Italy, between Turin and Milan. London is, of course, one of the best places in the world if you’re into clubbing, everyone knows that. Milan is a very smart and classy city, with some very interesting underground clubs and a lot of fresh stuff going on. But our favourite is Turin, which has one of the coolest underground Techno scenes in Europe.
How long have you been working together?
A couple of years – we started this duo in the late 2013, after a short experience within a live band.
How did you guys join up to form this duo and why did you want to work together?
As said, we used to play together in a live band, sort of James Blake-like synth-pop stuff. Not very successful, to be honest! But we were both interested in club music, so at one point Matt came up with this House track and told John “I don’t know how to finish this”. Two days later – well, let’s say 48 hours of almost non-stop studio time, the track was ready, and it was now called ‘Slow Down’ and it sounded great In fact this track is going to be released this September, in an EP signed to Sullivan Room Records. It was an incredible experience, everything came up naturally, in a seemingly unlimited and incredibly powerful stream of ideas and inspiration. We didn’t even have to tell each other “Hey, let’s start a House music duo together”, it was already there.
Do you consider yourselves to be more of a live DJ act or producer duo?
We consider ourselves well-rounded musicians. So yeah, we are producers, DJs and live performers. We write our music, sometimes by improvising and holding jam sessions with keyboards, synths, MIDI drums and drum pads – and we’re very good at that. We craft our sound in the studio through hours of experiments and research with any sort of gear, noise-making things, field recordings and uncommon samplings. However we also love to DJ and to perform live. In our sets we always try to use as much live equipment as possible, we very rarely go on stage without at least a 3-octaves MIDI keyboard or a drum machine. Music is meant to be played in front of people, for people and experienced with people. This connection with the crowd, is what makes music our favourite form of communication.
For those who are not familiar with your style. Where would you place your sound?
It’s quite a wide spectrum, actually. It mainly sits somewhere between Deep House, House-Garage, Indie Dance / Nu Disco and Deep Techno. But from time to time we just cannot resist the temptation to digress into proper Techno, old school House, Funk-House or even IDM.
Who were your influences growing up?
We’ve always been very curious and we consider music as one big, whole piece, with no specific limitations related to genres and styles. We grew up listening to pretty much everything, from Rock, to Pop, to Funk and Soul, Jazz and even Classical – and electronic music, of course. If we had to name a few, the ones that inspired us the most would probably be: Moroder, Justice, Chemical Brothers and Frivolous.
You both started out as Jazz musicians – why and how did you switch towards the electronic scene?
We always loved electronic music. I (John) remember going to a big 3 days music festival in Italy when I was a teenager; some of the biggest names ever played on the main stage: Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Santana, Garbage, Manu Chao and many more. I was kind of a punk-rocker at the time, so I didn’t expect much from the Chemical Brothers set. But when they started playing… Wow. One of the most impressive shows I’ve ever seen.
Today electronic music represents what Jazz music represented between the 20s and the 40s, or what Rock n’ Roll represented from the 50s to the 70s. It’s an incredible sort of “primordial soup”, always changing and evolving, with influences coming from every corner of the world, bringing new creative energy every day. Its boundaries get pushed forward every day. Under a cultural point of view it’s an amazing phenomenon, without precedents in history in terms of dimension and number of minds involved. It’s a revolution; it’s where the new musical languages are born every day. It’s where things happen and where we want to be.
Do you feel your Jazz musical background helps when you producing Dance music?
A lot – having musical skills is always a powerful tool when it comes to producing or performing (unless you do Minimal Techno). I (Matt) can improvise our beats on a drum pad and they’re ready to go, we don’t have to apply groove quantization templates or anything because the groove is already in my hands. Another example, many producers without musical background have to struggle for hours trying to get a nice bass-line out of an on-screen piano roll, while for us, it only takes a few seconds to play it live. Most of the times we don’t even record MIDI, we print the audio take straight away.
Walk us through your career highlights so far.
We both have a 10 years long career as musicians and session guys, and we both toured Italy and Europe several times. John & Matt is a young project though, for now we can say that being in the Beatport charts with our very first EP in March 2014 was an incredible result, as well as hitting those charts again with 6 out of 8 releases in the first half of 2015, almost without any promotion.
Do you have any projects coming up this year?
We have a good partnership with two NYC-based labels, Sullivan Room Records and Modern Day Music, born from the ashes of one of the most relevant underground House & Techno institution in NY, a basement club called Sullivan Room. They will release 3 EPs from September to December and another one will be published in November by one of the most important Italian Techno labels, Natura Viva. But there’s a lot of new stuff in the pipeline for 2016 😉
How would you describe your work relationship as a tandem?
We are very complementary, in musical and personal ways. Matt is a good drummer and can write killer beats, John is a good keyboard player and singer and provides bass-lines, synth parts and vocal takes – although we often swap these roles. Matt is quiet and cool, John is noisy and easygoing. We both are focused hard workers, as well as clubbers and party lovers. We can’t think of a better combination!
John, what’s the best and worst thing about collaborating with Matt?
He’s always on it, always ready for work, always thinking about J&M, always focused. He has concrete determination and will never let me down. He’s a great music lover and an exceptional drummer. Unfortunately, I’m always the one who has to talk to people, carry the gear on stage and set up the studio – he just gets confused with all those cables and wires!
Matt what’s the best and worst thing about collaborating with John?
I knew from the very first time we played together that he had an exceptional musical sensibility and an exceptional talent. He’s very intelligent, and I’ve learnt a lot from him, about music and life. Working with him is always stimulating and together we make a perfect team. The bad thing is that sometimes he behaves like a high school teacher, telling me off as if I were a child!
Thanks guys!
John & Matt Online
www.johnandmatt.com
www.facebook.com/johnandmatt
www.soundcloud.com/john-matt-1
