Audion: the great escape

He’s not in the least bit snobbish about how people approach his music. “I’ve met people at my residency in New York who used to go to Electric Daisy Carnival and have arrived at my stuff from there. That whole EDM bubble’s definitely popping in America and I’ve always thought that if 20 per cent of those people graduate to more underground electronic music then it’s a good thing,” he says.

Would he accept the offer of a Vegas residency? “I’d consider it. But I’d need to investigate what their motives were and if they really thought it was a good idea… I try to make wise decisions. You can dive with great white sharks with or without a cage, but you should probably stay in the cage. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you have to.”

You will be able to catch Audion in Ibiza this summer. He may not be your typical superclub DJ but Dear embraces the White Isle willingly and without prejudice. “Of course it’s not like it was in 1987. But it’s still an island dedicated to dance music, albeit a transmutated, fucked-up, hyper-real version of dance music. It’s easy to hate that, but the kids are enjoying themselves. All I know is that when I go there and I have fun and people react to it, then we all win. Are there people making a shit-ton of money off it? Yeah, but play the game, man.”

Mathew Dear is not at all how you’d imagine him to be if you caught him playing the aloof and faintly troubled frontman at one of his live band shows. He’s handsome enough to pass as a Hollywood actor, so is there an element of acting when he performs live? He looks mildly affronted. “That’s me, man! I never wanted to force an ego on stage. I knew that if I tried to be somebody I wasn’t, I would fall flat on my face. But by allowing myself to find out who I wanted to be on stage… over time I became that person.” Ah, so there is a transformation that takes place? He smiles enigmatically. “When you’re in a dark room and you have the power of a microphone, the adrenaline’s flowing and the music’s loud, then… things happen.”

What about some of the darker lyrics on ‘Beams’? “I feel hollow as the grave I have to dig every day”; “How could you trust someone as suspicious as me?” These don’t sound like the kind of things that the everyday Matthew Dear would say. “I think I live on a surface layer of existence and there’s a lot that happens subconsciously,” he says. “Music becomes an outlet. It allows you to say things that you wouldn’t say in normal conversation. But I don’t always know what it means. Mostly it’s just about the rhythm and the pattern of the words and the way they fit into the music.”

Recently he visited Simian Mobile Disco at their studio in Kent and wrote four songs in four days, giving full rein to his subconscious while Jas and James tweaked the drums. He’s not sure yet what those lyrics will to reveal about him, but he’s content to leave that to the amateur psychiatrists among us. All he will say is that he’s hoping to put out a new Matthew Dear album early next year.

But he’s not going to abandon his fruitful Audion sideline and the chance to make a dark room full of ravers go haywire. “I’ve been doing this for a long time and it still makes me smile, still energises me,” he says, emerging onto the Brighton promenade at 2.30am as hungry revellers shield their chips from dive-bombing seagulls. “I like seeing people lose their shit.”

Audion's 'Alpha' is out now on !K7