Audion: the great escape

Recently, Matthew Dear found himself standing on the edge of XOYO’s dancefloor with his old pal Tiga while one of the support DJs warmed up the crowd. “He played a song with a big breakdown and you knew as soon as the kick came back that the crowd were going to go wild. I remember saying to Tiga: ‘That never gets old’. It’s been happening since the beginning of dance music; the build, the drop and the return. Everybody expects it, but everybody still freaks out. It’s a magical thing.”

It’s the reason why Matthew Dear keeps coming back to his playful techno alias Audion, despite his burgeoning career as a brooding synth-pop crooner. 2012’s enthralling ‘Beams’ album seemed to mark the point where Dear transcended the dance world in the manner of Caribou or James Murphy, and he ended the campaign supporting Depeche Mode at Rome’s 78,0000-capacity Stadio Olimpico (“when we went on it was probably only a quarter full, but still… it was crazy, man!”) Now 37 and the father of two girls, you could forgive him for quietly retiring Audion to concentrate on becoming a respected leftfield artiste. But instead he’s in Brighton on a blustery bank holiday Sunday, his usual black button-down swapped for a colourful abstract-print tee, ready to bring the party to anyone who’s not face-down on the beach.

Dear’s puppyish enthusiasm for dance music possibly stems from the fact that, as an American who came of age long before the EDM boom, he was never able to take it for granted. Growing up in Kingsville, a tiny city near the Texas coast, he didn’t even realise there was such a thing as dance music. “I’d hear a single by Happy Mondays and know I liked it, but I couldn’t place it.” His epiphany came after his family moved to Michigan in his late teens and he found himself at a warehouse party in Detroit, helmed by Underground Resistance’s DJ T-1000. “That’s when a giant lightbulb went off and smacked me in the head.” He immediately bought a sampler and a drum machine and funnelled his musical ambitions towards the dancefloor. Within a couple of years, he’d joined up with ambitious University Of Michigan student Sam Valenti, who founded the Ghostly International label as a way to get Dear’s music into the world.

As the records released under his own name became a byword for urbane techno-pop refinement, Audion was established in 2004 as a repository for Dear’s less inhibited dancefloor freak-outs. The records came wrapped in vivid, fluorescent sleeves and were given dumb, borderline offensive names. “‘Suckfish’, ‘Titty Fuck’, ‘Just Fucking’…” he shakes his head sheepishly. “I was young and I had a lot of fire inside me. Some weird, sadistic voice in my head was calling the shots: ‘Call a track ‘Titty Fuck’, it’ll be funny!’ Obviously I don’t think that way any more…”

As if to underline the shift in his values, one of the tracks on Audion’s new album, Alpha, is called ‘Bob The Builder’. Meanwhile the in-yer-face acid squeals and ludicrous long builds of early Audion favourites like ‘Kisses’ and ‘Mouth To Mouth’ have been traded up for a fuller, richer sound, defined by Dear’s deployment of his new modular synth set-up. But thankfully some silliness remains – a track called ‘Suppa’ is followed by one called ‘Napkin’ – and the album subverts techno cliches by being warm and hospitable throughout.

Dear admires producers like Andy Stott and Recondite but admits he just hasn’t got it in him to make harsh, forbidding techno. “I try, but I can’t be that cold. It always ends up a little quirky with me. I’m more drawn to weird, rubber-bandy loops; wilder shit that falls apart and come back together, as opposed to very rigid, strict sequences. I still want my techno to be uplifting.”

‘Alpha’ is full of interesting hooks, samples and found sounds, but it’s best not to read too much significance into their provenance. Opening track ‘Dem’ is marked by a strangled vocal snippet that seems to be trying to say “angel”… or perhaps not. “I heard it as ‘anger’! I don’t think I know what the original word was, because the way I work, I just cut and cut and resample. I don’t even want to know, it’s not my place to tell you what it’s saying.” Where ‘Alpha’ does employ vocals they are distorted or submerged, employed solely for their percussive qualities. “I don’t need a narrative on a techno album,” he reasons.

Dear is wary of overcomplicating matters. Two years ago he tried to turn Audion into more of a live spectacle, embarking on an ambitious A/V tour called Subverticul, which found him playing from inside a glowing triangular matrix designed by the same people behind Amon Tobin’s ISAM. Ultimately though, he found the structure imprisoning, and he only played ten shows.

“I’m glad I tried to do a larger show but I realised it’s not necessarily for me,” he says. “I prefer getting up in front of people with my little modular rig. It’s more real. All you really need is one light and a good soundsystem.”

Dear’s unflappable, can-do attitude comes to the fore when he discovers he’s been booked to play one of Brighton’s less celebrated venues. Shooshh is the kind of place that’s spent all its budget on a gaudy VIP area, complete with waitresses in corsets. It’s not full, most of the local techno cognoscenti understandably choosing to steer clear of such a tacky venue. But even with a patchy crowd and a malfunctioning video wall, Dear attacks his set with the same energy as he did in Fabric the night before, jacking furiously to the beat and beaming proudly when he spots people getting off on the supple acid undulations of new tunes like ‘Traanc’.

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