“Good riddance”: Why Matrixxman is happy to alienate techno purists

Charles McCloud Duff, a fixture of Berlin’s dance music circuit best known for producing loopy and bone-crunching techno as Matrixxman, is sitting in his flat and laughing about the absurdity of releasing a techno album. We’re meeting up to speak about 'Identity Crisis', one of two records he released in 2024. At first blush, the LP — which rockets between UK drill, straight-up UKG, bleary-eyed dubstep, and umpteen other styles — read like a bit of a curveball for the producer, whose catalogue helped define the sound of Berlin techno in the 2010s. But Duff doesn’t see it that way. “['Identity Crisis'] is a full piss-take of a name,” he tells me, grinning. “The more apt title might be 'Homecoming', or 'Welcome Back'. I’ve always been on some chaos. Life is too short to play it safe!”

If you dig through Duff’s discography, you’ll find piles of steely-eyed four-fours and frigid synthesisers; when he first flew to Europe, it was to play Berghain, an old-school mecca of Berlin’s techno scene if there ever was one. But, now, he’s looking towards different pastures. “I look around,” he tells me, “And I see cats that are really good at doing loopy techno, which I love. But I’m like, ‘That’s cool. What else can you do, bro?’ If the big dogs of techno aren’t going to take it upon themselves to get wild and experiment — all right, bet. Let’s go!” With that, he breaks out into a boisterous laugh, his eyes lighting up underneath a crown of salt-and-pepper hair. “Can you imagine if I would have released an album of 19 techno tracks—how boring would that be? No one would give a fuck!”

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Duff grew up in Arlington, Virginia, listening to Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh on the radio during what he refers to as “the heyday of the crack era.” He got caught up in the city’s music scene at a young age, finding his way into all sorts of corners: hanging with the b-boys and graffiti artists, listening to blown-out Fugazi cassettes with local skateboarders, hitting up dancehall parties and go-go functions. In high school, though, his sister set him on a collision course. “She had this 'Greatest Hits of Jungle' CD, which is ironic, because I don’t think she actually liked it,” he recalls, smiling. “She never went to raves! I was like, 'Give me that shit', and I wore it out.” He started going to raves years before he could legally drink, hitting up now-demolished warehouses in DC, club-night institutions in Baltimore, and Ultraworld, an annual festival in the area. (Of Buzz, a party he frequently attended: “It was simply life-changing — a very special era to have witnessed in the flesh.”) He cuts to the quick, making no bones about his love for that period: “There were basically Berghain-level parties every Friday. It’s a time that hasn’t quite been replicated, in my mind. It was really, truly magical.”

Part of that magic, perhaps, comes from the connections he made. He met one of his best friends, Paavo Steinkamp, at these raves, taking all sorts of drugs for the first time. One time, when they were “rolling our faces off and dancing our asses off,” they made what an older Duff describes as a “Shamanic pact: ‘We want to do this shit, and we’re not stopping.’” He’d already pooled his money with Steinkamp to purchase a Roland synthesiser, so they tried their hand at the kinds of drum ‘n’ bass they’d hear blaring over warehouse soundsystems, but their endeavour proved to be more slippery than that. In the early aughts — just a year or two later — Steinkamp pulled out a Juan Atkins record, and the rest was history. ”The next thing you know, we’re trying to replicate Detroit techno and house,” Duff says, smiling.

Even as he started falling in love with kick drums, though, Duff was nurturing another passion: hip hop. He managed to find his way into Pushaz Ink, the rap crew founded by Compton-area rapper YG, producing beats for names like Ty Dolla $ign. As ever in his career, Duff sees parallels in the forms. In recent years he's also fallen in with jerk, a deep-fried take on an old-school sound, and sigilkore, an experimental take on trap that laces its 808s with references to the occult. “Rap music, for [Steinkamp and me], is as futuristic as dance music,” he says. “When I listen to xaviersobased, it sounds like something straight out of The Fifth Element. It’s got this really brutal sense of futurism; it’s got an apocalyptic and dystopian energy that I intimately associate with techno.” That kind of futurism, of course, ties back to a formative experience he had with the genre, when he heard Joey Beltram’s 'Ball Park' played at a “big-ass rave on shit-ass speakers. I felt like I was running around in Ghost in the Shell!” From the jump, he was shuttling back and forth: a hip hop producer making dancefloor fuel, a club night veteran invited into the world of LA ratchet music.

Eventually — temporarily, at least — techno won that push-and-pull. To hear Duff tell it, 'Protocol', a delirious snare-drum slammer he released in 2013, “single-handedly jump-started” his career, landing him all manner of international gigs. A decade on, though, he’s working to renegotiate his relationship with that niche. “I love techno,” he says, “but I never got into music with the desire for limitations. I love so much music; to me, it’s the stupidest idea to say, ‘I’m only going to make one genre.’” So: 'Identity Crisis' might not be a full piss-take after all. It's the sound of a techno lifer pushing against genre purism and leaning into his myriad interests, throwing umpteen ideas at the wall — with a particular focus on “futuristic British bass music”—and seeing what sticks. Why else would a self-proclaimed Yank try his hand at rapping on UK drill instrumentals?

“Over time, I kind of got stuck in what me and my best friend call the ‘techno gutter,’ if you will. There's a lot of cats who are on some really thoroughbred techno shit — that's all they can make. No diss! I love that shit,” he tells me, smiling. “But, as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Techno's still the love of my life, but life is too short to only make one type of music.” Breaking out into laughter, he proposes a few hypotheticals: “I'd be thrilled if, all of a sudden Jeff Mills said, 'Here's a shoegaze album', or if Richie Hawtin said, 'I'm gonna rap about selling drugs and killing people.' I'd be stoked! I'd be like, ‘You got my attention!’”

For all his talk about swerving, it’s not as though he’s ready to move away from techno entirely. When we spoke, hard techno was ascendant in Berlin — a tough-and-rowdy style that doesn’t exactly speak to Duff’s preferences. (“I’d rather listen to hardcore music than hardcore techno,” he tells me.) That may, in part, explain his move towards other sounds, but it’s by no means a permanent thing. “I do feel it is imperative for people to still have a dog in the fight to never fully give up [techno],” he says with a laugh, “Because if everyone says they're out, who's going to steer the ship? You've got some young kids who don't give a fuck about the culture. Imagine you have a big-ass rig — you don't want that shit going unmanned. You want to have some veteran captains directing the young bucks, just to make sure it doesn't run into some icebergs!”

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If techno defined Duff’s professional life for the past decade, maybe 'Identity Crisis' foreshadows him moving towards other corners of electronic music. After digging into the worlds of Three 6 Mafia and SpaceGhostPurrp, he found his way towards Yabujin, a Lithuanian hip hop experimentalist whose material frequently pulls from video game OSTs. He’s dusted off some cartridges of his own, too, downloading ROMs of dollar-bin horror games from bygone decades. He’s now content to dive down those rabbit holes — new-school hip hop and old-school nostalgia — and see what direction those tunnels go. “These strains of trap and rap are really compelling,” he says. “I’m basically piecing together my own road map: how can Matrixxman exist in this ecosystem?”

Maybe that answer lies in making more hip hop, albeit in a very different form than the Pushaz Ink material he cooked up all those lifetimes ago. “I’m starting to splash paint on that canvas,” he tells me. “It takes time to source melodies, to make the beats, and to rap-slash-sing on them. But I’m really excited; there aren’t enough hours in the day. I go to sleep out of necessity! I haven’t felt that way in a really long time.” Later in our conversation, he underlines the sheer joy he finds in chasing the unknown. “Maybe I should be trying to explore more futuristic techno. I will again, at some point. But, to me, it's: ‘That's been done. What else can you do?’ It would be interesting to revisit bass music with lo-fi trap aesthetics. If I alienate some techno purists, fucking good riddance. I crave novelty and adventure.”

After two hours spent tangling decades and crossing oceans, moving from dancefloors to headphones and back again umpteen times, Duff puts his M.O. simply. “At the end of the day,” he says, “I’m chasing joy.” Maybe that’s the throughline to his career: the thread connecting his Green Velvet and Richie Hawtin homages to his ROM-hack deep-dives, his interest in club-night euphoria and gritted-teeth hip hop, his sweat-soaked pacts and unending stretch towards the unexplored. “When you follow what truly brings you the most happiness,” Duff concludes, smiling, “Somehow, it moves mountains.”

Check out 'Identity Crisis' here

Michael McKinney is a freelance writer, follow him on Twitter