Mathew Jonson: The Maestro

He could have been a concert pianist, but instead Mathew Jonson turned to electronic music - and has created some of techno's most monumental tracks. With his first commercially available mix out now, we caught up with him on tour in Brazil.

Mathew Jonson plays classical piano and jazz drums. He is a notorious hardware lover, synth collector and makes grandly musical techno. But he is no geek. "I think the people that know me would say the opposite," he says with a broad smile on his friendly face. He is sitting on a hotel balcony in Itajaí, on Brazil's south coast with birds tweeting in the background. "They would say I'm a total freak who maybe likes to party a little too much!"

With bedraggled brown curls tumbling from his crown, and slightly greying stubble on his rosy cheeks, Jonson is academic yet affable. He also looks a little tired, occasionally rubbing his eyes over the course of the next hour. It adds weight to his claim that he is a party boy when in the club, even though the Canadian admits he has "calmed down" over the last decade. "But I still like to pick my battles. Me and my girlfriend lit it up pretty hard at Warung last week," he says with a mischievous smile.

In the midst of a three week tour of Brazil, and off the back of a trip to Japan (where he will be moving for three months come December) Jonson has now been traversing the globe for more than a decade. Unlike many of his peers, he enjoys the travelling, "eating local food and meeting local people," and mentions a recent incident that still visibly upsets him. "I felt like a bit of an asshole not having time to have a beer at the bar and say hi to the people and not be at all personal," Mathew explains of rushing off for a flight as soon as a recent set finished. «But that was the only way it could be done," he shrugs.

People will surely forgive him, because in the last decade, Jonson has built up a reputation as one of electronic music's most accomplished live performers. Preferring to play live over DJing because "you have 24 channels in front of you, not just two, and I like the possibilities," he has years of formal training behind him, something that comes through clearly on monumental tracks like 'Marionette' and 'Decompression,' with their elegant melodies, real chord progressions and trippy, soft techno grooves. When the Wagon Repair and Itiswhatitis label boss refers to himself as "a musician" it isn't too bold. Underlining his genuine musical nous, words like "timbre, phrasing, tonality, dissonance" litter his speech, and he also spends two weeks a year lecturing young producers at the Red Bull Music Academy.

"Music making is a therapy thing for me," he says as he sips on a glass of water and moves inside to avoid a rumbling storm that rolls in on the beach in front of him. As he does, he reveals a quick flash of what look very much look like robot print pyjama bottoms to go with his casual white t-shirt and navy hoodie. «It relaxes me, it gives me time to be on my own. Only 5% of the stuff I write is techno, the rest never gets released and is just for me." Suddenly Jonson gets coy and shifts in his seat. He's talking about his new girlfriend. Last night she encouraged him to break one of his own unwritten rules and set up his gear in the hotel room. "She was singing and we were doing lyrics," he giggles. "She is a musician so it made sense. Usually on the road I don't write at all," he says, before admitting that until this year he never even listened to music on the road. Instead he learns languages on his iPad. «I was terrible at school but now I'm obsessed.

Jonson's home is in the north of Berlin, intentionally away from the party hotspots so he can live a normal life Monday to Friday, "then at the weekend it's my time to party and socialise." As well as doing yoga as many mornings as possible, he is a vegetarian in the week (but "an absolute carnivore at weekends") and reports that next to "normal crap" like taxes and housework, he takes "too many long baths" reading the epic Asian saga novels by James Clavell, indulging his fascination with Eastern culture.

Growing up in Canada with the odd early DJ residency, Jonson spent seven years as a lifeguard at a tough inner city pool that had "crazy shit going down every day." Turned on by the adrenaline rush of first aid, he fancied becoming a paramedic («or chef») but couldn't get on the college courses as he had no real experience in either. Instead, having first started playing with synths in 1986, he took up a music course. "But I soon dropped out," he says, leaning on one hand as he looks back, "because it took all the creativity out, I was just doing engineering!" That same drive to always be creating is what stopped him becoming "something like a concert pianist," despite very real playing chops. "As soon as I could sequence and write my own music, I did that and stopped practising. It's much more rewarding for me.

His most recent project is 'fabric 84,' a compelling live recording of a set he played for the London club's 15th birthday. Many have asked for commercial mixes from him before, but he never felt comfortable giving over so much of his unreleased material to anyone but "real friends" like fabric. "Those people are like family and that night the lasers, visuals and everything just clicked," says Jonson, who wore a Japanese alien suit (though it actually looks more like the Easter bunny) to play his set.

After a long term relationship ended earlier this year, Jonson is in no rush to get home after gigs. With his new girlfriend, he is lingering in the places he plays longer and getting to know people better. The upshot is that he is very much back in love with electronic music (as someone who no longer DJs, though, he largely only buys "old second hand drum 'n' bass stuff from the UK, hip hop and jazz") and is in a comfortable routine of a couple of shows a week. Now older and wiser and able to pick and choose his parties, Mathew Jonson is as serious about having fun as he is about music.

'Fabric 84' mixed by Mathew Jonson is out now