more eaze and Molto Ohm Don’t Have A Niche

Mari Maurice is a New York-based composer and multi-instrumentalist who performs as more eaze; Matteo Liberatore is an Italian-born, New York-based visual artist and composer whose latest project is Molto Ohm. In March, more eaze put out a record with Claire Rousay called no floor, and Matteo released his debut as Molto Ohm, FEED. To celebrate, the two got together to chat about it all. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Mari Maurice: One thing I’m really curious about — I know a little bit about your background and how you got into music, but I’m interested in tracing the influences from a formative age to what you’re doing with Molto Ohm now, and how you see that stuff all intertwining. 

Matteo Liberatore: Funny enough, Molto Ohm might be the first project where I can finally put all my influences in one. I feel like up to now it’s been a bit more compartmentalized. Like, “OK, this is my decade of improvised guitar work.” And then before that, I was like, “This is my decade of studying classical music.” And it’s not like I wanted to [compartmentalize it], but I feel like the curiosity has always brought me different places. You probably feel the same — you’ve jumped [around], you have different influences. But yeah, when I was a teenager, I was mostly drawn to Eurodance stuff, honestly. 

Mari: Oh, cool. [Laughs.] 

Matteo: Growing up, it was always on the radio, and when I was 15 or 16, my friends in high school would go to the club once in a while. I wasn’t really listening to that stuff at home, but then we would go to the club and I would just dance all night.

Mari: It’s a huge part of the social fabric.

Matteo: Yeah. I remember I bought a specific blue glow t-shirt — it looked like super flashy metallic — and I would just stand on tables and dance all night. But I wouldn’t really listen to that stuff at home, that would be the thing you do socially. And then I had a lot of Italian pop music at home. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Italian artists like Degregori Battisti, Lucio Dalla — all these Italian singer-songwriters — my mom would listen to that stuff all the time. Whereas my dad was more into older vinyl, kind of an audiophile. He had these huge speakers that he bought in the ‘60s when he was young. And he wouldn’t listen to music that much, but I kind of got from him this interest in gear, even though he was not a musician. Nobody in my family is a musician, really. And then I randomly got into guitar when I was 14. 

Mari: That’s the same age for me. 

Matteo: Yeah. I was at the bar with a friend and he was like, “Why don’t we start a band?” I never really thought about playing an instrument before, but he was like, “I want to play drums.” And I said, “No, I want to play drums.” So we had this fight for a bit, and eventually he won and I was like, “Fine, I’ll play guitar.” My whole life was decided in front of a Guinness. I picked up the guitar, learning an instrument became super fun right away. I was super curious about it. And then from there, it kind of snowballed into getting good at guitar, and that snowballed into going to a conservatory — and that’s 10 years long in Italy.

Mari: Woah!

Matteo: But I made it in five. So I got really good at classical guitar, but I was like, “I don’t want to play classical guitar my whole life.” And my teacher was like, “It sounds like you have so many interests. Why don’t you go to New York?” Just in passing. But I became obsessed with the idea of moving to New York. So I came to America and I started studying jazz. But in the meantime, I played a lot of bluegrass in Italy. 

So I then found myself in New York with all these different influences, and I didn’t know how they were going to ever come together. Then I got more into experimental music, and that opened up a lot of doors in terms of understanding music and sound. But then finally, three or four years ago with this Molto Ohm project, I was able to throw everything in there. I feel like I filter my life through this project, in a way — all my ideas about life, society, politics, culture. So then music can help to pull out those ideas from myself. So it’s not really about the genre anymore, it’s about an idea that’s maybe outside the music. The unifying theme is something that’s almost extramusical. How do you think of it?

Mari: I really relate to a lot of that in terms of everything I’ve been doing as more eaze, since the creation of the project. 

Matteo: How long has it been now?

Mari: The first record came out around this time in 2015. At the time, I’d been making music under my own name for several years before that, and I felt like there was a lot of baggage attached to it. Also similar to you, it felt very compartmentalized. I had grown up playing a lot of music in Texas, and I started very young playing shows with Americana bands and folk bands, and would sit in with them playing guitar, playing fiddle, playing my own really shitty singer-songwriter songs. I would hang out with all of these older folks, and made a bunch of records as a teenager doing that stuff that’s, like, deeply embarrassing music. [Laughs.] I had gotten kind of known in San Antonio very young doing music like that, and I had done my undergrad in San Antonio at Trinity, which was a pretty conservative school musically, but I discovered a lot of good stuff there. Actually, largely through a professor in the English department that I studied with — he would make mixes for all of his students, and a very pivotal moment was he put a Robert Ashley song on one of them. I was like, Holy shit. This is everything I’ve been looking for in music. And I, just through interlibrary loan, would get every CD and rip it, and then I started trying to do that with every Lovely Music, LTD thing.

Matteo: How old were you when that happened?

Mari: I was 20, 21. So I got really obsessed with that, and started making experimental music a little bit. I had been really into Editions Mego, and a lot of harsh noise, and a lot of very glitchy, laptop-core stuff. I started playing music just using my own name, and people who had normally gone to my shows fucking hated it. It was a real uphill struggle, and I was just kind of like, “Man, I don’t know if I’m ever going to find anyone who wants to collaborate or work with me.” 

Going to CalArts for grad school was kind of freeing for that. But I was also doing very serious chamber compositions and things like that too. So I kind of had the same feeling you had of, I guess just for this period of time, I’m going to be doing this, and then at this period of time I’m going to be doing that. It all felt very confusing, because it was all just under my name. Then shortly after I got out of school, I was just like, “I need to have a project that can be all of these things, where I can kind of synthesize everything I’m taking in,” similar to how you think.

Matteo: So consciously you were like, “I want to do this.”

Mari: Yeah. And I mean, I think there were a lot of feelings about transitioning and gender wrapped up in that, that I hadn’t fully unpacked. Because I really just wanted to disappear into the music I was making and I didn’t want anyone to think about it as being me, as it having to be my name and my face.

Matteo: I feel very, very similar.

Mari: Yeah, I feel like we have a really similar idea of this. But yeah, I feel like more eaze was created with the idea of trying to think about how all of these things that I am influenced by both musically and extra musically, and to try to unpack that all. It was a way to synthesize a lot of influences and make it a single thing. And I think similarly to what you’re talking about with Molto Ohm — sometimes that might be something that is very close to singer-songwriter music, or it might be more like chamber music, or sometimes that might be much more abstract electronic work. But it feels like all those things can live in equal measure. And I think at this point now, that’s something that is a little bit more accepted. I don’t know if you encountered this too, but I definitely felt like when I first started more eaze, there was a real uphill struggle — especially in experimental music — to get people to understand a project like this. 

Matteo: Yeah. I have this project and I’m like, “Well, where does this fit really? Is this electronic music?” I guess it could be put into an umbrella of experimental electronic, because there’s rarely an acoustic instrument. But it’s like, “Do I play audiovisual shows? Yeah, I fit enough. Do I play improvised shows? I fit enough. Do I play a DJ set? I fit enough.” It fits a little bit different places, but it’s not like there’s a specific scene for that.

Mari: Totally. 

Matteo: But then I see your work and it seems like you found a world where you exist and you’re known for that. So I guess it just takes time for people to get used to the work.

Mari: Yeah, I think it definitely takes time for people to get used to it. At least when I lived in Texas, I feel like it was really hard for people to understand that, because I would get booked with these shows with people who were maybe in indie rock bands, and they had heard a song I’d made, and then I’d get there and it’s, you know, 20 minutes of collage and two minutes of songs, and you could just see the palpable frustration. And then the improvisers, it’s the exact reverse situation. A lot of times I would do these solo violin pieces and they’re all on board with that, but then the second I start singing, they’re just scowling. So it’s a struggle. 

But at least now, what I’ve noticed is people in these different scenes are in general a bit more open-minded to that. And maybe part of this too is the experience of New York versus Texas. But I find it interesting because I’ll play shows at someplace like The Owl, which is typically geared towards more acoustic music, but everyone there will be very supportive and very interested and open to what’s happening. But then I might go and play more of a show that’s very electronically focused, and that also feels comfortable in a way. There’s just a little bit more of this acceptance. And I think that’s something that’s actually really exciting about where both of our projects are at; they don’t have to fit in any particular niche. They can actually go in all of these different directions and follow all these different threads.

Matteo: Yeah, there’s pros and cons. Because if you have a more defined path, it’s a little easier to get going with things.

Mari: [Laughs.] Yeah, it’s a lot easier.

Matteo: “These are the clubs. These are the shows, these are the magazines. This is the music.”

Mari: You have a prescribed path forward. And I think that’s the thing that’s been very confusing, about my career at least — there are all of these weird curves in the road. Sometimes you’re on this huge upswing, and then it’s like, “Oh, nobody cares.” And then that happens again, and then it happens again. And at this point, doing it for a decade, it’s just probably going to be like this for the rest of my life. And that’s OK, because I feel like most of the artists that I really like, that work in all these different mediums, I see that happen a lot. One of my favorite artists is Oren Ambarchi, and I feel like that’s his whole career — he’ll do something and it gets a lot of attention, and then he’ll do something that’s equally amazing and maybe only the heads really know it. He’s kind of the career model.

Matteo: Yeah, I like Oren a lot.

Mari: Me too. I would love to know your experience with this, especially as someone else who went through a conservatory: One of the things that I was really trying to get at, too, with more eaze was that there was so much of this serious attitude around experimental music. Everything was extremely black and white, there was not a lot of room for any sort of cross-pollination or even just a sense of humor in the music. And your music obviously has a lot of humor in it — I feel like every time I’ve seen a Molto Ohm set, it’s cracked me up at one point. I really love that, and I’m very curious if you had a similar experience being in academia and being at a conservatory, and just how you see humor in music in music in general.

Matteo: The first thing that came to me is this quote from this free jazz book that I read — the book starts with an anecdote of some guy that goes to a free jam session, and he’s like, “What is this?” And they say, “It’s a free jam session.” And he says, “What do you mean? I can play anything I want?” “Yes.” And he starts playing a folk song, and they kick him out.

Mari: [Laughs.] That’s amazing. 

Matteo: It’s like, what does it mean to be free? Does it mean that you can do everything you want? “Free” has become like its own language. But then there’s also the John Cage quote that says, “One day I want to play a C major, and I want it to sound like just a bunch of notes.”

Mari: Oh, yeah.

Matteo: There’s all this cultural value inside the C major, right? So those are two funny things to me. I mean, humor is fine. I don’t know if I see a demarcation between humor and darkness, really. I feel like the two can overlap.

Mari: I really agree.

Matteo: I mean, David Lynch just died. I’ve been rewatching a lot of his stuff, and it’s always kind of funny while it’s being really dark. I’ve had other people tell me that Molto Ohm can be funny at times, but I kid you not, some of the parts that are the funniest, I didn’t want it to be funny. I wanted it to be sad or dark. And then the first time I played, people laughed at some parts. I was at first kind of thrown off. I was like, “Why are you laughing?” And then I realized how much of the funny and the weird and the dark overlap.

Mari: Yes.

Matteo: There’s a part of the live show where sometimes I use this sample of me reciting all of the kinds of Dove soap — which there are, like, 100. So I’m just like, “Dove Shea Pampering Better Body Wash. Dove Winter Care Body Wash.” And then I had this video I made that was just a bunch of footage of lions looking in the wilderness, and the music was a really sad song. To me, that was signifying the absurdity of commercialism, industrialization, the commercial world with nature and the universe. To me, it was kind of serious. But then my friends were like, “Oh, this is so fucking funny.” So then I started thinking about that, and I realized a lot of the art I like, it’s at the same time a bit dark, but also a bit funny. The movies that I end up really liking often have this quantum quality. 

Mari: Oh, absolutely.

Matteo: Molto Ohm deals a lot with capitalism, commercialization, and the internet — I mean, absurdity comes with the territory. So I think the topic itself can be absurdist, and in the absurdity, fun and darkness can come together.

Mari: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, and is most certainly something I really relate to as well. A lot of the records I’ve made with Seth Graham, there’s a ridiculousness to the sound quality and everything that’s happening. But Seth and I, when we’re working on it, usually have this goal of a sense of overwhelm and intensity — all these things happening should have the effect of ultimately making us cry. But it could also be really funny to you, too. Which I think is something that I was always really interested in, that dichotomy.

When I was younger and studying composition at Trinity, I can remember having this whole semester where all we did was listen to Ligeti — who I love. There’s something about that music that really tows that line between darkness and humor, because he’ll make these absurd gestures, and they’re so powerful and they sound so fucked up and intense, but they’re also really funny. And I think whether he wants them to have that effect or not is ultimately kind of irrelevant. It’s interesting though, because knowing what I know about him as a composer, there is this intensity but he also seems to be searching for this absurdity. I think that shows, to some degree, with how often the titles of his music have very rote and boring connotations — just like, “Concerto for Piano and Orchestra” — and then it starts off and there’s an ocarina solo and you’re just like, “Dude, what?” [Laughs.] 

Matteo: That’s amazing. I mean, that made me think of Stockhausen, “Helicopter String Quartet.”

Mari: Oh, totally. It’s absurd. It’s really funny. 

Matteo: It’s super hilarious. 

Mari: I think about that with Stockhausen a lot too, because it’s so serious, but even when you look at those text scores he did — there’s one that really cracks me up where it’s just like, “Live without food or water. Don’t go outside for eight days. Play one note.” [Laughs.] How could you not laugh when writing that? 

Matteo: I have a question. What is your relationship with music genres?

Mari: My relationship with genre is really complicated. I think that it’s really interesting, and I like the idea of genre as this labeling of things. Like, one of my favorite activities is to go on Rate Your Music and find some obscure record I like and see what absolutely batshit crazy genre tag they’ve given it. Because it will be something that’s so hyper specific, and then you’re like, “I want to find out what other things people think is this genre,” because a lot of times it’s really not something that’s particularly related at all. It can be interesting to see how people are trying to categorize or understand that. 

But I also find [genre] really limiting in a lot of ways, and I’ve tried very much with a lot of what I do to avoid that. Because I think that when you start to think about the idea of, “I am this kind of artist,” there’s sort of a pre-prescribed path and sense of expectations with what that means. And that’s always something I’ve been really skeptical of. Especially when I lived in Texas and the scenes and communities were very small, very insular, and often very snobbish, that was something I really wanted to avoid. I was always very careful not to get too attached or involved in any one scene, because I was just like, “I don’t want to be the person who’s only booked for this kind of thing…” I want to work with a lot of different people. I want to have that freedom to go where my interest takes me, and I don’t want to feel like I am beholden to the scene or this style.

I would love to hear you speak about [improvisation], and how you see the role of improvisation in the work that you do.

Matteo: Improvisation changed my life entirely. I don’t know if I had the best relationship with music until I started improvising, because it was like: you study music, you understand the genre, you understand how it works. When I was studying jazz, I feel like I had to learn so much in so little time to be able to apply to school and come to America, and I was not really enjoying it — I was really just figuring out how to do it. So the enjoyable part of it came much later when I finished school. When I got into free improv, I really understood the beauty of just playing a note and hearing the sound. And then discovering John Cage, all of that stuff. 

Improvisation has become an integral part of how I work. Even now when I play solo with almost a DJ setup, sometimes I’m literally just throwing a fader up randomly, because I like the idea of a mistake that can lead to new things.

Mari: Me too.

Matteo: I try to make, quote-unquote, “mistakes” as much as I can because I think our brain is pretty limited with our influences. Collaboration is a way of bringing some fresh ideas into the mix. The first year [of playing as Molto Ohm], I was mostly playing the tracks synced with some video elements, so it was more like composing. And then a year later, I was like, “I want to loosen things up a little bit.” And the best way I could do that was to play with other people.

Composing in free music starts when you pick the people. So when I ask someone [to collaborate], it’s like, “I want you to come in and bring your own aesthetic, and I’m not asking you to do other stuff.” When you put two people next to each other, that’s already a kind of composition. And I like to think of improv kind of like that. It’s like a dialogue — but it doesn’t have to be call-and-response necessarily. It can just be two things existing in the same space.

Mari: I love that.

Matteo: That in itself can be enough to make something interesting — “bring your own aesthetic, let’s put it next to mine.” Like John Cage and Merce Cunningham together — John Cage would make the music, Cunningham would make the dance, and they would never listen or watch each other’s work, but just meet up the day of the show and say, “Let’s see what you choreographed, let’s see what you made.” I like that idea.

Mari: I absolutely love that. As I’ve continued working as more eaze, and in other collaborative projects, I feel like that’s what it’s all about: “What do you bring to the table? And how can we make this something that will coalesce regardless of anything else?”

Matteo: I feel like to do that, you have to be very comfortable with the idea of letting go of control.

Mari: Yes.

Matteo: I had a lot of issues with that when I was younger. It takes experience to be able to trust someone else that, because of who they are, they’re going to be bringing things that I want. Like, I don’t even know what they’re going to bring, but I already know that I’m going to want that. It is hard to get to that point of view. It’s a muscle that you need to work on.

Mari: Yeah, it’s like exercise. You have to just keep doing it.

Matteo: Yeah. The more you realize that someone else can give you something new, the more you look for it. Anybody that has a skill that I don’t have, now it’s like, “Please — please come help me!” [Laughs.] 

(Photo Credit: left, Tomberlin; right, Brianna DiFelice)