Matt Espy is an American drummer
and percussionist. Born in Dayton, Ohio,
he spent his youth playing every genre
of music he could find, playing out in
clubs starting at age 14 and launching his
touring career at 18. He moved to Chi-
cago in 1996 and continued his journey
playing rock, avant-garde, jazz, and per-
formance art pieces. He's played drums
for a number of groups and charismatic
individuals, including Atombomb-
pocketknife, Duke Special and
The Mountain Goats. Over the past
decade, he's found his home with Dead
Rider, also on Drag City.
Hawksworth is Matt's first solo
adventure. In the field of solo drum-
ming albums, it's an avian psychedelic
percussion trip all of its own. A dia-
logue between birds, electronics, and
drums, Hawksworth operates along
precise degrees in the vastness that
exists between the diverse poles of
Terry Riley and Martin Denny.
It captures one particularly memora-
ble morning walk from long ago, a time
immemorial in Matt's life. In this new
musical rendering, that fateful morning is
ridden with wormholes throughout the
piece, like hyperspace links that travel
to motifs from his 30-plus years music
career with every step along the way.
The inspiration for the album came to
Matt all at once a couple years back. It
was early pandemic times, and the world
outside his home felt drained of people,
which brought the sounds of the world
without people to his attention. It took
awhile for the impact of that to settle in.
One day-while, naturally, listening to
music, he heard a pop song employing
the barking of a dog as percussion, and
sat up with a start. Was it real, or? Like
a bolt from the blue, the sonic and the
visual design for Hawksworth came
whole cloth, completely evident to him
in that moment. It was done, and all it
needed now was to be executed.
Birdsong as a transformative ele-
ment had first affected Matt during this
almost-mythic teenage perambulation of
his. It was an early a.m., post hallucino-
genic, walk of shame; a night of wonder,
followed by the cold light of dawning. As
he made his way back home, the wonder
began to kick and flicker again, and the
sounds of the birds in the trees above
caused the possibilities of the world to
open up wide. Now, all these years later,
he thought about recharting that path
through lostness and inspiration, to once
again find the places where nature and
HIS nature-the drums-became one.
Matt started with the birds, locat-
ing a variety of hi-definition free source
samples of their song. He chopped and
scattered them into a new state of
nature, collapsing the hemispheres and
the regions within, to allow the birds of
all nations the freedom to flock together.
Once the editing work was done, drum-
ming to this sound was almost simple
compared to that process. He brought
forward some licks-perennials-and
other things worked up over time that
had or hadn't found a place with the dif-
ferent bands he'd been in-with room
allowed for improvisation. And for
Matt, drums were the only way to fly.
Working at the studio of Dead
Rider frontman Todd Rittmann,
Matt found - or was it that he
refound?-his happy place. Hawk-
sworth comments upon a life in music
as a space where the firmament is ever
vaulting above our head, and Matt
uses the world we too often take for
granted-the one we live in-as a
means to get back to the sky.
