KREFTING, MATT - Finer Points

Edition of 200. "I have known Matt since the very early 00’s when he was still a student at Hampshire College. We became great friends right away and have remained so since. Matt has been an on-and-off member of IFCO (full time now), and we have worked together on a number of other projects. This is to say, I might be a little biased. (But everyone is biased, no matter how much they write in the third person.) Matt has been doing solo tape music for well over ten years now. My memory says it started out as a live thing with a mixing desk and a bunch of cheap cassette machines. (My memory says a lot of things.) I’m not sure exactly what he does now, but it is something similar and still involves cassette tapes. There are loads of people doing music with field recordings and tapes, etc., and, for the most part, the music is a messy yawn-fest. That is not The Krefting Way. Each of the six pieces on Finer Points has a limited number of elements that slowly revolve. Each track is discrete in its sound pallet but made in a similar fashion. The overall effect is like the bottles in a Joseph Cornell box. My favorite bottle is the one for a guitar (Spanish?) It manages to hit a sweet spot between hypnotic and unsettling. The whole LP is great and expertly sequenced. (The lost art of recording!) Matt’s releasesare like desert flowers that bloom and are gorgeous, then they are gone. A tip of the glass to Bill Nace as well. He has kept Open Mouth running for quite a while, and as anyone who has ever run a small label will tell you, ‘It’s a fool’s errand.’ It is, too – but if it weren’t for fools like Bill, the world would be missing a lot of great music." - Scott Foust.