Album of the Week: Mathew Jonson, ‘Agents of Time’

Album of the Week: Mathew Jonson, ‘Agents of Time’

11 June, 2010 | 4.51AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: album of the week, mathew jonson, wagon repair

“It’s all about bass—I guess I’m obsessed.”

We could have guessed as much of Mathew Jonson. It’s evident in all his tracks, whether solo or with Cobblestone Jazz. Jonson’s basslines are always in motion. Rippling with a tight, nervous funk, and often imbued with an almost Eastern sounding tinge, they’re unusually muscular, especially when compared to contemporary tech-house and its penchant for one-note underpinnings. And on his new album, ‘Agents of Time’, Jonson’s basslines snake through a spellbinding array of counterpoint melodies and complex harmonies, as though turning the musical stave into a complicated cat’s cradle of intersecting vectors.

Surprisingly, ‘Agents of Time’ is actually Jonson’s debut album—a point it’s easy to forget, given his deep catalog of singles since 2001, as well as two albums made with Cobblestone Jazz. It’s also a significant step forward.

‘Girls Got Rhythm’

Long ago, with singles like ‘Decompression’, ‘Symphony for the Apocalypse’, and ‘Return of the Zombie Bikers’, Jonson proved his ability to craft cracking club anthems. ‘Agents’ has plenty of those. ‘Girls Got Rhythm’ is a squelchy funk bomb; ‘Sunday Disco Romance’ is a cheeky fusion of disco and techno (with an even cheekier Michael Jackson reference); ‘Agents of Time’ is a dark, druggy swirl that spreads out like a supernova.

‘Agents of Time’

And ‘Thieves in Digital Land’ imbues its springy groove with one of the most hypnotic progressions that Jonson’s come up with yet, a powerful fusion of rhythmic focus and trippy reverie.

‘Thieves in Digital Land’

Like much of Jonson’s work, ‘Thieves’ has an eerie twang reminiscent of Hindu music. “I guess I do listen to a lot of Indian music”, admits Jonson, reflecting on the influence. “A lot of sitar music; maybe that’s where that comes from. To tell you the truth, it’s just what comes out of me, I can’t put a finger on why it comes across like that. I work with long phrases; I like it when music is kind of circular. I like when things are modulation, so that when you listen to a piece of music at a certain tempo, it has a certain vibration on top of that”. 

‘Night Vision’

The tempos on ‘Agents of Time’ range widely. Smartly sequenced, the album opens with a 100 BPM warmup before diving into four consecutive burners—including ‘Marionette (The Beginning)’, the original version of a track that he beefed up for its 2005 release as a one-sided single. Here, it’s stripped down and made more limber without sacrificing any of its momentum.

‘Marionette (The Beginning)’

“That’s not a redo; that’s the original”, says Jonson. “It’s inspired me to do the one that came out. At the time, I didn’t think it was worth releasing. It was before a lot of people started playing super minimal music, and to release that, without even a string line, nothing else other than the SH-101 and a drum machine, seemed impossible.” Maybe, in retrospect, all it needed was to be slotted into the context of an album, as it is here.

‘Pirates in the 9th’

The second half of the album finds Jonson trying out various modes of downtempo. There’s ‘Night Vision’, a slo-mo synthesizer jam in the vein of Boards of Canada. ‘Pirates in the 9th’ is even slower, maybe 92 BPM, gurgling like an old-school electro 45 spun at 33—you need to listen to this one loud to really appreciate the haunted low end. ‘New Model Robots’ again recalls Boards of Canada, particularly their ‘Hi Scores’ EP, but the crispness of Jonson’s drum programming and the fullness of his sounds give the track a unique character.

‘New Model Robots’

‘When Love Feels Like Crying’, previously released on single, picks up the tempo again, but its spare, skeletal lines—not to mention its genuine melancholy—set it apart.

‘When Love Feels Like Crying’

“I like to have phrases that sound like they’re major, but then they go minor when they turn around,” explains Jonson. “You think that you’re in a happy place, but suddenly you’re not. I like playing with that tension. I like music that triggers both emotions—you get something happy but also sad, or upsetting… When I look at the music I’ve made, the best music is always music that can stimulate any kind of emotion. I’m trying to focus on something—it’s not an emotion, it’s more like a key, towards opening up whatever emotions are inside you. A gateway, a stimulation of the emotions—but not necessarily one thing.”

• (1) Comments
• (2181) Views
• Get 'Agents of Time' on Beatport