Following a four-year hiatus from solo releases, the British musician Matt Karmil returns, with the soft-focus gentle beauty and subtly stealthy beats of new LP, ‘No Going Back’.
With inspired moments of creation happening incrementally, the album came together amidst a busy mixing/remixing/mastering/co-production schedule. Artists who’ve enlisted his multiple skills includes Bicep, Underworld, Mall Grab, Jayda G, DJ Koze, Neneh Cherry, Sofia Kourtesis, DJ Fett Burger, Matias Aguayo and Carmen Villain.
On the process behind his new work, Karmil comments;
“After releasing my previous album, my feeling for making my own music was fractured, so I concentrated on working with other artists, grabbing precious moments to create only when compelled to do so, out of pure feeling. A few years later these moments of personal expression were starting to add up, and I gained the confidence to play them to some of my most trusted confidants – among them Rick Smith of Underworld and Axel Boman – getting such a positive response that I started thinking about bringing them to a wider audience.”
Feeling the benefits of this new approach, ‘No Going Back’ is the strongest expression of Matt’s artistic vision to date, honing the spectrum of styles for which he’s renowned, all smudged together by a warm, gauzy haze. The microhouse anthem ‘SFP’ is followed by the broken tech science of ‘No Going Back’, the spectral dub techno spookiness of ‘Old Haunts’ and the sublime misty shimmer of ‘The Last Time’. Further switching things up is the oddball dancefloor experimentalism of ‘Still Something There’, the washed-out electroid balm of ‘Things Really Happen’, and the epic dark ambient closer ’15 mins’.
Born near Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, Matt Karmil was a classical guitar child prodigy and an early record collector. His adolescence was spent DJing and working as a studio engineer in London, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm, all while honing his craft as a recording artist himself.
In 2014, Karmil released the album ‘—-‘, an acclaimed debut that blended dusty samples and tape effects with irresistible grooves, all framed within a striking minimalist aesthetic. In the same year he released the jubilant club anthem ‘So You Say’ on Beats In Space Records. After his breakthrough, a steady flow of album and EP releases followed, on labels including Smalltown Supersound, Idle Hands, AUS and Studio Barnhus.
Concurrently, Matt’s studio engineer work has flourished. Experience from his formative years spent working in some of the world’s most discerning recording studios, combined with a rare and precise musical intuition, has led to regular mixing, mastering and co-production work behind the scenes. An array of renowned electronic artists have reached out to Karmil in times of sonic need.
Matt Karmil ‘No Going Back’
October 4th
Vinyl / CD/download / stream / Dolby Atmos version
Tracklist:
SFP
No Going Back
Old Haunts
The Last Time
Still, Something There
Things Really Happen
15 mins
Album pre-order
