MTVoid’s Justin Chancellor and Peter Mohamed Talk New Album and Collaborative Process

Jordan Blum
·16 min read
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The post MTVoid’s Justin Chancellor and Peter Mohamed Talk New Album and Collaborative Process appeared first on Consequence.

MTVoid — the duo comprised of Tool bassist Justin Chancellor and Sweet Noise vocalist Peter Mohamed — unveiled their debut album, Nothing’s Matter, in 2013. The LP saw the pair (alongside some guests) incorporating their revered specialities into new musical and theoretical paths. Bursting with philosophical insights, culturally specific attributes, and avant-garde techniques, it was a refreshing and rewarding art rock journey as only they could’ve created.

For various reasons, however, the project had been silent until this past November, when MTVoid unleashed the follow-up, Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1.

A “pan-dynamic tapestry of sound and thought, twisted together and pulled taut, a connection of ideas remotely fused between Los Angeles, California and Swarzędz, Poland” – as Chancellor states in the album’s official press release – the new LP sees the duo pushing themselves further creatively and conceptually. With help from Isabel Munoz-Newsome (Pumarosa), Andy Morin (Death Grips), and Aric Improta (Night Verses, ex-Fever 333), Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1 absolutely delivers everything fans could’ve expected (and then some).

The duo recently caught up with Heavy Consequence to discuss what led to the project’s resurrection, what makes Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1 a fitting yet surprising successor to Nothing’s Matter, and more. Pick up MTVoid’s new album here, and read our full interview with the duo below.

Can you speak a bit about the decade-long break between albums and what led to restarting the project?

Justin Chancellor: Well, I mean, I was very busy with my day job. Obviously, Peter had a lot of stuff going on, too. Multiple sound projects. So, yeah, the first album we did was kind of a bit of an experiment. Consider it more like it’s us getting our feet wet. Just a demo. It was us trying to understand how to use a proper mixing desk together. We actually did it together in L.A. Once we’d done that, Peter went back to Poland and we just kind of got on with our lives.

We did a few tracks together, but it was COVID that really pushed us into doing this next album. We found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands and we’d accumulated some ideas along the way. Because we’d already gotten quite good at file sharing and doing some other tracks with some friends of Peter’s, we realized that we could make quite a lot of progress quite quickly just doing this in our own studios in Poland and L.A. So, that kind of spurred us on.

We were just, like, “Oh, wow, now’s the time.” We never really had a schedule before that because we had a lot of other stuff going on, but very quickly, we realized that this was the moment to seize, and we got on with it.

That’s great. Carpe diem.

JC: Exactly.

Obviously, the title connects to its predecessor, so I wonder how they’re related stylistically, thematically, narratively. I know that the last album was sung entirely in Polish, for example.

Peter Mohamed: The main difference is the choice in language. With the first album, it was Justin’s idea to keep it in Polish. I was kind of fresh from moving to L.A. to do a project with Toshi Kasai. We worked for a couple of months and then I started talking with Justin about possibly making some music. It was supposed to be, like, a pure noise soundscapey thing. Then, we realized that if there is this opportunity, we must figure out how to write songs to just, you know, memorize the moment and just give it importance.

We’d been waiting a long time to start making music in one spot. Before that, we never really collaborated on any sounds. When we moved to writing this second album, during COVID, I was really trying to get back into the idea of really communicating with a broader audience and by using English.

It was quite a trip to find the right method to write the lyrics. I chose a method called the “cut-up technique” to make it as weird as the stuff we were making musically, which is nonlinear. And, you know, I was kind of thinking that it might work in this scenario. I didn’t want to just start doing what I was doing for years in my own project by just writing words.

That’s interesting. I have to admit, though, that I’ve never heard of the “cut-up technique.”

PM: It’s a method invented during the Dada movement of the 1920s. A couple of people I admire, like William Burroughs and David Bowie, used it a lot. I pretty much followed that formula of having a program that I fed different sources of texts into to make it randomize the thing.

I used that for lyrical content on this record, and to my – maybe not surprise, but it made me happy that Justin was like, “Okay, this is so weird and so strange.” He didn’t know about the methods. I introduced him to my workflow.
That was the main difference in my in my case when approaching this album. We just took it from there.

JC: That method scrambles these ideas, and it makes it a lot more open to interpretation. It’s closer to poetry, where it’s more thought-provoking, with little phrases that allow you to pick up on different things. Plus, the way that they’ve been randomized – the words or phrases – means that interact differently every time you listen to it. It really works.

PM: Our music is pretty glitchy and it’s based on soundscapes and textures that, as initial ideas, they’re mostly composed in not a typical [way] that people work with. I use Ableton Live and Logic to mix, but to just spit those ideas out, it’s different stuff that is told nonlinear. There is no sequencer for that. So, I’m a fan of noise sound machines that I also put different textures into, and some of my field recordings and stuff. That created, like, a context, and the first things I sent to Justin and asked him how he felt about them. He reacted to those textures with beats and baselines, and that’s why the non-linearity allows for words to fit in different ways and vice versa. I think we did a lot more to move away from the typical song structure on this album.

There’s definitely a collage aspect that gives the album a distinctive flavor. It sounds like making it was an evenly split collaboration, too.

JC: Yeah, we tried to do that as much as possible. We did a little bit of it on the last go around, though, as we were already sending files back and forth. We also collaborated with a bunch of other people, and just as they came into view – as we were writing songs and we’d have something going on with someone, whoever it was coming into town – we’d say, “Well, why don’t you get involved in this idea right now?”

We pretty much followed our noses as everything was colliding. It started with the first record, but this was a lot more – I mean, it’s always been very 50/50 with the two of us, with the notion that as we progress through an idea and try to give it life and grow it, we’d both discuss where we think it should go and what we think it should sound like. You know, like, I’m adding guitars while he’s working on his lyrics.

This album was much more that way because when he’d send the files, I’d have a few days to react to it on my own, and then I’d have plenty of time to do everything I wanted. We both knew that the other person was eagerly awaiting a response, though.

So, that really balances out the workload because it’s just, like, you go hard for a few days and then it’s the other person’s turn to go hard. Even when we were mixing – I mean, Peter was pretty much mixing it, but he’d be sending the mixes to me. Then, we’d have to chat and Zoom or FaceTime about it and try and explain things.

I’d have to explain what I was hearing that I wanted to hear differently and then he’d work on it again. So, yeah, that’s just the nature of it and what really evened out the workflow, I think, in a strange way.

PM: There was no strict method, though. Each track was almost like a different kind of experiment, and that’s what I feel like is the best thing about the project. There are no limitations. I can send Justin anything with a beat or without a beat, texture, or soundscape. I love that, and when he sends back his take on bass (which comes first), we can start talking about maybe adding some more input on his side, like guitars or even cymbals and stuff like that.

When I get the bass lines, it’s usually around five tracks, which can be overwhelming. But, I’m usually fast with that, so within an hour, I’d have a sketch of a baseline from those five takes and I’d polish it and make it sound like a proper baseline and send it over to him.

It sounds like a very efficient process, as if you two are working as a collective mind with a shared vision. You almost know what the other person’s thinking or what the other person wants. Can you speak a bit about how the guests came into play?

JC: As we completed each track and started the next one, we were deciding what we needed to add. With “Propagator,” we thought it’d be great to have a great drum track. We’d done a few songs with the synthesized beats and stuff that Peter put together, but we wanted a real drummer to add more flavor. I’d met Aric Improta on tour and he’s a real prodigy. He’s an up-and-coming drummer and he can really rip. He’s a lovely guy. That’s just the way of life, you know? It leads you and bumps you into people.

I’d already done some stuff with Isabel on her Pumarosa album a few years ago, so I just asked if she’d return the favor. As for Andy from Death Grips, I did a track with them years ago and I called him and asked if he’d be into it.

I also hear shades of your other projects, such as Tool and Sweet Noise, throughout the new album. Was that intentional or was there a conscious decision to distance this project from those other ones to avoid comparison?

PM: It’s kind of surprising that you heard those projects in MTVoid. I think there is only one spot when I hear a little bit of Tool, and it’s not the bass. It’s the guitarwork. This kind of rhythmic thing going on.

In the case of the first album, the Polish vocals were something that you could associate with me. With this second one, I wanted it to be totally different, so I used English and the “cut-up technique.” I wanted to really distance myself from what I’d done in the past while throwing all these different textures and musical structures. With Justin, I was always curious about what he’s going to come up with.

In my opinion, there’s almost nothing here that could fit into what he’s doing with Tool. Since day one, we’ve tried to do our own thing and just explore whatever that is in terms of the choice of instruments and noise and textures. In a conventional band, it’s mainly the drummer jamming with a bass player and a guitar player. So, MTVoid is instantly a different mood since we’re playing with soundscapes and formulas.

JC: I never even think about it, you know, if it sounds like other things I’ve done. I’ve collaborated with different people, so I always just listen to what’s coming at me and have an honest reaction to it. I mean, you might be able to recognize my tone or something in a different band, but because of different relationships with different people, it’s already something different.

I’m always conscious of going down a different avenue when I work with Peter. Like, I love using electronic beats and sounds. I’m a big fan of electronic music, so I’m already excited to play bass on top of something like that. The excitement of going down that road is already kind of inspiring me to play differently and come up with different things. So, I never was like, “Oh, wow, that sounds like something I’d do with Tool.”

PM: MTVoid fits into certain genres, it’s so free to be its own thing. Consciously trying to distance yourself from anything or pigeonhole yourself would be detrimental to that. A little bit of that approach comes from constantly remixing. Who knows what might happen if and when we create another one and really tie our body of work together to the point where someone can say, “Okay, this is MTVoid.” I don’t think we’re there yet, so we’ll see what happens.

Totally. This album clearly ties back to the first one but does its own thing as well. It feels like an evolution, and it rewards repeated listenings.

PM: It’s also the perfect length for that. It’s not too long or too short. You can play it three times in a row and only, like, an hour passes by.

Justin, I want to ask you about your decision to take center stage on the final track, “Magmaficent.” It’s a spoken word piece and a good example of how MTVoid is always trying new things. It also feels like a conclusive ending and a final statement.

JC: I sang a little bit on the previous album. We sort of had this idea or sentiment that, you know, because Peter was ripping out in Polish so hard, maybe we’d start to interact with English and Polish and then it would slowly morph into something else. We didn’t quite pull that off, and Peter was like, “Well, we need you to sing again. What are you going to sing on this?”

I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do it this time.” I actually tried a few times, and I have lots and lots of journals where I just write ideas and poems and band names and album titles and just pages and pages of stuff that just comes out of my head. We realized that we’ve got this piece at the beginning [“Death Survives”] that’s really atmospheric. So, maybe we could do a bookends thing and have the last track be more like that.

I think it was my idea, and I tried to sing. It wasn’t sounding good to me at all, though, and I came across this piece I’d written in my book that reminded me of the music. The music was already done, and this piece was kind of reflective of it, and I thought that I’d be proud to present it and see if it would work in this environment and stand out from everything else.

Everything we’d done up to that point was pretty heavy to me, so I decided to go for it and send it to Peter. After he mixed it and sent it back, I thought it sounded too much like me [Laughs]. I asked him to rough it up a bit and drag it around the dirt. So, we worked on it quite a bit just to fit it into the music.

It worked out well.

PM: Thanks. I still wanted that piece to sound like Justin, but at the same time, he was asking me to push it to sound unlike him. That was quite a challenge, you know? How to satisfy him and capture his voice and delivery while also making it a bit weird. I don’t think there is a lot of, like, straight in-your-face weirdness about the effect I used, but there is a lower voice and then an octave lower going on underneath and a little bit of glitching going around it.

I’m a big fan of how this one and the opening track are soundscapes. One has Justin’s voice on it, and the other one is just the pure beauty of a soundscape (with kind of a hidden base).

It’s very unique, for sure. Ultimately, what do you want listeners to take away from the album?

JC: They can take away whatever they want, you know? I mean, it’s supposed to be an open-ended book. That’s why we called it Pt. 1 as well. It’s not over yet, and it’s also an incentive for us to do the next one. Either way, the fact is that it’s an open expression of poetry and music. It’s thought-provoking and, hopefully, it’s something you can put on and get sucked into the atmosphere and get lost inside yourself.

It’s got a lot of layers of depth. Some of it’s very dense, and as you say, it requires multiple listens to discover different things. Ultimately, you can take from it whatever you want or just enjoy a nice piece of music.

PM: Yeah. I’d be happy if it could just teleport you to somewhere in the future. Like, I remember seeing this description of the “cut-up technique” that said that when words collide or sentences collide, it can be like reading something from the future because we’re so used to describing things in specific ways that are tied to certain objects and matters. When those structures get glitched and combined in “unacceptable” ways, it’s almost like you’re questioning where you are on a timeline.

Whereas the first album was almost – I don’t want to say grounded, but it was a picture of where we were at back then and it was tied to Los Angeles. With this one, I’d like listeners to feel like they’re moving forward. I know it sounds cliché, but let’s make the world a better place by leaving all that behind us and just moving forward in terms of ideas and being open to new things. Everything is happening now in a non-linear way, so having music that gives you that feeling is not so weird anymore. At least, it’s not outside of my comfort zone [laughs].

MTVoid’s Justin Chancellor and Peter Mohamed Talk New Album and Collaborative Process
Jordan Blum

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