touchless by Matt Evans

touchless is a tender collection of delicately floating, glacially paced, ephemeral meditations on the wandering experience of grief and loss, unfolding like a running commentary spoken in whispers. I made the album between 2019 and 2020 after the loss of my partner, sculptor and eco-feminist artist Devra Freelander. Devra was a light, and through her life and art, she worked tirelessly to imagine ways of expressing empathy and love on a geologic scale. Over six intimately textured tracks that are suspended in a dreamy haze, touchless questions the phenomenology of touch, reaching to transcend the boundaries of the physical to embody touch while remaining touchless.

In the last two years, I've grappled with loss in many forms. In the gaping experience of touchlessness, I find strength and love in our solidarity. For me, making this album has been an attempt to find communication through a mystical and spiritual sense of touch, and to uncover the multi-layered experience of loss by weaving a narrative through the wandering dissonance of depression and the neon glow of love.

touchless is made of three compositional couplets (Arcto 1 and 2, Fluorescent Sunrise and Solar Silhouette, Touchless and Firn). In these three pairs, I investigate the phenomenology of touch and touchlessness by embodying the intrusive and extrusive themes of Devra’s sculptural and print work—fusing practice room pianos with arctic field recordings, tracing sculptural forms with master equalization, and weaving together acoustic performances with forgotten tape recordings—as a way of reaching through time.

touchless builds upon New Topographics, by employing a similar conceptual approach to music-making, but this time, the materials are limited, softer, and more patient. The piano playing is not about its complexity but about the way a chord played with different weight in the fingers can mean something wholly different than another. The chamber recordings center their approach on texture with responsive improvisations from an elite cast of composer-performers, Tristan Kasten-Krause (Whatever’s Clever) Elori Saxl (Western Vinyl) and David Lackner (GALTTA). The drone pieces are about their form, shape, and color.

Making and releasing touchless has been a way to externalize my experiences and make them real outside myself. It’s not about putting the experiences behind me, rather, it’s a way to crystallize some sentiment from the last few years. Ultimately, it’s my way of reaching through the void to touch something lost, and to remember how real those experiences are.

Matt Evans is a drummer and producer making acoustic and electronic music about the poetic interconnections between landscapes: internal, external, fictional, and virtual. Taking cues from millennial esoterica, natural phenomena, and science fiction, Matt uses drum-driven hypnotic soundscapes and improvisatory performances to embody imaginary ecosystems of surreal sonic worlds.

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