Behind the scenes of my New EP - Matt Nõmme Newsletter
How goes it?
This is a picture of me recording my debut EP! Did you know the best place to record audio is by shouting at your bins? Nor did I, we’ll go into that later..
Last Monday, the 17th of April, I released my debut EP ‘Every Cunt’s Climbed Pen y Fan’ and it has gone down better than I ever could have expected.
I’ve had loads of hilarious messages and great feedback, people have really resonated with it.
I thought I’d take this newsletter issue to go through the logic of why I’ve started releasing poetry in EP/Album form and what I’ve learnt from that process.
Why release poetry as an EP?
The past few years has been a testing ground for my poetry, I have published poems in all sorts ways; releasing a book, posting on substack, daily posting on social media, posting videos of me performing live, each with various successes (or not).
What I found is that regularly posting a poem into the abyss of social media gave it no staying power, it was just another poem to scroll past because “he’ll post another one tomorrow anyway”, and to be honest, I’d have the same thought if I saw someone doing the same.
What does have more staying power is what musicians do for their releases. Instead of flippantly posting a song and music video before going onto the next one, they often bask in an EP or single over a month or two, giving time to release music videos, share artwork, and give that piece of art its moment.
I thought I’d do the same.
What even goes on a spoken word EP?
Having just a tracklist of me reciting poems felt a bit bland, it didn’t need much more than the poems, but it did need some seasoning.
So I went back to the 90’s.
Remember the 90’s? Double denim, jorts, and jewel CD cases?
There was another thing lurking in the 90’s… album skits, you may not remember these, but they were short audio tracks between songs, usually comedy bits (leaving answering machine messages was popular) both The $20 sack pyramid and The doctor’s office from the above Dr Dre album are skits.
For an EP which doesn’t have any music, I needed to at least thread a story through it, which led me to the following tracklist:
Both skits, lycra and Crocs on top, give space to each poem, with the aim of allowing breathing room for anyone listening.
Especially when the EP is only 3 minutes anyway hahah.
The recording process (A.K.A why shout at your bins?)
I first recorded the EP in a pretty dead sounding studio environment (a closet), but without any instruments to accompany the vocals it sounded flat and boring.
Then I test recorded myself in different rooms around my gaff, I quickly realised that every room sounded too much like bedroom recordings (because they were).
After feeling a bit deflated I put a box of Weetabix in the recycling bin, which is in my outhouse, I coughed and the room coughed back, the outhouse was really reverberant with its very hard brick surfaces bouncing soundwaves everywhere, but most importantly, it was not a box room, instead it was a long L-shaped room with a mini-box for the toilet.
When I stood in the hallway section of the outhouse it sounded horrific, the below shows that when I project my voice down the corridor, it bounces back and forth between the two hard surfaces, with only my body absorbing the sound waves.
But if you shimmied across, next to the disused car battery, and shouted into the downstairs bog over the bins, there was a slight reverberance, which gave a more lively feel to the recordings, without filling the room with reverb.
This alternative position, shows how projecting my voice into the separate small room, makes it bounce off of many surfaces, before hitting the microphone again.
This creates a much more natural sounding reverb on my spoken word vocals.
Another plus is that I can shout in the outhouse without my neighbours being annoyed.
What’s the long term aim here?
Every two months a new EP will drop with a small collection of poems which will sometimes feature other artists, these will give room for the poems to at least live without being a flippant post and forgotten about.
What’s next?
Firstly, there will be a music video for Every Cunt’s Climbed Pen y Fan, that will be released in the next few weeks, I will also be putting a behind the scenes together for the video.
The next EP is already being worked on, poems already selected, I just need to go shout at some bins…
If you have any questions, please chuck me an email or comment on the substack post and I might lob it in the next newsletter.