The future is Absolutely Free

With Aftertouch, Absolutely Free is letting go of the past

Photo by Darren Ringo.

“We’re kind of in a transition point, ideally, coming out of late-stage capitalism ideas of ‘do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ That is kind of the idiom that our generation has grown up with,” says Matt King. Together with Michael Claxton and Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg in Absolutely Free, since 2011, King has helped develop a concept-rich footprint of shapeshifting art-mospheric kosmiche arrangements and engrossing live performances, but he questions whether it’s enough. “That’s not necessarily the key to happiness. Making music is not necessarily the key to happiness in my life, but it’s also something that I’ve obviously made mandatory in how I operate. It’s not always a joyous expression of feelings. It’s a lot of labour and toil. I am doing what I love in some ways, but it’s not helping me survive, and it’s not necessarily making me love it more.”

King’s evaluation of the moment perfectly captures what it’s like to pursue your passion in a social economy that increasingly demands instant production; it also gets at the central paradox of Absolutely Free’s name, which King returns to like a mantra — nothing is free, nothing is absolute. The transition point King is talking about is also reflected in a new relationship to the music they make. 

Arriving seven years after the band’s self-titled full-length debut, sophomore album Aftertouch marks a shift in focus and process for the band. Named after the synthesizer function that produces an effect once a performer depresses a key after touching it, the album addresses topics like the alienation of contemporary living through the lens of a fleeting cultural relationship to physical connection and a pronounced digital immersion.

“Some of those themes are themes we’ve touched on in the past,” King explains. “We have a number of recurring concepts and ideas,” an aspect he says the band borrows from Frank Zappa’s idea of conceptual continuity, where all of the activity surrounding a work of art exists in dialogue with that work — promotional materials, live performances, future work, even interviews.

Paired with conceptually-focused shows, live, the band’s music has often felt more like the centrepiece of a larger gallery statement or art installation than music for music’s sake, grounded in site-specific contexts, with an emphasis on physical congregation.

The night Absolutely Free released their 12-inch debut “UFO / Glass Tassle,” the band improvised a live score for a screening of 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still at Kensington’s alien-muraled Electric Theatre with Carl Didur, tripped over to Double Double Land for a more traditional set on the late apartment venue’s stage, then bounced back to Electric Theatre for a Much Music Video Dance-style VJ set, premiering the “UFO” music video. Subsequent single releases for “On the Beach” and its b-side “Clothed Woman, Sitting,” meanwhile, gathered listeners in the sand dunes at Gibraltar Point, and tapped into the natural reverb conditions at the Annex’s Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre with a pool party, respectively.

When the band finally celebrated their debut full-length Absolutely Free. in early 2015, they brought fans out to the city’s practice space nerve centre on Geary Avenue so they could properly jam out the album’s closing track with adequate personnel, enlisting Mike Haliechuk (Fucked Up), Joseph Shabason (DIANA), and Marcel Ramagnano to oversee additional synthesizers and electronics. With the band about to tour Europe, one suspects they could have made up the difference with some creative sequencing, but for this, you had to be there.

Arriving seven years later with Toronto’s cautious return to sorely missed live music, Absolutely Free’s second full-length was conceived with a stated interest “to create an album that wasn’t bound by a physical ability to perform it live, to not only expand our palette, but also to consider the live performance as something completely separate.” 

Claxton, Fisher-Rozenberg, and King approached the live experience from a more feverishly negotiated angle in another of their projects, DD/MM/YYYY.

“DD/MM/YYYY was very much a live band, and we road dogged it and just played, played, played,” King reflects. The band’s tenacity eventually caught the attention of avant-garde trip-hop legends Portishead when it was their turn to curate All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2011, but the same hyperactivity often left the group struggling to catch its footing, resulting in unsatisfactory recording endeavours (a contributing factor to the band’s dissolution the same year). “All of the recordings tended to be kind of as experimental and loose as possible, putting 25 songs on an album. In retrospect maybe not the best idea, we never felt like we truly excelled at the recording aspect of being a band.” 

Suggesting a departure from physical connection, Aftertouch finds the trio reconsidering its relationship to the present, and in a way, King says it helped the the band realign its process with the product of its labour.

“We took on this project not considering how we’re gonna play this live, or how we’re gonna pull this off with the three of us — let’s just make music,” King explains. “A lot of it started through a jam at the practice space, but practices where we’re kind of sitting and listening to the music and writing the music on a computer, away from the performance. In some ways that was an exercise to try and remove some of our egos. When you’re playing something, you’re thinking about your performance and if you’re not playing in this part, maybe you should be playing, [thinking things like] ‘you could be doing this. Filling in the spaces.”

For Absolutely Free’s live shows, that impulse to fill in the spaces often manifests in a game of musical chairs of sorts, Claxton, Fisher-Rozenberg, and King routinely trading off stations behind synthesizers, guitars and drum kits, often mid-song, lending a sense of carefully choreographed urgency to their performances. In the early days, that could sometimes be to the band’s detriment, even destabilizing sets, though in recent years they’ve more closely resembled busied lab scientists, perfectly in tune with one another and whatever the moment calls for.

“DD/MM/YYYY was a very maximalist band and so is Absolutely Free, in some ways,” King says. Aftertouch was an experiment in letting go of that more instantly-minded impulse for a more mindful approach. “Trying to be like, ‘okay, if I’m not performing, I’m listening maybe closer to how the listening audience would be experiencing the music,’ as opposed to being the one who’s making the music. So trying to flip that perspective and see what’s the music we like listening to. Sometimes the music you like listening to can sound very different from what you play. We tried to get a little bit closer to the type of music we listen to. Which in some ways we definitely achieved not rushing ourselves.”

Slowing down launched Absolutely Free into a postcapitalist future.

Aftertouch gets its name from the parentheses in the opening track “Epilogue (Aftertouch),” suggesting the album itself is simultaneously a reflective statement and an anticipatory one.

Offering what could be an artful take on the sounds that might run at the top of a weather update, in its opening seconds, Aftertouch is a swirl of minimalist synth arpeggios, vaporous organ notes pushing the intro along, the textural whoosh of a synthesizer replicating blustery winds. Then the band shifts into some of the chilliest synth progressions this side of Depeche Mode, King’s lyrics suggesting alien touchdowns, recognition of emotional manipulation, a preoccupation with the past: “Touchdown can feel like an arrival / like a movie that’s faded out. / But I still wonder what’s behind.” For an album landing just days after the fall equinox (Sept. 24 via Boiled Records), it’s a remarkably autumnal statement to open on. What’s clear: change is in the forecast.

Atmosphere — social, political, economic, libidinal, tonal, environmental — looms large on Aftertouch: on the horizon, but difficult to grasp; atmospheric phenomena are a recurring motif throughout the album, the band lifting listeners through the sky while King reaches out for something material to cling to — sometimes flying feels like falling.

Dappled with light and bursting forward on swinging polyrhythms, synths beaming, “How to Paint Clouds” reflects on the absurdity of beholding an image only to see echoes of things you’ve seen before, suggesting “Maybe some things should be left in the past.” On “Clear Blue Sky,” King sings about the Faustian tradeoff of digital life under capitalism: access all the information you want, just agree to these terms and conditions.

These aren’t luddite ravings of millennials yelling at the cloud, but pointed critiques of commodified behavioural surplus and manufactured oppression. The band no doubt recognizes technology’s role in supporting revolutions, propelling modernist attempts to expose the designs of structural oppression. 

Aftertouch feels at its most urgent on “Remaining Light,” King affecting a David Gilmour-ish lilt here, gesturing to ghettoization, racialized pain, and the media desensitization neoliberalism has seized upon to let it all fester. Meanwhile, the track’s use of marimba (acoustic and sampled to MIDI) carries echoes of Steve Reich, who in a different mode once phased a vocal recording of Daniel Hamm (one of “the Harlem six”) describing an injury to author Truman Nelson (“I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”) into total obscurity on a track called “Come Out,” effectively illustrating how media can desensitize Black pain. 

It’s an album that starts with an ending; it also ends with a beginning.

A reflection on his morning commute to a gig at a record warehouse in the city’s east end, on “Morning Sun” King snaps out of the grind, the track’s titular sun being a reference to a view he’d glimpse of the sunrise as his subway car would pass over the Don out of Castle Frank Station.

“Sometimes things feel more finite when you’re at the end of the day,” King says, “But there’s a little bit of hope in the fact that nothing changes much over time” — not necessarily the best disinfectant, but no distortions of good old days either; glimmers of hope and future possibilities.

Aftertouch is out Sept. 24 via Boiled Records.

Absolutely Free performs Sept. 25 alongside Obuxum and ZONES in the parking lot across the street from the Garrison (Dundas and Lakeview) in Toronto. Tickets $15 in advance (reserve a spot) or PWYC at the door. More information here.