JM: What are your eating habits like on tour? Cheese and crackers, or … MK: Depends, are you talking about North America or Europe? JM: Both. MK: Our cheese and beer and bread intake highly goes up about 200% when we cross the Atlantic Ocean. In North America, it’s strictly 89 cent menu at Taco Bell. JM: What projects have you been up to lately, art wise? MK: I’ve been working on a bunch of things lately. Jordan and I have this project where I modified a super Nintendo so that you can control street fighter characters by playing the drums and synthesizer, so Jordan and I battle against each other. I’m also doing this other thing in October where I’m controlling some LED strobe lights by playing music at InterAccess (Toronto). It’s a collaboration between me and this artist, Philippe Blanchard, who made this big installation with strobe lights. When they change colours, the colours on the screen prints change as well and worm around. We went there last night for the opening and it was awesome! MR: Yeah it was pretty psychedelic. It was like a rainbow cave. MK: Totally a psychedelic rainbow cave. Other than that, I’ve been making a lot of sculptures and screen prints. I’ve got a website, mattkingdotcom.com. JM: Would you say that music influences your art, or art influences your music? MK: I think it goes all around. I started getting into art because I made t-shirts and CD covers for my band, and I’m like, “Oh, I can do this? There are schools that you can go take art at? Oh cool, there are all these different types of things you can do!”. You can do media art, you can play music, sound is an art, and then you learn about art things and that changes how you think about music. I think that goes for everything—walking down the street or riding your bicycle—that’ll influence how you play music, hopefully. Or [else], don’t play music. JM: What are you listening to right now?
DD/MM/YYYY SILKSCREEN TOUR POSTER
MK: I’ve got a Moondog record, and I got a whole bunch of Bollywood records for $1 at this shop in Richmond Hill. Burmese music, African music… yeah.
issue no.1 / november
2011
19