The latest single from Italian brothers Mathame, “So What,” was made available via Astralwerks. The single serves as an exemplar of the dark and voluminous signature sound found at the roots of Mathame’s sonic core.
Placing eerily distorted vocals over winding synths, ‘So What’ crescendos into a volume intensity that took months of technical precision to achieve in collaboration with Mathame’s sound engineer Luca Pretolesi from Studio DMI. The crispness and lack of distortion that make the group’s productions a favorite among DJs on the international club circuit can rarely be achieved at this level of loudness.
Their most recent album, “Come For You,” which is mystically intimate and romantic, stands in stark contrast to “So What.” The pairing of the two songs highlights the dark and light contrast in their music as well as the sibling dynamic, with Amedeo acting as the solemn and brooding yin to Matteo’s upbeat yang. Skillfully interconnecting their differences, Mathame’s work also draws influence from different backgrounds, all connected: as classical performers, as electronic musicians, and as heavily-touring DJs.
With So What we wanted to achieve the maximum sound pressure and sound stress on every elements of the composition , and maintain an impactful emotion , developing our dynamic tempo expressive signature sound in unknow territories. – Mathame
So what, uncovered pic.twitter.com/tqqIoRhKkt
— Mathame (@mathame_ofc) November 28, 2022
Mathame’s So What music video and A.I.
In order to produce the official music video for “So What,” Mathame worked with the Japanese A.I. art collective Hokuto Atarashi, drawing inspiration from their lifelong love of science fiction and anime. In keeping with his background as a celebrated film director, Matteo used artificial intelligence, one of his other interests, to co-direct the visually captivating post-apocalyptic reality. Depicting anime-inspired characters that evolve into a riot as they dance through the streets, the video conveys dystopian themes that the duo is known to explore in their work.
This Music Video was made by the unknown A.I art school collective Hokuto Atarashi: “After listening to the record, it was clear the dark and dystopic feeling was at the epicenter of the scene here. We wanted to achieve a high level of dystopian visual street stress. The video tells a story about a riot, an internal revolution between artificial intelligences, the one who wants surveillance, and the one who leads us to creative freedom. The story evolves from dance to fight in a non conventional timeline. The technique we used turned real footage into dystopian landscape, mechanical android and movie animation characters by models of artificial intelligence animators : this is just the beginning of a real revolution in the arts, just upon us. Soon or later we should speak about Cosmotechnics, or simplifying “how to live in a sustainable ecosystem with those techno-intelligences’ – music video director team
The Mt. Etna volcano in Sicily, where the brothers’ joint project first took shape, is beautifully evoked by Mathame’s musical talent. Gaining massive global recognition with debut EP releases on Afterlife records, including ‘Nothing Around Us,’ followed by ‘Skywalking’ and ‘For Every Forever,’ Mathame began playing nearly 150 shows a year and remixing tracks for artists such as Zhu and Moby.
After creating a mix series utilizing artificial intelligence in 2021, Mathame continued to explore their love for technology by training and programming a customized AI machine that creates their signature “hyper-expressionism” imagery, including their cover art and the music video for ‘So What.’ The music video also finds inspiration in Japanese anime, NFT landscapes, 3D cinematic images, and Expressionist painters.
These tracks have been released by Mathame on some of the most coveted stages in the electronic music industry, including Tomorrowland, Miami’s Club Space, Amsterdam’s ADE, EDC Las Vegas, and London’s Fabric.
