Fugue Chat

Matt and Ross talk about festivals, and how they feel about the music they listened to as teenagers.

Matt talks about the limits of what we are willing to admit in public. Can we ever really admit our failings?

Matt talks about being bald and making jokes about baldness. He also proposes a new belief that he thinks should be commonly held: that men who carry on having full head of hair after the age of about 40 look ridiculous.

Matt reflects on his paranoia about whether the lollipop people near his work like him or not.

It’s a hot day. Matt talks about a job interview and then gets distracted by global politics.

Matt and Ross chat about whether vibe is a young person word anymore and what different people might mean when they say it. Then they talk about being middle aged for a while. There’s also a high pitched screeching noise for a bit which is less present on the recording than it was in real life.

Matt talks about turning 40, getting sentimental and the meaning of milestones.

Matt walks through Hendon in the rain, talking about resentment and the far right, and how resentment is a performance that constitutes the hierarchy that the far right uses to justify it’s political programme(s). He mentions Richard Seymour's new book 'Disaster Nationalism'.

Matt talks about sweetness, ‘Americans’ on TikTok and how capitalism can’t capture the feeling of eating a McDonalds in a steamed up car in the carpark of the Sydenham Sainsbury’s with all the crows.

Matt phones up Ross and tries out a conversational fugue chat. We talk about conversations with your parents, Ross comes up with some productivity hacks and we have a conversation about what being middle class means, based on Matt watching Joanna Hogg’s 2019 film The Souvenir. (Apologies for the audio quality, I’m working on it)

Matt talks about thinking out loud, clarity and the difference between strong and weak theory. He also almost gets run over by a Tesla.

Matt walks through the city talking about tooth pain, verrucas and nostalgia: all private experiences that can be very intense for the person experiencing them, but hard to communicate to other people.

Matt talks about listening to old songs, Philip Guston and how sometimes art isn’t made for an audience. There's also a bit about gendered icks.

Matt talks about narcissism. Is this podcast narcissistic, he wonders? (Yes, is the answer.) Also, what is it to perform narcissism in an age when our sense of self is always already fractured and scattered across the technological platforms through which we construct it?

Matt walks to the library and talks about what it means to have conviction as an artist. What should you have conviction in? When is it useful to remain convinced by your work and ideas, and when is it important to give up? (n.b. At some point in the podcast Matt shouts ‘8:30’ and that’s because someone has just asked him the time in the street.)

Matt talks about his teenage anti-capitalism, seeing the back of things and how political disgust can turn into aesthetic interest.

Matt walks to work and talks about the desire to act out while teaching.

Matt walks to the library and talks about Object Oriented Ontology, Ed Atkins, and the NPC and POV trends on social media.

Matt walks around campus and talks about how being an artist trains you to make decisions, and how we find the edges of what can be talked about in art practice, and what has to be passed over in silence.

Matt tells the story of a forgotten artwork based on a denim tote bag made by the artist James Richards’ as part of ‘Music for the gift’, his Wales in Venice project from 2017. Warning: Matt sings a song at the end.

Matt walks to work and talks about memories he didn’t ask for.

Matt walks a slightly different route to work and talks about different kinds of boredom.

Matt walks from Lewisham to New Cross and talks about theme parks, art and the relationship between class, taste and the intensity of aesthetic experiences. Not quite a trigger warning: this episode opens with me referring to and deconstructing a dismissive and classist joke that I made to my wife.

In episode 1 I walk from the dentists, through Lewisham market, back home. I talk about being clumsy, but eloquent. And the differences and connections between speaking and acting. My voice sounds weird at the start because I enhanced the audio with the Adobe AI podcast app, but after a while it kind of works out what I really sound like.