Matt Choboter is a Canadian, Copenhagen-based pianist and composer, whose music is informed by non-Western cultures and eclectic spiritualism. He embraces liminal psychology and dream work; a panpsychist ecology; and a musical practice which absorbs distinct features of Just Intonation, South Indian classical, and Balinese Gamelan.
Visceral Totems features Choboter playing ten spontaneously composed pieces on a microtonal prepared piano (a custom-made upright piano with a smaller pitch range and only 1 string per note, with intensive preparations), recorded in several intimate spaces around Copenhagen, including Choboter’s living room, and at the Krokodile collective, between 2022 and 2024. Choboter began to explore the sonic possibilities of microtonal prepared piano on his album Postcards of Nostalgia (ilk Music, 2023.
The microtonal prepared piano allows Choboter to express himself in an unfiltered, visceral, raw, exposed, and honest way, bridging expansive territories between avant-jazz, contemporary experimental, and ambient music. Furthermore, the microtonal prepared piano served as a laboratory and a labyrinth for sound and self-discovery during Choboter’s «searching periods». Only one piece was recorded on a grand piano.
Choboter’s microtonal prepared piano becomes a rhythmic playground that flirts with mytho-spiritual worlds of South Indian Classical and Balinese Gamelan music, G. I. Gurdjieff’s Sacred dances and rituals, and futurist, highly resonant, and cryptic messages. His playing is spontaneous, direct, and tactile, and each piece focuses on a dream-like or story-like motif, which he imagines in an irreverent form of wayang kulit, the traditional Indonesian form of shadow puppetry. Throughout this captivating but quite short sonic journey (only 40 minutes), Chotober radiates the playful and exploratory joy of finding unfamiliar, surprising, and uncharted sonic undercurrents that enrich his sonic vision.
The cover photo was taken by Choboter at the Great Gallery at Horseshoe Canyon in Utah. It was made by the ancient indigenous people – desert archaic cultures (2000 BC-500 CE), with their descendants likely associated with more modern groups like the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Paiute. It stresses the album’s timeless spirit, melting boundaries between geographies, cultures, and eras.
Eyal Hareuveni
Matt Choboter (microtonal prepared piano)
