Matthias Schack-Arnott

DIPLOPIA

An interview with Matthias Schack-Arnott

As far as professional noisemakers go, Matthias Schack-Arnott is likely to be one of the most reflective and soft-spoken of his peers. At just 26-years-old, the Melbourne local has been referred to as ‘genre-smashing’, ‘virtuosic’, and a ‘consummate musician’, but you couldn’t tell it from his humble manner of speech. His passion for percussion, however, rings clear throughout our conversation: driven by a desire for invention and exploration, Schack-Arnott is almost singularly obsessed with the particulars of his craft, and it is this finesse and care that makes him stand out.

Schack-Arnott’s newest investigation, Diplopia, is a 30-minute experience in which the young percussionist uses 30 Chinese hand cymbals and an array of electronics to create an unparalleled binaural soundscape.

“There are two microphones in the piece,” Schack-Arnott says. “They’re both tiny lapel mics that are strapped directly to my wrists, so basically the work has become a kind of exploration of sound and gesture and how they’re linked. What I’m doing is working with harmonic resonances with these massed Chinese cymbals – these beautiful, complex harmonic resonances which are each completely unique from the next.”

The musician has made a special point of involving the cinematic notion of close-up in this piece – it’s an unorthodox approach that allows for the audience to experience the deep and variant pitch elements of his instruments with the same clarity as he does.

“Cymbals are very expressive,” he says. “If you move the microphone even slightly, it changes the combinations of overtones that you’re hearing, which would be the same if you put your ear right up against the cymbal and moved it around. It’s quite amazing, it’s quite surprising how rich and varied the pitch information is.

“I’m zooming in on different cymbals, sometimes moving rapidly between different cymbals so that the ear is taken on this kind of sonic journey through different metallic resonances.”

It’s a transportative experience, and well outside the realms of conventional melodic structure. What elevates the piece even more is Schack-Arnott’s adherence to ritual, as he forms cyclic patterns over his cymbals, conjuring and teasing out the nuances of his materials. He’s adamant that such rituals have no particular real-world reference point.

“I’m interested in resonances, the maybe subconscious resonances, that certain movements or performative gestures can have, but ultimately my work is very abstract,” he says. “What I like about the idea of a ritual is the idea of movement, action and those kinds of things having a deeper meaning that is expressing something greater than the action itself.”

Approaching the artform almost as a dancer would, Schack-Arnott’s visually arresting live style remains secondary to his intoxication with sound, especially when it comes to exploring new textures. Diplopia’s “fractured sonic patterns” are partly inspired by the musician’s own lived experiences.

“I’ve had vision defects where my eyes haven’t worked together,” he says. “I’ll see the one object but from two different perspectives that the brain is trying to understand as one image but it’s ultimately two images that won’t really align.

“I’ve got two mics, one on each wrist, and they’re hard-panned left and right through the speakers and a lot of the time they’ll be miking the one object, like one cymbal or a group of cymbals, but from two different perspectives… so you’re hearing this one object but it’s scattered across the left and right sonic fields.”


Matthias Schack-Arnott’s Diplopia is will be performed as part of Supersense on Friday August 7 at Arts Centre Melbourne.

Post originally appeared in Beat Magazine, available at http://beat.com.au/arts/diplopia