Matt Valentine

Matt Valentine

Matt Valentine is an American musician associated with psychedelic folk, drone, experimental music and New Weird America. He is a former member of Tower Recordings, a 1990s New York group that also includes P.G. Six. Tower Recordings issues a run of albums that move between corrosive no wave noise, abstract tape work and delicate melodic folk, drawing on ESP folk, British folk, free jazz and its own experimental approach. The group also has links to the music of Pearls Before Swine, the Fugs, Can, Sun Ra and Sonic Youth, and builds its reputation through frequent underground live performances in New York.

Tower Recordings

Tower Recordings develops a sound that combines homespun urban folk with noise and experimentation. Its work covers a wide range of styles while keeping song form at the centre, even when the music moves into chaotic group improvisation.

MV & EE Medicine Show and solo work

Valentine continues to record under his own name and as part of The MV & EE Medicine Show with Erika Elder, known as EE. Together they shape a psychedelic-blues approach and issue work in a range of formats, including chapbooks, CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, through their Vermont-based label Child of the Microtones. His solo recording Creek to Creation is described as a key point in his solo output, with folk ideas opening out into a more spacious and natural sound. Across his solo and Medicine Show recordings, a blurred, tone-rich guitar sound acts as a central feature.