We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matt Larson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
I feel like keeping one’s creativity thriving (and not just surviving) is something that requires a delicate balance between community and solitude. I think far too often, creatives like to wax poetic about time spent in isolation, crafting their various magnum opera, to the extent that we romanticize or even fetishize working alone.
I know that a lot of us love to sentimentally dote on the image of a misunderstood creative genius, working tirelessly at their keyboard, canvas, or instrument in solitary splendor, but I maintain that good art cannot be made in a vacuum. Our calling as creators is to share our insights and observations with the world, and to simply toil in obscurity is, I feel, ultimately very self-indulgent. More to the point, I think perpetually toiling in anonymity will eventually begin to hinder one’s creative process.
I keep my creativity alive by surrounding myself with, and engaging with the oddest characters I can find: the weirder the better, honestly. In the same way that good art can’t be created in a vacuum, it also can’t be created in a monoculture. It’s so incredibly vital to connect with people whose perspectives are different in order to see society in all of its facets, both good and bad.
In empathizing with people you can’t understand, you’ll come to gain new perspective, not just with regard to the world but with yourself. Both of which are crucial for any creative.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m probably best known under my music production pseudonym “d.notive,” which now encompasses a lot of work. One of my biggest pushes for this past year has been to expand what that moniker applies to, and as such I’ve dedicated more energy into my writing, DJing, and filmmaking than I did in previous years. Releasing original music, remixes, and edits is still a big priority for me but in giving myself permission to be a broader type of creative I’ve managed to really stave off burnout.
One of the biggest projects this attitude translated into was the construction an experimental musical instrument, with a 30-minute video essay to follow about my experiencer building it. You can expect to see that in the next few months.
Believe it or not, “d.notive” originally began as a kitschy, self-aware project for My Little Pony fan songs about thirteen years ago, but rapidly evolved into something more meaningful and personal as I gathered momentum and became connected with other skilled creative professionals in the process.
My most notable successes came after I started infusing more earnestness into my work, and became a noted pioneer in the “Synthwave” community – a community that has now exploded in popularity. For a lot of folks I think the whole 80’s throwback aesthetic has always been a really tongue-in-cheek self referential wink at the vapidity of toxic masculinity, capitalism and yuppie culture, but I’ve always taken the aesthetic as a kind of big “what-if” question. What if our cultural optimism about technology were still here? What if New-Wave and Synthpop didn’t have to die artificial deaths? What if we could actually live in the egalitarian, technologically-forward future we were promised in the 80s?
In Minnesota, that translated to co-founding Nitrowave Twin Cities, which is a community of like-minded electronic musicians and music-enthusiasts with a non-specific focus on channeling the optimism of the past into creating a better future. As a community NitrowaveTC puts on a number of concerts and events over the course of the year, hosting established voices while also amplifying the voices of smaller artists who deserve more attention.
I’ll be headlining a show at the Aquarium in Fargo in October.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Recognize that “The Audience” is not a creative partner.
It’s so incredibly easy to lost in the grind and the hustle of being a modern creative, especially in a world where social media makes it possible for anyone to have access to us at any time. It feels gratifying too when people come out of the woodwork to tell us about how our work moved them, or to tell us about how much they like what we’re doing, so much so that I think a lot of us end up having really distorted relationships with our audiences.
There’s a really insipid self-deprecating attitude that pervades a lot of art now that honestly drives me a bit insane, and it’s because a lot of creators have really toxic relationships with their fanbases; they’ve become so focused on creating things that their fans and followers *like* that they’ll deliberately couch their creative efforts with gags and inside jokes just to creatively distance themselves from what they’re doing. So many creators have become terrified of their audiences being mean to them or even outright *leaving them* that they’ve deprived themselves of the simple joys of being earnest about their work. They feel like they need to make fun of their own art so they can have some plausible deniability about it, just on the off chance that someone responds negatively to it and seeing that bums me out every single time.
You have to do what you love, even if it’s silly, even if it’s cheesy, even if it’s bad, even if it’s been done before. Say what you have to say with your entire chest and don’t look back. Our goal as creators is NOT to create things that people like, and the minute you start creating with a specific audience in mind, you’ve already sold yourself short.
2. You can’t be afraid to look like an idiot.
To that end, when you create with complete earnestness and seriousness, there are going to moments where you’ll miscalculate and end up doing something that’s poorly received. You have to be okay with feeling really stupid when that happens.
The advantage to being earnest though is that there’s always solace you can draw from this: you did something that was meaningful and important to you, made absolutely zero compromises about it, and even if nobody else responds to it you will always be feel confident in the integrity of your work. Once you start working this way you will always run the risk of looking like an idiot, but you will never *be* an idiot.
3. You have to know when you’re wrong.
The most substantial growth any of us can do will come on the back of seeing the errors of our ways.
For example, my live shows have changed substantially since I first started performing, and a lot of that is simply the natural iterative process that comes from seeing how well certain things work, and being able to make adjustments when they don’t work.
My first live shows were done as a solo act, and then eventually I realized that wasn’t particularly entertaining this way, so I pivoted to become a three-piece band for performances. From there we definitely still had our fair share of growing pains. For example, the first show we did we used a separate laptop to process all of our drum sounds, and that proved to be a terrible decision (later on we started including a dedicated drum sample processor that vastly improved our shows.) My guitarist used to bring a full-sized amp stack with him to our shows, but has since reduced his foot print to a single digital processor. I used to bring a hoard of hardware synthesizers with me to play our shows, but have since reduced my footprint to just two to expedite setup and teardown… and all of this is just the tip of the iceberg.
We’ve been gigging as a three-piece off and on for 6 years now, and after all of that time we’ve perhaps only just now finally reached a version of our live presence that feels “correct.” That’s only possible because I’ve never been afraid to admit when something we experimented with worked out poorly, or that some idea I came up with didn’t work or could be done better.
I bring the same mentality into the studio with me; I’ve never been afraid to completely tear down project files and start over if a track isn’t working out, and the only reason I can do that is because I’m not afraid to look at my failures objectively and choose to iterate on them.
What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
I think my biggest obstacle at the moment is trying to map out where I take myself in the future. The nostalgia encompassed within the retro 80’s aesthetic, and “Synthwave” itself was always destined to have a finite shelf-life, and I’m struggling to find new spaces where I can co-exist and contribute outside of that framework.
Ironically, X/Twitter’s impending “collapse” has reinvigorated a lot of folks’ desire to connect, as evidenced by the blossoming of its clones and the uptick in activity on other platforms. I feel like there’s this really interesting window, now, for folks like myself who are eager to “start over;” and it’s leading a lot of us to build more targeted and more interesting online spaces for ourselves.
I got so mired in the cynicism of grinding and hustling on social media that I found myself completely depleted emotionally just thinking about creating meaningful outreach. Now, making a point of having earnest, impactful conversations with new people who are equally eager, I’ve found, has really restored a lot of my creative mojo.
Solidarity with new people has been the biggest boost in the face of this kind of uncertainty and I’m just overjoyed to find like-minded individuals.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/dnotive
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/dnotive
