Mato
Pleasure
2021 | Hip Hop, Pop
— track 1 “Pleasure”
Mato Wayuhi: You know, if you would have told me in high school I would be scoring a TV show, I would have been like, “That’s… no.” It’s been cool, it’s been definitely a whole different world. I just watched the mix-down today with the whole squad, like, we watched the whole first episode [of Reservation Dogs] and they gave notes and everything. But yeah, it’s ready to go on FX and Hulu. I’ve been grateful to just, I guess, be in the right spot at the right time, and with people who really fuck with me, and care, and want to see me succeed. And vice versa, like, with that movie I’m scoring and that TV show, I want to see it do the best that it can, and so I’m going to give it the best of my abilities.
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I feel like DIY is born out of necessity. No one wants to be doing everything yourself, at least from my perspective. You think about those romanticized images of music-making, and you think of Quincy Jones behind this huge mixer, or you think of Dr. Dre, and then you look where you’re at and you’re just behind your dingy little computer [laughs]. It’s kind of demeaning, but what’s good about it is, living in this digital age gives us so much permission to make what we want.
I started making music when I was 15 and 16 in Sioux Falls, and it was just, like, rinky-dink stuff, I was just in my basement. And then I really started producing just a couple years after. I took this class at CTE [the Career & Technical Education Academy of the Sioux Falls School District] and it was music production. It was super basic and they didn’t really teach much music theory necessarily, it was more-so how to get around Ableton. That opened up everything for me. I got a cracked version of Ableton and I just used that for years. Honestly, I’ve never had any classical training. I had, like, maybe I didn't have ADHD, but it felt like I had ADHD growing up, it still feels like I have ADHD, but I couldn’t pay attention for shit during school. In band and orchestra, I always got graded poorly in those, but I always had that performance muscle in my body. In orchestra I played cello, and I just was bored as shit, and I couldn’t read the music. They didn't have grades, it was like E, P, I, N, and I got an N or an I, so I was like “Fuck you! I’m trying my hardest!” and I just quit. And then in band I played percussion, but yeah, it was just a lack of interest, and I’d get yelled at a lot, and I was like, “Why am I doing this?”
I always flirted with the idea of making music, like, I used to — in 4th grade I was in student council. We would have announcements, like, you know, “We’re going to have chicken nuggets next week,” or whatever, just these trivial things. So I was like, “You know what, I’m going to rap these.” So I would go in front of the class and be rapping these announcements. And we started doing that so much that my teacher, to get me to shut up during class and stuff, she’d be like, “Yo, could you make a rap to teach everyone about mean, median, and mode?” And I was like, “I got you.” And so I’d go and write these little raps, and that was really big for me at the time. So that kept going, I would flirt with music, right? I would have these little moments. And then in high school, my dad gave me his old car, so then I had a CD player and that’s when I really got turned on. When you find music, and you’re not assigned music, I think there’s this click that’s like, “Oh this is what I’m going to do now. This is literally it.” And so for me it was 14 or 15, so I was a little late, but it was like, “Yeah, no, anything to keep doing this.”
I was doing shows around [Sioux Falls] in 2014 and 2015. I was doing a lot of shows, actually. I learned to perform in real time on stage. I came in at a time when there was a scene: I mean, there was Soulcrate, there was Phantom Balance, there was Deeno Babik, all these fools who could very much rap. And so I came in rapping, and I was embraced by them which was really dope, and they were really helpful to me early on. Anyway, I was going through this guy named Jason, he was basically my promoter now that I think about it, I didn’t realize that’s what he was doing at the time, but he literally was. He’d be like, “Yo, there’s a gig here, you want to do it? Blah blah blah.” And so one day he was like, “Yo, do you want to open for Odd Future?” And I was like, “Shut your mouth.” [laughs] Like, “What do you mean?” And he was like, “Yeah, they’re coming through town, they’re playing at Bigs Bar. And I was like, “What?” I couldn’t even compute. They, like, raised me, Odd Future. I fucking, I can’t even explain how much of an impact many of those people have had on my life. So yeah, it was me, Silent Obliteration, KeShaun Camon [KDC], and then Odd Future. And Odd Future meaning it was, like, Left Brain and Mike G, and then a couple other dudes, so it wasn’t the full Odd Future group because by that point [Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator, Syd, Earl Sweatshirt, etc.] had kind of disbanded, but even meeting those two and a couple more, I was losing my mind. All my friends were there, it wasn’t lucid, we were in a different world, I couldn’t believe that was happening.
And what’s so great about Odd Future, is like, they were not only fools who could rap, but they also opened you up to this wide range of different music. Because they were into punk, they were into jazz, electronic, neo-soul, all these different things. And so you become inherently exposed to that type of stuff. So that was really music school for me at that period. And I was smoking a lot of weed. Like, just a generous amount of weed. And so those mixed together, I started writing lyrics, and I would freestyle at parties and it was horrible but I would do it. And then at 16, I made the conscious effort — I got in trouble, my mom sent me to drug counseling for weed, and so I had all this time, and I was grounded, so that’s when I really started making music. I would have moments, there was one moment — I don’t know, you hit these inexplicable moments of happiness. I’m very intense with shit, and so with music I’m super intense. And so if I’m happy with music — they call it chasing the dragon when you do drugs or something, it’s like the purest form of that, it’s just this complete nirvana of, like, “oh my god.” And it’s dumb stuff — it’s not listens or views — all it is, is like, you were tinkering with this synth and it finally got to do what you wanted, or you made a drum pattern by mistake and it sounds so cool, or anything. It’s just these really innocent things. I kept having those moments early on, and so those really pushed me to keep going. Because any musician, or any artist has dark moments, so those really kept me going, because it’s like, “I know there’s going to be more of those, and I gotta find more of those.” And what helps me find more of those is being open-minded, and trying new stuff, and doing it for me just as much as I’m doing it for them. So that’s kind of what kept me going. There’s not a particular moment that made everything click — well I guess there was a couple local rappers that really inspired me. There’s this guy named Royal who, he doesn’t make music anymore I don’t think, but I went to his shows early on and I was like, “I didn’t know you could, like, do this.” Because when you want to be an artist or anything, I felt like I had to wait for someone to let me, but with them it was like, “Nah, I can do it. Who am I waiting for?”
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Then I went to college, I went to USC [University of Southern California], I was an undecided major. I wasn’t even in music, but I was focusing on music way more than college. Then I kind of made this ultimatum, I was like, “I’ll apply to the film school, if I get in then I’ll continue, if I don’t I’ll just drop out and do something else.” So luckily I got in and stayed. There’s different degrees you can get, so I applied to the school that was Cinema & Media Studies because I was just lacking, like, I was lacking material and I was also lacking confidence to get into a certain discipline. But I think luckily, that actually ended up helping me in a way because I had the freedom to work on music. Because if I got a film production major, I would have had no time to do what I was destined to do. And then same with the music school, like, I wouldn’t have made it in, but it also would have gotten too academic. So, yeah I was just in Cinema & Media Studies, which is kind of like an English degree in film. So, like, I know a strange amount about Italian neorealism [laughs] and all these weird things, but what’s good is, like, it helps me contextualize my own work, and in work now I’m always thinking about stuff like that. That fascinates me, these analyses of how technology affects media, or how media affects music. And TikTok is just a never ending cesspool of thesis statements. I can’t even use it because I’m too fascinated by it, it’s this holy beacon of, like, this is crazy and offensive but amazing.
For Pleasure that was an intention, like, “I want to produce.” Because I’ve had a couple other records and they were mostly produced by me, but I think Flying Lotus said it, he was like, “You gotta make one body of work that’s yours.” You know, that you made everything. So I went in with that intention of, like, “I’m going to do everything front to back. I’ll hire people to do things, but in terms of a production standpoint, I want it all to be me.” I think, everyone in the pandemic had some sort of existential crises and some sort of epiphany, so for mine it was like, “Bro, my music is not where it could be.” I completely had that revelation, and so I really just hunkered down and focused on what I needed to do. So I kind of isolated myself, and really honed in on production skills. I started a lot with the drum programming. I don’t — I use samples kind of seldomly, I don’t really rock with samples too much because I just can’t. I have a real team behind me, so they’ll be like, “What are you doing? We can’t afford this.” So I try to just discipline myself a little more. But yeah, for Pleasure, I got my drums to where I wanted them to be and then I would lay keys down. I just play on a simple midi controller. Most of Pleasure I didn’t have any plug-ins, it was just kind of stock stuff and I just messed with it. There are some keys by my buddy Sam, and then guitars by my friend D.A. [The Tewa] who’s down there playing Pokémon right now, anyway, and then I have a buddy who plays horn, so I work with family members, you know? Liv [The Artist], I met through shows, she’s cool, she’s dope. Riley [Keough], she helped direct and create the movie that I scored originally, it’s called Beast, and then we just became really close. Xiuhtezcatl, I went on tour with a couple years ago, we’re just very, very similar in many ways, and he’s just amazing. Then John [Gourley of Portugal, The Man], my former manager showed him my music so we connected through that. That’s kind of the whole squad. Producing music is like directing visuals for me. I give a lot of leeway to the “actors” who are my players, I have a set vision but I’ll be like, “Play it with, like, more, you know, zhuzh.” And they’ll know exactly what I mean, so that’s been fun.
Part of that existential crisis in the pandemic was, like, I need to lean towards a redefinition of this image of me. It felt obsolete, what I was portraying earlier, which was just a kind of cornball aesthetic. And you know how you are on yourself, you’re always hard on yourself, but to me, I just wasn’t rocking with it. I’m proud of that music that I made in 2018 and 2019, but it just wasn’t who I was at the moment. So yeah, I wanted to create a sexuality around the music, because I felt a lot of my stuff before was cute, teen music, but I was like, this could have some balls, for lack of a better word. So I set that intention. A lot of the themes on the record are these fleeting moments of romance, and so everything on it is pretty autobiographical because I was just pulling from all of these different experiences. This beauty of the finite, that’s kind of this element of pleasure, so I wanted to explore that from a romantic, sensual standpoint.
I can’t really work outside of a concept. It helps so much from just an artistic standpoint and a narrative standpoint. I wish I was an artist who could just release singles and be cool with that, but I like working in eras. I like fleshing a story out and building the world around that. So The Ends EP came out on May 14th, and then “Constellations” came out a week later, and then Pleasure came out a week later. The thesis statement throughout the record is “Pleasure is only real because it ends.” So the songs on The Ends, in the whole kind of narrative, that was kind of the epilogue to it. They’re both like, the knots are tied, you know? In the first song “Hace Frio” a decision has been made, and then on “Down2earth” it’s like “I do not fuck with you. I thought I did, but I do not.” And then from a cute cinematic standpoint, you can hear the beginning of Pleasure at the end of “Down2earth.” So the intention is to play The Ends first and then Pleasure. I don’t think anyone’s done that, but I think it’s dope. It leads right in, it’s literally on beat and everything.
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I’m still chipping away at some stuff [for Reservation Dogs]. I’ve seen all the episodes, which is helpful for my end. There’s still some more stuff to do but I think the girth of it has been completed, which is nice. After that, I mean, once it airs, hopefully that can lead to more stuff. It’s funny, we talked about [with Pleasure] I’m proud of saying I made something completely myself, but now I never want to do that again [laughs]. That was like, “Okay, I did that, and I can say I did that for myself,” but I really respect Pharrell, and all these different people, I think Tyler [the Creator] is one of them, and Flying Lotus, these people who can help curate other people’s sounds. I really want to someday shift into that place, so I’m just trying to work on that, working with other artists. It’s hard because I’ve been so insular my whole career, just out of necessity, but now I’m really eager to work with other artists, just get in the studio with people, because that’s why I got in it: to work and be less lonely [laughs]. And so I’ve definitely worked and now I just want to open up the slate to different people and bring in different energies. I think that’s next. I got a lot of ideas. I’m constantly teeming with different shit. I have a TV show that I’m working on, and a lot of different scores that I want to do. I used to rap and joke that “I want to be the Native Donald Glover,” but there’s some merit to that. To me it’s not just music, it’s never been just music, that’s kind of the fuel in the tank, but there’s a whole car. There’s this whole thing that I really want to push. It’s wild, bro, I never thought — I knew this would happen, I have a lot of confidence, but it’s weird to see it happening, like, damn, I’m actually working in these different elements. I’m in New Mexico right now to work on this Amazon TV show, it’s called Outer Range, I’m a producer’s assistant, I’m helping out this executive producer, and so to me that’s like, “Oh shit,” because I want to be there one day. I want to be someone in film who can help others make what they want to make, and then also from a creative end I want to be able to contribute to stuff too. I’m really fortunate to have perspective on both of those things with the Amazon thing and then Rez Dogs, and then my own stuff too like Pleasure. It’s been really a whole experience, I don’t even watch that much TV, and to be involved with two TV shows in one year, it’s been wild.
MATO'S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Silent Obliteration — Wondrous Exquisite (2015)
SOURCES
Wayuhi, Mato. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 20 July 2021.
