SunSon is the multi-instrumentalist, producer, and actor Stanley Mathabane. This year the musician put out his seventh release, the 24-song LP Guerrilla Welfare. Active under the moniker since 2013 when he self-recorded his debut NoWhere Fast while completing a “bridge year” in Senegal, Mathabane combines elements of Indie Rock and House into a DIY sound that reflects his diverse musical upbringing. Raised in Portland, OR where he played in Jazz orchestras and Indie bands, the musician has studied at the Berklee Conservatory and is a recent graduate of Princeton University. This week Live Eye Tv talked to Stanley about his musical background, prolific output, and recent move from Portland to New York City.
LETV: Hello Stanley. Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions about your musical project SunSon. Earlier this year you put out your 7th release, the 24-track collection of songs Guerrilla Welfare. Before we delve into that release can you tell us a little bit about your musical background? For instance, did you grow up playing music? Do you play other instruments besides guitar? When did you start recording your own music?
SM: I grew up playing both in jazz orchestras and indie rock bands. Portland had a vibrant jazz scene when I was growing up so I had some cool opportunities touring nationally with this community band I was a part of. Indie Rock-wise, I started my first band Goat in Freshman year of high school. I wrote the songs and sang while playing rhythm guitar. 3 piece rock group. Just friends deciding to play some local venues and house shows. There was a great community of young musicians across Portland when I was growing up and we all supported and engaged with each other’s events.
On the other hand, I loved playing jazz and learning about Black America through the expression of its earlier artists. I’m mixed and my Dad is from South Africa so I found myself living and engaging with a history that I only encountered in textbooks with my white peers. They tended to make me feel shame in relation to the concept of blackness. It was only when I started playing jazz that I felt a connection to a lifestyle that inspired me more than the norm I knew. Studying jazz was huge for my self-development in those years.
From my personal connection to jazz, I ended up studying jazz vocals at Berklee Conservatory in the summer of 2013 on a scholarship. That happened around the time I recorded saxophone on a Grammy Award Winning Album: Esperanza Spalding’s Radio Music Society. My mentor recruited me to play for the orchestral accompaniment to two of the tracks. That experience was really inspiring.
I play a lotta instruments: bassoon, clarinet, saxophone (main), flute, guitar, bass, drums, trombone. I was always that kid who got really into learning new things and then got bored after the parameters of the game were learned. I liked figuring things out on the instruments but when it became a question of shedding for hours to sound fluent… I wasn’t so disciplined. I’ve learned that more as I’ve grown, though. Now I practice every day.
I started recording music during my Gap Year in Dakar, Senegal. I was over there living with a homestay family and working at various NGOs in the city. A co-worker gave me FL Studio on a flash drive and it was a wrap – I was in my room until 3AM almost every night. Before Senegal, I had recorded a couple demos for my MySpace page but I forgot my login info and the URL. It’s like a little internet time capsule, though. It may resurface one day.
LETV: How did your time in Africa influence your musical development? What can you tell us about recording your debut while there?
SM: I spent 10 months in a fishing village in the north part of Dakar. That’s actually where I recorded NoWhere Fast. In my bedroom with a USB mic and Fruity Loops. Some of the tracks feature an acoustic guitar I borrowed from a kind Senegalese musician friend. I definitely felt a greater magnetic pull towards music as an aid in processing a lot of emotional events and relationships I had just felt were put on hold while I was abroad being called by a different name for 10 months (I was given the name Malik Ndiaye by my homestay family). Creating songs became a way to try to distill all of my conflicting emotions and uncertainty about my adolescent life. I hoped that the themes were relatable. A healthy amount of heartbreak.
My Mom sent me a USB mic for Christmas while I was there. I used that to record the vocals. On some of the vocals on the first track of the album, you can hear the goat outside my window bleating. I was not in a studio space at all. The fact that the album came out and is in a listenable form on Spotify was hours of sound design, mixing and mastering. I would stay up until 3AM for weeks experimenting with different post-effects. Then I’d run into problems and have to wait until the next day to go to the neighborhood cyber cafe and download YouTube tutorials that addressed my issues. The limitations afforded by the demands of the program – I worked 9 to 5 – made it so that music took on a healing quality. I think that’s because I was feeling it rather than thinking so much. I had enough to think about, adapting to a new life at the time.
LETV: You have also played in the indie band Cosmo Alto, but SunSon seems to have always been a solo, DIY project with you handling all aspects of composition, instrumentation, production, recording, and mastering. Is that a conscious, philosophical choice or one of necessity? Do you enjoy handling all aspects of your own production?
SM: It’s not really a conscious or philosophical choice, I just mainly can’t find many musicians who are engaging with music with the same spirit as myself. I play with a backing band sometimes but I find as musicians get better in ability they sometimes methodize music to a point where it becomes sort of stifling to the creative curiosity that makes you try something new and fail sometimes. Sometimes people play in bands because it’s safer. Not all bands, of course.
Cosmo Alto was a great band and I loved playing with them at the local shows we booked. The band was made up of friends from high school days back in Portland. It felt natural playing with them after having graduated college and moving back to my hometown. When I was at college they went up to Seattle and opened for HomeShake. That was cool. The band split up naturally and gradually as all of the members were figuring out how much music mattered to them. It was a splintering point where post-grad life expectations are kind of set. So people go different ways. All with the breeze.
Cosmo Alto, the guitarist/vocalist of the group moved to Brooklyn now and writing music under the same artist name, soon to be released. I just hung out with him last week. I played keyboard, sax, synth, bass and sometimes rhythm guitar at our shows. That multi-instrumentalist flow.
LETV: In 2017, you released a suite of music as a 3-act effort: Scenes from Beyond the Void, Solar Winds, and Eye in the Sky. Is it fair to say that much of the music on those EPs reflect your interests in meditation and yoga, and, if so, how do those interests inform your music making?
SM: There’s also [Act IV] Age of Reveals, which was a deep house final Act I released on December 30th of 2017. I wrote those EPs over the course of college. They were all released in the last year but the tracks are from any of the four years.
At Princeton I studied Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience, the insights from these fields encouraged me to notice my own patterns of thought and habits. This curiosity combined with a meditation practice I took up with a Buddhist Monk – an arrangement through the campus center of religious life – lead me to take to meditation as a practice that supports artistic creativity. All of these ideas sort of coalesced in the different moods of the 4 Act EP series. I also wanted to experiment with expressing emotion in the context of different genres. So, each of the 4 acts is of a different genre. Act 1 (Scenes from Beyond the Void) is deep house ; Act II (Solar Winds) is indie rock ; Act III (Eye in the Sky) is Indie Electronica ; Act IV (Age of Reveals) is back to deep house.
LETV: Your 2018 LP Guerrilla Welfare found you “fighting for the light,” and the album’s namesake track honors the “little things we do for one another.” How important is a socially conscious attitude to your music?
SM: I acknowledge the subjectivity of the songs I sing. I think that even if your music is about bullshit you’re making a statement that society absorbs. Whether it has intention or “socially conscious attitude” behind it or not – it leaves an imprint. So, I choose to accept this inevitability of social interaction that comes with a collective art form – the creating and sharing of music. Hearing is a constant sense.
That’s all to say that being socially conscious in the process of creating music is very important to me. Art affects society and vice versa. Mirror up to society, in all forms, self-aware or otherwise.
LETV: Tell us a little about making Guerrilla Welfare. What was the instrumentation used on the making of the album and what is your home studio set-up like?
SM: The album features myself on guitar, drums (live recorded samples), and synth. Most of the bass on the album is actually my guitar pitched down an octave because I didn’t have enough disposable income to get a bass when working on the album. I like the effect, though.
To record guitar, I used a Scarlett Solo USB. Vocals were on the Yeti USB Microphone my Mom sent me in Senegal. And everything else was me getting schwifty in Ableton with the built-in effects. I also mixed and mastered the tracks in Ableton with Izotope Ozone 6.
I’m planning to record the next album in a studio. I’m excited to have more connections to make that happen now, living in New York City.
LETV: When did you start writing the music on Guerrilla Welfare and how do you handle composition and the recording of particular tracks? Where does the writing of lyrics come into this process?
SM: Most of the Guerrilla Welfare tracks came from the period between my Senior Spring at college and the end of my first winter back home in Portland.
Each track came together in a different order. Sometimes I’m playing an instrument and discover a melody or some chord changes that feel interesting to me. I then record the instrumental and put it on my phone. I like to walk around and listen to the track and see what thoughts come about from different moods. Like, by responding to the sounds from different vantage points (different days/weeks) then I find a common theme of reaction and that usually matches the mood of the music pretty well.
Other times the song creation is driven by the lyrics. In this case, the lyrics usually start as short poems that I write after moments of intense, sticky emotion. I try to find a second to put emotions into words when I feel I’m most overwhelmed by them. These are the things I write about. They feel the most natural to sing about. Like, I can know what I’m talking about and communicate that without being explicit in the words, because I have such a clear moment that I’m drawn from. I guess in that way I sort of take the emotionally taxing moments of life and try to find some insight or inspiration from them – something that moves me to sing. Beautiful or otherwise.
LETV: You recently relocated from Portland to NYC. How did you decide on New York and how has the move affected your creative activity? Have you found New York to be supportive as far as your musical pursuits are concerned?
SM: Yeah, I moved to Brooklyn in April of this year (2018). I had worked in New York City in 2016 and also starred in an Off-Broadway show in October of 2017. During my stay in New York in October, I linked up with a musician friend and event curator – Amani Fela. He’s linked me with a lot of awesome artists and helped me get acclimated to the scene. Now I find myself in a really inspiring community of DIY artists/musicians of color. They’ve really been like family thus far. We jam, write new music and support each other’s stuff. Amani Fela, Pink Siifu, Ted Kamal, Quinton Brock to name a few – fam feels. Plenty of other artists I want to work with and am getting to know right now. Moving was definitely the move.
I also play with a live band named Ladybread, we do a sort of collaborative show where we do half their songs, half SunSon songs and then a couple covers. The shows are cool. We play often in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
LETV: What’s next for SunSon? Are you currently working on new music? Do you have any live gigs or a tour planned?
SM: Currently I’m working on mixing and mastering two projects. One is a short EP of covers of songs by 80s Disco Divas. The other is a longer Rap EP with some pretty exciting features. After that, I’m planning on working on the next album in the indie rock vein, similar in spirit to Guerrilla Welfare. Honest jangle rock.
Tonight I’m playing at The Well – a Brooklyn bar venue in Bushwick – with Ladybread. And Saturday I’m sitting in on saxophone with some artists from my neighborhood who I’ve been jamming with recently.
Being in NYC has been unreal. I just meet new awesome people every day. And people are passionate about getting things moving, which I appreciate. People are already in the flow and you just jump in the movement. I’m glad I took the time to have still moments earlier, though. Loving the new NYC community I’m meeting and helping co-create. It’s a whole vibe.
