Whether it’s flying out to see the grandparents or trekking away from those aunts and uncles who just don’t understand what your job actually is, traveling during the holidays is almost a common law practice. So we at AP thought we’d do the same via conversation with Chad Matheny, the Berlin-based mind behind Emperor X.

Matheny, a teacher gone backpack folktronic artist, is currently meandering the states on a U.S. tour set to reach Great Scott on January 4th alongside Babydriver, Man Diego and Beach Toys (we’re presenting it HUZZAH!). Equipt with a few synths, a nylon string guitar and his new album The Orlando Sentinel released this June, Emperor X has been cultivating more than just American fans while on the road this year. According to Matheny, lessons have been learned. Textbooks: ditched.

Chad Matheny: So what are you using to record this, coming from a fellow recording nerd?

Allston Pudding: It’s extremely high-end [clears throat] Garageband.

CM: Right on.

AP: So, I hear you used to be a science teacher.

CM: Correct. That was a long time ago though, like, 2001-2002. But, once you do it, you can always say that you did it, right? So, the answer is yes. I used to be a science teacher.

AP: And how was that transition from teacher to Emperor? That’s a crazy occupational shift.

CM: Well, it wasn’t completely direct. I had a period where I was trying to do graduate school. I quit teaching directly to go into a graduate program in physics, but I never really finished. I took some classes and I did some work, but I didn’t get very far in that degree because I was distracted by writing songs… It took over. I realized it was silly to keep trying to go to school. I wasn’t doing any of my homework instead I was staying up every night writing lyrics. So it was sort of an instinct. I felt I just had to, and it just happened.

AP: Do you ever miss teaching?

CM: Of course. I actually have dreams about it sometimes. Yeah I loved it, but it’s good that I didn’t continue being a teacher then because I think I was way too inexperienced and immature in a lot of ways. And I don’t know if I would be more mature now [laughs], but I would be more experienced at least.

People would ask me questions about science, and I’d be able to mostly answer them. But, if they asked me life questions, I’d be clueless. I think it’s nice to have a teacher that knows how to help with life’s stuff too, you know? Putting ten years on helps with that.

I also want to teach music when I go back to teaching, which I do definitely anticipate doing at some point in the next five to ten years. I’ve always thought of music as something that needs to be worked on a lot, and once it’s sustainable then I can expand to other things as well. I had a music seminar under David Grubbs once. I mean, it was just half a semester, but David Grubbs is famous for Gastr del Sol and a couple other Drag City bands. He was a huge inspiration to me, and that’s the kind of “combo meal” that I want to be: an academic and a touring veteran.

AP: That’s awesome. We can only hope to become combo meals in the future.

CM: Yeah.

AP: And just to get this straight, Bandcamp tells me you’re from Berlin, Spotify tells me you’re from L.A., and a third source told me something about Chicago. Confusion?

CM: [laughs] That is the only thing that isn’t true. I’ve never lived in Chicago, but I’ve been in L.A. a lot. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I currently live in Berlin, and I love it there and don’t see myself moving anywhere else anytime soon. I’ve live all over the states though but mostly, New York, Los Angeles, and in Florida.

AP: And not Chicago?

CM: Definitely not Chicago, but that’s a cool one so keep spreading that rumor.

AP: Will do. I’ll cross off the “what’s the Chicago scene like” question. How about Berlin?

CM: Well Berlin’s scene is much more interesting than whatever’s going on in Chicago I think. My interaction with it is actually pretty tourist-y at the moment. I’ve been there for about a year and some change, but a lot of that time’s been spent getting my footing.

I’m pretty involved with a venue called Donau115. It’s a very small, closeted café that just has these absurdly, randomly good acoustics. They have a lot of jazz acts in there. Well, one of the people who owned the café was friends with somebody who had booked a show for me in Munich a couple years before. He knew that I lived in Berlin and was like “Hey, we want to do things other than jazz. Why don’t you come in and do some stuff?” And that evolved into me partnering with them and booking things like that.

So the music there, to put it in a report sense, is a neat combo of singer-songwriter stuff and electronic stuff, which is exactly what I want to focus on too. There are people that use electronics but not in a create-a-house-party situations. They use it as another tool for songwriting.

It’s not new, and folktronic’s been out since the mid-‘90s, but it is the focus there.It’s not new, and folktronic’s been out since the mid-‘90s, but it is the focus there. I think there’s some genuinely good work coming out of Berlin. There’s this girl who goes by the name Entertainment for the Braindead. She’s a great songwriter. There are some really good songwriters. There are some bad ones too.

It’s a comfy place because the cost of living is pretty cheap compared to any American city.

AP: Really?

CM: Yeah. I think the only city that you could get away with living as cheaply as you do in Berlin is Philadelphia, and Philly’s pretty cheap. For the moment, it’s possible to skate by on a artist’s income Berlin.

AP: In terms of your equipment, have you found yourself using new stuff since going abroad?

CM: For sure. Touring made me get rid of everything so I don’t have any records or big amps. I really just have a nylon string guitar, and I have these two synths and some looper pedals that travel with. I record everything on a portable field record. If it doesn’t fit in a backpack, I’m not allowed to own it.

But it’s amazing what you do with very minimal technology. That’s been true for a while, but I think people are starting to realize it now. There’s not as much of a barrier to entry as it is with even being a poet. You just pick up a pen and write in a notebook. It’s very easy. I think, similarly, music has those tools to a greater extent than pen and paper. You have to have a computer, but it’s not thousands of dollars anymore. It’s hundreds.

AP: That’s good to know. Well, going straight into your music as whole, how would you describe your genre to…let’s say… my grandpa? And keep in mind that he only listens to The Doors.

CM: Wow. That’s a way better question than the usual genre one… [laughs] That’s a really good measuring stick. I actually had this problem myself. My grandfather didn’t understand what I did really at all…But I think, for someone like that, I’m a wimpier Johnny Cash playing disco.

AP: Awesome.

CM: Yeah that works.

AP: Now that you’ve accumulated a decently sized discography for yourself, what’s your favorite album you’ve made thus far?

CM: I don’t know. Pick your favorite child. It’s impossible. My least favorite is definitely my first one. I was 19, loving fore-tracks and didn’t have much of an editor.

If I had to pick one to survive off of, it would be Data Apocalypse because it kind of spans everything that I do. It’s also kind of looked-over. When I was writing it I was really intensely focused on writing in way that is rare. It’s just an EP, four songs, but the lyrics are especially hallucinatory in a meaningful way.

AP: And as for the new album, The Orlando Sentinel, I hear both clean and rough textures. Could you talk about your process of recording this one?

CM: Several of the songs were recorded in a way that was similar to how I record everything else. In a lot of ways that’s Western Teleport. But then, in addition to that, I did other things with the setup.

There’s one song on there called “Proving the Politburo Right,” and it was recorded all live at a disco with my field recorder. So yeah! It sounds crunchy, crispy and gnarly but definitely not as much as a raw recording. I spent a lot of time teething out the musical sounds from that rough file.

For this record I started with five or six things that seemed like songs and then built onto those. I also mine this ever-growing folder on my hard drive. It’s music that I’ve been saving up, and it seemed to fit here.

I think I had more fun making this record than other records before… Orlando Sentinel is definitely my most recent memory of having a blast recording.

AP: I definitely want to talk about the lyrics too. One track I was listening to repeatedly mentions Medicaid. What topics were you hoping to address most in this album?

CM: Yeah. The line goes “Medicaid, Medicare, Medical,” and to talk about that, I’ll try not to go too deep into the way I write lyrics.

So, I’ll sing something that I think sounds cool through phonetic nonsense. The musicality is primary element that interests me. Then I start to listen to it a lot picking out anything that might sound like a word, and that’s when the poetic instinct kicks in. And the result is a stream-of-consciousness way of recording.

I feel like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, accidentally. Not that I’m Dostoyevsky. He’s trying to delve into somebody else’s brain. I’m trying to do the same for my own.

I think what happens is that things that I’m wondering about or excited about naturally come up in this process. There were a lot of things going on around the topic. I didn’t have medical insurance, and there were some other things too. The topic came about through those personal experiences, but there’s also a musicality to the names of those public healthcare systems.

AP: Do you ever find your background in science seeping into your songwriting?

CM: Of course. More and more all the time I think. My amateur interest in science, it’s been years since I’ve picked up a textbook, definitely informs what I do. I’m certain I wouldn’t be writing the way I write if I didn’t have an education in science. My degree is in physics, and I think it was much more fuel for my poetic side of my brain than my analytical side of my brain.

I definitely do still follow developments in physics and mathematics, but not in a professional way at all. I just watched a NASA video about this proposal for a cloud city over the United States, and that’s the kind of thing that my friends and I like to stare at and get inspired by. It’s kind of like the contemporary version of the European Romantics, who were inspired by nature and long ways in the woods. I’m inspired by space colonization.

AP: That’s completely relatable since I was a chemistry major for five minutes.

CM: Hey that’s super useful though! That gives you depth.

AP: Something like that!

CM: It’s an argument to keep encouraging math and science education. If you give degrees in the humanities with cross-training in science, really interesting things can happen.

AP: Well put. So 2014 is coming to a close. Best show you attended this year?

CM: Best show. That’s a good one. I’ve been to a ton this year, but, off the top of my head, I’d say the most memorable show was when this guy Asuna from Japan came to Berlin. It’s on my soundcloud page if you want to hear it in all of its 37 minutes of monotonous glory.

So, he comes to Berlin with 30 or 40 keyboards, and he sets them all up in this grid, turning them on one-by-one very slowly. It was almost painful. And then he turns on this sound that was interacting with the other 28 keyboards, which was very hard to ignore. So, by changing it, he made this really interesting piece that we were all forced to listen to for 37 minutes because there was nowhere to go. The room was full. He was very meticulously turning keyboards on and off, putting clothespins on the keys and just doing interesting things like that.

Those are the things I remember, and that was definitely the wildest thing I saw this year.

AP: And last but not least, tell me a scientific fact.

CM: Wow… How about psychoacoustics? Is that an okay topic?

AP: Yeah.

CM: Let me make sure I get it right. I don’t want to commit a scientific fault-hood.

Okay. The one that’s jumping off the top of my head is that the human ear, at birth, hears between 30 Hz and more or less 20,000 Hz, and that drops off as we age. By the time most people are in their 50s or 60s, they typically can’t hear above 12,000 Hz. You lose a lot of hearing as you age just by the fact of being in the world.

AP: So the moral of the story is to wear earplugs?

CM: Definitely.