MXLX Interview: “I am the brush, not the painter”

Whether it be through the MXLX lens or his vast array of other guises, including but not limited to, Knife Liibrary, Gnar Hest, WON’T, Fairhorns and Team Brick, there’s little doubt that Matt Loveridge is the quintessential noisemaker.

At 65 full-length releases and counting, the former Beak> founder’s creative scope spans wider than the ocean. From blistering bunker sonics to protracted organ dirges and everything else in between, MXLX has been the facilitator of some of the most forward-thinking noise from the U.K. underground.

The past several years has seen Loveridge produce his best work under the MXLX banner, led by 2017’s Kicking Away at the Decrepit Walls Til the Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru the Cracks, the sweltering one-two of Serpent (2020) and Nebula Rasa (2021), reaching the crescendo that can also be considered the project’s most precious jewel, Saint (2023). Devotional echoes from the ensuing avalanche of ideas, as Loveridge orchestrates a wildly elaborate cacophony where techno, dub and industrial noise all shine through at times.

While the wandering krautrock-inspired explorations of Beak> make way for something seemingly inspired by black holes, the above-noted releases have seen Loveridge in the ire of DIY’s most celebrated moments. The Bristol artist has tasted victory away from the MXLX project, too, led by last year’s Knife Liibrary release, To Loathe… – devotional no-wave leanings that plough through the fields that Angus Andrews’ Liars odyssey once conquered.

Always shifting with the mood, it’s a punk’s prerogative, and Loveridge underlines the spirit. A renegade force in constant flux, and 2025 has seen more of it, firstly with APOCRYPHA – 12 bourgeoning soundscapes shaped through the Fender Rhodes, resulting in the same amplifier worship as fellow heller-raisers, SUNN O))). Following a month later was his first Gnar Fest long-player in 10 years, Video Ritual. Ambient synth sketches in some of Loveridge’s softer moments committed to tape.

It’s the aesthetic of the former that carries through to his latest release as the MXLX Piano Trio, APOCRYPHA LIVE. Featuring fellow Bristol DIY stalwarts Dan Johnson (drums) and Jo Kelly (double bass), APOCRYPHA LIVE consists of three long-form compositions that move with grace. Recorded live last March in Bristol’s St Anne’s Church, the results are rich and sparse, the sound filling every corner of the room.

Beginning with Loveridge’s thrumming piano on opener, In the Loud of the Church, the piece builds frenetically into We Ring a Gunpowder Bell – Kelly’s throbbing double bass searching for Johnson’s percussion which slowly rolls in like a thunderstorm. And the dark clouds break on For a Golden Tonic Song; Loveridge, frantically working across the ivories and backed by Johnson’s free-form freak-outs, APOCRYPHA LIVE’s climax is mesmerising.

Ahead of APOCRYPHA LIVE’s release next Friday, last week, Loveridge answered a series of our questions about his creative process, inspirations behind his work and more.

Weirdo Rippers #17

Sun 13: Your catalogue of work suggests a wide array of influences, also away from music… there’s a real devotional thread that runs through some of it. Did you grow up around religion?

Matt Loveridge: “I was raised in a trad-Christian Salvation Army family but the day-to-day integration of all that was fairly mundane and secular – [I] also grew up around folk culture (spent about two-three months a year living on campsites), so there was a lot of deep symbolism going on, on the more pagan side.

“[I] totally lost my faith in my teenage years and went through the classic obnoxious-atheism-as-religion thing that most people tend towards… something about ‘The Spirit’ always came back to me, though – [I] was always into the idea of aiming high or at least diagonally in art (above the self, ego as editor instead of avatar). I ended up playing with symbology as pure window dressing, unaware that the symbols were playing with me in return. After a while the more I interacted with symbols and forces and deities the more they interacted with me and the further I fell into it. These days I’m a fully-fledged card-carrying Gnostic… nowadays it’s all fully devotional whether I say so or even realise or not.”

S13: Do you remember the first piece of music that really spoke to you, to the point where you wanted to make it yourself?

ML: “Nope! But it was most likely The Beatles. Making music was always and still is a pure autistic and libidinal drive, blind to most other things like that Greek cunt with his rock and the hill.”

S13: How long have you known Dan Johnson and Jo Kelly, and were they the obvious choice to record with on APOCRYPHA LIVE?

ML: “Dan I’ve known for a while, he does a lot of work with my girlfriend (Annie Gardiner, who recorded and mixed the concert). Jo I’ve known a few years… and is conveniently my neighbour and also plays bass in a band I’m in (on drums). The two of them are considerable behemoths / titans / leviathans in the local improv’ / weirdo music cadre, utterly world class improvisers (although, important to note that APOCRYPHA LIVE isn’t improv exactly, it’s pretty tightly composed, rewritten a couple of times because I was putting too much in, and then had to re-rewrite it on the day because the piano didn’t like the keys I’d originally written it in. There’s still a lot of chance or ‘instant composition’ going on there, too).

“Also given the chops of those two, it’s easier on me as they can do a lot of the heavy lifting by being badass while I slouch in tendonitis.”

S13: The performance is entirely acoustic too, which is surprising given how it sounds. Was it always the intention to record the set this way?

ML: “Absolutely, yeah. [It] had to be presented so as to remove all doubt, no chance for any trickery or sleight-of-ear going on, no effects or processing or prepped piano, pure acoustics… the piano is a beast if you let it sing its own particular song when you stop making demands of it by ordering it to spit out notes, all for your own whim. It’s meant to be symphonic too, the building we’re in being as an instrument alongside the ones being ‘played’ by us.”

S13: When you recorded Saint, in the interview with The Quietus, you said you banned yourself from listening to music for several months. Do you still do that now when you’re writing and recording?

ML: “That was a particularly difficult ascetic period for real. [I] wanted to see what would happen when I removed all influence and frustration from what I was about at the time. These days I don’t often get the space to listen all that much, a few times a week I’ll get to boogie, but more so I end up preferring silence or just listening to the wind or the pipes in my house or paying attention to listening to the plants grow. It’s a balancing act now, though; if I’m deep into writing I won’t really listen to all that much because I still don’t want to ‘infect’ my writing with wanting to sound like other people’s work – but while I was writing this set (and the studio versions for solo piano) I was pretty solidly and exclusively listening to SUNN O))) as that seemed to be the crystallised form of this ‘ore-music’ idea I was chasing.

“I remember the first bit of music I listened to after my noise-fast – it was a Glassjaw B-side and I played it over and over and I wept, curtains of tears in a big rush of emotion. But I do love Glassjaw, so that’s probably an apt response.”

S13: Your body of work is so vast. Do you work on one album at a time, or do you have an archive that you pull from?

ML: “It’s always one at a time, but there’s a backlog of albums I’m always working on and adding to. I never seem to do well doing bits of a single piece / song / track and moving on, I have to get the whole album into shape as a constant / consistent whole-body thing. There’s a whole notebook of albums waiting to get planned out… I always know what the next five are going to be and when they’re going to get done.

“What I’m up to is only vast if you take it as a lump sum kind of thing. Factor in the length of time I’ve been doing it and how much has come out alongside the fact that this is pretty much the only thing I do, and you end up with three albums a year, that’s an average of four months per project, which by my standards actually seems kind of lazy!”

S13: What about ideas? Are they mapped out before you begin writing or is it more of a case of following your nose?

ML: “It really does depend. Oftentimes, I’ll work with graphic scores, mapping out a visual of the whole album and breaking it down into its constituent movements, sometimes it’s based on a simple ‘knowing what the vibe is’ or restrictions in play (different projects have different limitations and liberties, different manic states too, different deities working alongside and against them), and in rare cases, the nose is followed and I keep going until there’s a record at the end of it (most notably the two acoustic MXLX ‘songs’ albums). 90 per cent of the time, though, the sounds are the last thing to come.”

S13: Bristol seems to gravitate to the darker frontiers of art. For example, I know several doom-orientated band from up here in the North West whose biggest following is actually in Bristol. Why do you think that is?

ML: “Bristol to me, seems a little lite for my tastes. I don’t really like it very much, but I don’t like cities. As cities go it can be okay, it at least has its niches of weird brilliant cunts which keeps me going. I like that there are so many good green spaces for trees and streams. I also live in east Bristol which feels more like a small town unto itself than a city. The wankers are worse but there’s less of them. 

“There’s another question to your question; is metal really all that dark? I got into metal through my cousin who was a tape-dub kind of kid, so I never got any dark aesthetic from track titles in biro on a cassette, only the music, which I thought was incredible and rich and full of vivre, to me it sounded triumphant, goofy and joyous! Grindcore? No, grincore!”

S13: Could you see yourself living anywhere else?

ML: “I’m tethered to Bristol for better or worse, but I could see myself having a nice time in eastern Europe. Croatia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, these kinds of places. I like these out of the way spots and their quality of life, slower and more focused on the more favourable elements.

“If I’m condemned to the U.K., I’ll take Bristol but small fishing towns in Devon or somewhere in the motherland (Cymru) would suit me too. [As] long as I’ve got good walks and a decent butcher nearby, I’m fairly content.”

S13: Do you ever think of a life without making music, and do you think the art you create is a reflection on your personality?

ML: “I often think of a life without making art. These fantasies either end up completely monastic but completely untethered (Abdul Alhazred) or making bombs in a cabin in the woods (Good Old Uncle Ted). I have a lot of peasant in me. I don’t think I’d be all that unhappy living as a fisherman somewhere with no fish. 

“I don’t think there’s a correlation between my art and my ‘personality’. I don’t even know what I’m like or how I come across to people. I’m a pretty shy dude and only know ‘what I’m like’ from other people’s retellings and each and every time I go, ‘Wow, I came across like that?’

“I only know that I’m never as aggressive as people like to think I am, I’m soft as lambs and puppies. I never make art as a reflection of the ‘self’, but I know that ‘I’ will always shadow the art I make. It’s not made by me, it’s found by me and made through me. I’m a dumbass vessel for the arts. I am the brush, not the painter.”

S13: Are you someone always looking to make the next thing, or do you take time to reflect on your past creations? I mean, Saint feels like a pretty accomplished works in your canon and not really something to be glossed over…

ML: “Both ways, really. Always looking to move forward and on, but at the same time recognising that progress is not a linear thing. Some of my work goes forward, some backwards, too. I generally like what I end up doing but when there’s something I haven’t got right I’ll focus on what I can do better next time. If I’ve nailed something, it’s done, no need to return – if I change and re-appreciate things in New Light then I’ll make cautious steps towards Th’ Temple. Maybe the past and the future and now are all nodes on the same keyboard, all feeding back into ‘The Now of No Now of Itself Being Now’.

“Saint was a bastard, borne out of extreme poverty (I could afford to eat maybe three times a week while making it) and extreme mania (dark visions and visitations from daemons, deities and angels, and one particularly noisome Djinn) – the end result I liked, harrowing as it was, but the handling of it from the label’s side was a total disaster, hated everything about the process and their side of the bargain. I should have self-released as usual but I had some of that pesky ‘hope’ in me. Never again! Sadly, I still can’t listen to Saint because of how horrible working with that label was. [I] don’t think there was one single human in employ there, pure death breath all round!”

APOCRYPHA Live is out next Friday. Pre-order from Bandcamp.