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Matter Talks New EP “The Sound”, Working With ill.Gates, and the Class of 808 [Exclusive Interview]

June 30, 2017 By Tori Matthews

Up and coming artist, Matter, has released his first official EP The Sound through ill.Gates’ production label, Producer Dojo. The Philadelphia native, Dustin Dvorak, joined the training class on ill’s website. Dvorak’s EP is the first to come from their “Class of 808” group, and it’s an exciting start for what is to come from this pool of new talent. We were able to chat with Dustin to hear about the process and learn more about him as a producer. Check out what he had to say about meeting ill.Gates, writing during full moons, and what we can look forward to from the accomplished graduate.

RR: What inspired you to pursue your career in producing music?

DD: There were a few things that happened to me throughout my life that led me to producing music. When I was like 8, I watched School of Rock and instantly went out and got a guitar. I pretty much learned the first 4 strings, stopped practicing, and bought a bass. I was never any good because I stopped taking lessons and there wasn’t even Youtube yet to learn on the computer. After that I went through this crazy phase where I wanted to be a rapper and I started learning about beats and instrumentals. I tried to make a beat a few times in garage band but it wasn’t until my homies, Tim (Mindset) and Ian (Cryptic Flow), started making beats on their computers when I was a senior in high school that I started taking it seriously and actually tried to make beats like my friends did. There was something about making any type of music that drew me into doing it. Music is essentially just sounds that make you feel things over time, so once I found out that I didn’t have to be coordinated or witty with words to make music. I got on my computer and started trying to make people feel the way that music makes me feel.

RR: I saw on your Instagram a written purpose. What brought you to write that?

DD: You know, I never really thought about that. I was spending some time before the EP working on myself and trying to be a better person and I would listen to these Napoleon Hill CD’s my dad gave me in my car while I drove Chinese takeout deliveries (that’s my “real” job) and I would try to listen to what he said. One of the things Napoleon said to do was to write out your definite major purpose of life on a piece of paper and read it out loud to yourself twice a day. I took it further by sharing it on Instagram but the idea behind that is that if I share my purpose with all of my followers I’m challenging myself to fulfill my purpose, and therefore it comes back around and inspires me to do it. It’s like this strange paradox where I get inspired by inspiring other people so it sort of feeds inspiration back into itself and further inspires me.

RR: Will you be doing anything in the future that would specifically tie back to this statement?

DD: To be honest I never really plan that far ahead. My focus is doing the next right thing in front of me and then the next right thing after that and so on. I think the next thing I’m doing is I’m that I’m going to try to start helping ill.Gates out with his new website www.myproducerdj.club, where he teaches students and shares his workshops and tutorials but nothing is confirmed yet!

RR: Is the description on your Soundcloud page a sort of mantra or basis of what you want your DJ persona to represent?

DD: I don’t think it’s more of that as much as it is a description of what I think my music physically is. I think bios are always so formal/lame and I wanted to spice it up a bit and give people a story to read and connect themselves with. Anyone can say “x is a producer from y and has opened for z and collabs with 1,2,3”. That’s no fun to do, and I certainly don’t care about where you’re from and what you did. If I’m your fan – I’m here, on your page, because I want to see if your music can make me feel something or because it has made me feel something. So I tried to write something that would make people feel and think something.

RR: Can you tell me about Producer Dojo? How did you and ill.Gates meet and end up working together?

DD: Producer Dojo is the label for the private club that ill.Gates has. The Producer DJ Club is a place where all of the members can get together and get private tutorials, workshops, track feedback, and even tutoring from Dylan himself which is pretty rad. The first time I met him was when we, a few of the students, and him, got together in New York to work on the track “Is You Is”. I started working with him about a year before that as a student when he first started taking students on. I saw his post and immediately called my homie Tim and told him that we had to sign up and do this together. Shortly after we were the first two to sign up, Dylan called us thanking us for signing up and we talked about how excited we were to be his students and asked him about cool adventures he’s been on. A few weeks later we had our first lesson and the rest is history.

RR: This is the first EP that the “Class of 808” is releasing, what was it like working with ill.Gates and the team?

DD: Working with Dylan and the Producer Dojo team has been a blast. It’s like a little family in there because most of the students have been there from the beginning, so we chat back and forth and everyone supports everyone else in the group. Professionally I was really impressed with how Dov, the label manager, handled the release and how he kept telling me that it would be a great, even when I had my doubts about it. ill himself is the man and I would not be where I am without him. He’s done so much for me by teaching me what he knows and pushing me to keep getting better. As far as publicity goes, he has given me so many shout outs and mentions at his shows and online and I’m grateful for every last one. It makes me so happy that he supports me and what I’m doing.

RR: What all went into creating “The Sound”? Was this a mix of tracks you’ve already created or is it all fresh? Do you have a general process that you follow?

DD: This is a good one – so I have this gnarly ritual where I ALWAYS produce music when there’s a full moon. I don’t know why but my heaviest music is always made when there’s a full moon. Both “Recognize” and “The Sound” are full moon tracks. When that happens and I get in the full moon zone, I write my tracks instantaneously, both were something like 5 hours or less. From there with “The Sound” I worked on it once or twice more just to finalize the drops before ill and I were taking a listen to it during a lesson. He suggested that I let go of the original sampled vocals and reach out to Mayor Apeshit for a verse to really make the song stand out. This was the first time I ever had a real rapper on one of my tracks so I was overly excited when I got to hear the acapella and imagined how it would sound finished. Once I had the vocals it was pretty much cut, paste, and print because Mayor Apeshit put the icing on the cake for what would end up being my title track.

RR: Will you keep producing music through the “Class of 808” forum or will you be releasing music through another platform?

DD: I would assume so! Label things have always seemed tricky to me but I really like working with ill and the other students so I’m definitely going to do what I can to give back to the “Class of 808”. Since it helps the club when I release music through them I plan on continuing to do it to help it grow into something bigger so that ill.Gates can help more people learn.

RR: What else do you have in the works that listeners can look forward to?

DD: I’ve got a bunch of unreleased tracks I’m sitting on right now. A few of them are remixes of pretty well known songs but I also have a Brightside remix to work on and a few collabs with homies to finish up this summer. Once the fall hits, I’ll probably do a single here and there but I really want to have an album out next spring. I’m a super perfectionist type of producer so things tend to take a little bit longer for me to finish tracks but I feel that I try to make up for that with the quality of them. The EP was originally 12 tracks when I started cutting down, so an album should be say 30 or so tracks before I pick which ones make the album. Some of them that don’t make it will either come out as singles or turned into remixes of songs that I like and the rest only get played at shows.

RR: Do you think you’ll stick within the realm of dubstep or are you interesting in branching out and playing around with your sound?

DD: There’s no doubt that I’ll be branching out into different areas with my sound. Like I said, I’m a perfectionist so I won’t release anything unless I think it’s impossible to make better. I have made a few experimental hip-hop beats before but nothing too, too serious. I also want to have a tight, melodic DnB track on the new album so tackling that will surely be a blast to learn as well. It gets so boring when you sit down and write the same track over and over again in different ways and there’s times where I’ve done that before and it started making me crazy. I’ll always stick to the realm of bass music because I really like the heaviness of it and how that heaviness in the low end carries the weight all the way up through the high noises and it makes a complete wall of sound that can blow you away if you aren’t ready.

RR: I got two last fun questions for you. Of all the sets you have ever seen from artists, which one really blew you away?

DD: Every set is special in its own way. I think if there was a single show that I underestimated when I went to see it, it was my first time seeing STS9 at the infamous Hudson Project. I had never listened to a jam band or something like them before so I had no clue what to expect. I thought it would be light and fluffy and something like the Grateful Dead or Jimmy Buffett but Tribe got the place rockin’! They put on an awesome show that night and I was absolutely blown away and drawn into to what they were doing as a band and have loved their music since.

RR: If you could have a B2B set with anyone, who would it be and why?

DD: Well it’s kinda like picking your favorite egg out of the carton. You have 12 or so eggs that you could pick from but picking out just one would be way too hard since they’re all a little different.

We thank Matter for taking the time to talk to us today. Check out his EP, available on SoundCloud now.