by Ljubinko Zivkovic (@zivljub)
There is one term you can certainly use when you describe Matt Robidoux's music on At Dust - experimental. Yet many potential listeners would immediately feel the dread of encountering such music, because they associate experimental music in general as hermetic, impenetrable, or more simply put, something that takes too much effort to listen to. While Robidoux's music is certainly experimental, it is actually both quite accessible and listenable, possibly due to a few key factors - Matt has got intriguing musical ideas, he knows how to develop them and turn them into pieces of music that you can actually understand.
The second factor could lie in the way you can describe the way Robidoux creates his music - improvisational composition. He seems to be scattering musical bits and pieces, picks up a random number of them and then intricately arranges them into some sort of musical vignettes at the spur of the moment, “Cloud Dance #7” being a perfect example. Only a few tracks here, like “Sea Wall” with its slowly developing, enveloping sound, and “Interstital” with its minimalism that doesn't overstay its welcome, run over the three- or four-minute marks, but like the two mentioned, all are based on this approach.
The key thing though is that in lesser hands the results would be some sort of musical shambles, but on At Dust Matt Robidoux presents himself as a sort of a lo-fi Frank Zappa at his most inspirational.