Matteo Liberatore is a force of chaos and precision. His new alter ego, Molto Ohm, is as unexpected as it is electrifying—an immersive plunge into maximalist soundscapes that teeter on the edge of controlled madness. Melodies are shattered and reassembled into frenetic journeys through blacked-out neon corridors lined with jagged edges and fractured dreams. A fusion of instrumentation, voices, environmental recordings, and relentless rhythms crafts a serrated portrait of modern existence.
FEED unfolds in multiple dimensions, shifting from cryptic, ethereal opacity to stark, unfiltered transmissions wrapped in electronic fervor. Liberatore is the puppet master, orchestrating disparate elements into a feverish, unpredictable sonic narrative where the impossible becomes inevitable. It’s audacious, urgent, and brilliant; music for an age on the brink.
FEED will be released on March 21 by New Focus Recordings.
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Are You Making Money?
I occasionally record audio for video shoots. I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. I became introduced to the work in 2012 by helping a roommate shoot a documentary. Alongside my work in music and teaching, it has been a huge help in paying for life in New York.
The content of the shoots varies greatly: documentaries, TV shows, fashion exhibits, editorials for magazines, newspapers, you name it. I’ve been to places I would never have seen otherwise: a death row prison, a Peruvian desert, a food facility in Detroit, car factories, Ice-T’s house, New York homes with millions of dollars worth of art on the walls. I’ve recorded hundreds of people talking about all kinds of subjects. It has allowed me to witness worlds that feel very distant from mine, as well as learn the technical intricacies of video and film production up close.
Several years ago I was recording a white-collar executive reading from a teleprompter. He read the lines over and over, self-consciously laughing and asking for approval from his interns. The language was numbing but oddly fascinating to me. How could something sound so flat and impersonal—in other words, so corporate? Upon returning home I layered the repeating lines over a fast, manic beat, and the mental cogs clicked into place; I realized I needed to develop these sonic explorations. Once the whole album was done, I went back and reworked this track. A friend and I searched for and recorded the most tedious speeches we could find from banks, investment companies, and real estate websites.
I wanted to stack the speeches as the track progressed, moving the listener’s attention from the meaning of the words to the sound and tone of the speaker and eventually to the cacophony of the speeches. At the end of the day, the bland sameness of the speeches belies a simple but powerful message: money is everything.
I am aware that starting the album this way might be disconcerting (some friends told me they heard the track and initially thought it was a Soundcloud ad, waiting for it to end before the ‘real’ music started), but I wanted to draw attention to the pervasiveness of advertising and corporate influence. We’re so accustomed to ads that we barely pay attention to them on a conscious level —yet they affect us in very significant ways. Think of the constant, unwanted pollution, on the subway, on the street, on social media, on any free app, on the radio, on YouTube, and so on.
$$$$$$
I grew up in Abruzzo, in central Italy, in a stereotypically Catholic Italian family. I often heard choirs in churches and Gregorian chants out of my parents’ home speakers. I remember their CDs and records, including the ones of celebrated Italian singers. Through these early sonic experiences, I developed an appreciation for the human voice. For this track, I made a sample of my own voice and layered it with a synth sound to create a syncopated synth/choir rhythm: stabs of mysterious chords opening up into a sort of faux-EDM breakdown. I wanted to set the electronic-beat tone of the album right away. The track was also inspired by The Swingle Sisters singing Bach, which I heard as a teenager and thought was unbelievable.
The voice in my song that says “You smell so good,” is me. One of my favorite elements in electronic music is talking voices. The lyrics are an unintended homage to Your Only Friend by Phuture; I wasn’t familiar with the song until recently, or perhaps I had heard it when I was younger and don’t remember. That song goes: “This is cocaine speaking, I can make you do anything for me, I can make you cry for me, I can make you fight for me, I can make you steal for me, I can make you kill for me.” Mine says: “You smell so good, I want you, I need you.” You can apply these lyrics to any subject, but the track’s title $$$$$$ (as well as the previous track’s title) suggests it’s about money: everyone’s drug.
Were You Dreaming Yesterday?
This track starts with a recording from another film shoot, this time an interview with a graphic designer. I’ve always felt that adding a vocoder makes anything sound more poetic. I loved the effect of it on this particular speech—it sounds hopeful and promising. I thought of this track as a collage, the sonic analogue of someone moving from one IG post to another. The noise that follows the speech feels like an abrupt return to reality, raw and unsettling. And what better way to ease the pain of that return than what sounds like a jazz-inflected yoga session? The voice (mine, pitched up) says:
“Three, four, let’s do one more, on the other side
Inhale to extend, beautiful work
Take the wrists, planting the palms
Spread the fingers, one, two, three
Big breath…
Exhale, lift up, downward dog, dog, downward dog
Bend your knees
Tik Tok the hips, the hips, the hips, the hips
Feel the lengthening.”
Sponsored #1
This track is about the commodification of self-care, where the quest for mental well-being is shaped by algorithms and consumer-driven promises of a “better you.”
I’ve had this track (without vocals) since 2015. At the time, I was obsessing over an Access Virus C synthesizer, (which I later sold, bought again, and then used on this record). I was playing around with its arpeggiator and thought, what if I play arpeggios on the keyboard while a super-fast arpeggiator is on?! I ended up with an ultra-lush, wide bed of beautiful chords—nostalgic and melancholic—and a synth choir patch singing a soaring melody toward the end. At the time, I thought I would never use it, thinking it was “too beautiful.” Then Molto Ohm came around, and this track begged to be used as a faux ad for a meditation app. In fact, the “lyrics” are inspired by the questionnaire from the Calm app, a real meditation app. The voice is me again, this time not pitched. I was incredibly happy that this instrumental track was finally put to use—another reminder to never delete anything off your hard drives!
Legend
The inspirations for this track were the strange, atonal sounds from a Hydrasynth desktop synth and audio from a video shoot in which I recorded an interviewer asking people if they cared about brand ethicality.
I recorded a friend of mine who has a low, deep voice (I pitched it down even more) asking a series of questions about brands, while a messy and inconsistent beat rampages along with atonal chords, and a sample of an activist journalist clashes with the brand content.
The track is replete with digital glitch. The moodboard: Johnny Mnemonic, Neptune Frost, Blindsight, early 90s jungle, hardcore beats, the idea of the world as an information network, the immorality of capitalism, the irony of corporate responsibility.
Code 11 (Myst)
Noise and bits of melodic songs: the chorus that suffuses my neighborhood in New York when I go to and from the supermarket, the gym, the barbershop. I love walking in and out of places and hearing how the soundscape changes within a few feet, strolling past a restaurant or a nail salon and hearing the song inside, the sound of people and machines outside, and just for a moment imagining the lives of those listening, the world bursting, life everywhere. But this joy is brief; the end of the track is abrupt and the silence afterward is almost unbearable.
A Place Far Away
This track exudes pure longing. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was longing for, but when I started naming cities into the microphone, it all made sense. Longing for travel, for the faraway destinations we symbolically project our happiness and dreams onto. I thought of pre-internet brochures from travel agencies, my own travels back to my Italian hometown village, and my journey to New York. The idea of escaping or starting anew, ad agencies creating perfect images to place on highway billboards, designed to make you hate your current, limited life.
I inserted bursts of noise to counteract the disaffected nightmare. The synth pad sound is cold and shiny, as digital as it gets. The moodboard: ambient music, Vanilla Sky, The Handmaid’s Tale, the last chapter of 1984, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the rainbow flag on the Bank of America window.
My obsession with pitched voices is again on clear display…
The Party
I was thinking of the party scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s movie The Great Beauty, my teenage self at the club in Italy, ‘90s Eurodance, seeing Tiesto live in Brooklyn. Dancing, decadence, aging, commercialism, ritual. Dancing can have dozens of meanings and symbolism.
In the context of this album, dance represents a desperate escape, a resistance: to time, to the machine that controls us, to capital, to institutional power. I wanted to contrast a dark, driving strain of uncanny EDM in the first half with deconstructed, abstract minimalism in the second. It’s a dance track as well as a commentary on a dance track. The pitched voice is mine, mumbling mostly nonsense plus an Italian phrase that says, “It destroys it all, and it’ll always be there.” I wanted the beat to hit hard and the glitch to disrupt, the melody to be catchy and assertive, and the second section to be yearning, reaching for something, and then the beat coming back, fragmented.
After All (Mark)
I had an FM synth called Mega FM that I used a lot on the album; it’s an incredibly creative machine. I made a beautiful tremolo pad sound and recorded it as a one-take improvisation on a keyboard. I don’t “play” keyboard, but sometimes I pick a scale (often C major so I only need to hit the white keys) and randomly play chords on it. I come up with all sorts of unexpected tonal chord progressions and melodies that way. I’m a trained guitarist, but I enjoy playing other instruments I’m less familiar with to keep my ears fresh.
The quote in this track is from Mark Fisher’s book Ghosts of My Life. When I wrote FEED, Mark’s writing in that book and Capitalist Realism resonated with me. How can we even imagine a life beyond capitalism? We feel trapped in this never-ending present, a present that feels like the end of history.
The phone ringing throughout the track is a heavy-handed metaphor, but in our current moment, I would say nuance is out the window…
Are You Beautiful?
A while ago, I improvised a track taking inspiration from Morton Feldman’s piano pieces—sustain pedal down; slow, atonal chords resonating. Feldman used to say that he would write a chord, forget about it, and then write another. I love that idea.
I didn’t know what to do with the piece until I prompted a friend to talk about inner beauty and self-care. I agreed with all the things she described; they sounded genuine and authentic, but once I put her voice over the piano piece and added street noise, breathing sounds, and other artifacts, the feeling shifted. When I heard it in that capacity, I thought of the beauty industry, endless TikTok videos, meditation apps, personal trainers, the wellness industrial complex. My friend’s voice became the desperate voice of an ultra-materialistic era. If we are well-optimized and healthy, we can produce more. Yoga retreats for CEOs, corporate meditation, the high price of clean and healthy foods. Everything “good” has a price.
Growth
This is another track that starts with a “keyboard” improvisation I made, this one using MIDI pads tuned to a fixed scale. In the background, you can hear a sample of a voice from an interview that I cut and spread across the stereo field. You can’t make out any of the words other than “marketing” at one point; that word rising to the surface wasn’t chosen by me, it happened by chance…
The sample of my sink water running and a low, inconstant kick drum beat add a sense of intimacy and mystery to the track. The intimacy is further enhanced by the song sample that comes after. I wrote it with my first band, right after college; they were happy to let me use the sample. The song is called Westcliff Washeteria. It has a whimsical quality and is a bit nostalgic; Fellini comes to mind. It felt right to close the album with it. Intimacy is a mess in the globalized tech era. The more technology targets us atomically—individualizing every single experience we have, making us feel that the machines know us—the more we lose intimacy with the people closest to us, with concepts of community, the local, the particular. Imperfect people are replaced by ideals of perfect partners on dating profiles. Images, to paraphrase Marc Augé, possess a power far in excess of any objective information they carry.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
