Emperor X - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Emperor X is a pop/noise/folk music project headed by American musician C. R. Matheny. The project often performs and records with little more than Matheny on an acoustic guitar

Acoustic guitar

An acoustic guitar is a guitar that uses only an acoustic sound board. The air in this cavity resonates with the vibrational modes of the string and at low frequencies, which depend on the size of the box, the chamber acts like a Helmholtz resonator, increasing or decreasing the volume of the sound...

and a dynamic microphone, but sometimes also employs large groups of musicians on percussion instruments, various electronic noisemakers, brass/woodwind/string ensembles, and traditional rock instruments.

The lyrics of Emperor X songs have been described as simultaneously "hallucinatory" and "precise," and discuss subjects ranging from plate tectonics ("A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp"), paramilitary religious fanatics ("Allahu Akbar"), the nature of time as it relates to car accident casualties and the 2009 Port-au-Prince earthquake ("Defiance (For Elise Sunderhuse)"), failed attempts to fix broken air conditioners (“Compressor Repair”), and mass transit ("Everyone in Jacksonville", "Right to the Rails" and "Edgeless").

Emperor X tours the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

very frequently, and has completed several small tours internationally including trips to Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, Canada, and Australia.

In a self-described attempt to address the diminishing utility of physical copies of music and the expanding role of marketing in the experience of art, Matheny often hides or buries one-off physical copies and associated visual artwork of b-sides at GPS coordinates and posts them online as a part of a geocaching game to unlock MP3 copies of the audio. For the release of the most recent Emperor X album Western Teleport, 41 "translucent purple audio tape cassettes" were buried across North America, many of which remain undiscovered. These hybrid art/marketing projects received national attention including a feature on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition" program.

Full-length albums

The Joytakers' Rakes/Stars on the Ceiling, Pleasantly Kneeling (1998)
Tectonic Membrane/Thin Strip on an Edgeless Platform (2004)
Central Hug/Friendarmy/Fractal Dunes (2005)
The Blythe Archives Volumes One and Two (2009)
Western Teleport (2011)

EPs and singles

Dirt Dealership 7" (2007)
Wuss/Strike/River/Preacher/Magnet/God/Unwuss free online EP (2006)
Defiance (for Elise Sunderhuse) double cassette (2010)

Tour-only releases

Gasheater/Raytracer CD-R (2004)
East Coast and Freedom From/Freedom To CD-R (2004)
Everyone in Jacksonville CD-R (2006)
Australia Tour Tape Cassette (2010)
Several New Songs in Various Digital Formats CD-R (2011)

External links

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