Matthew Dear

As anyone who has eaten an Asian party mix will tell you, rice crackers are delicious, a condensed indulgence balancing salty, spicy, and sweet. But more than anything, the real pleasure of this snack is in the texture – its ingredients are satisfyingly crunchy, whether shaped like spheres, crescents, or spirals. And if you didn't know that producer Matthew Dear came up from Ann Arbor, Michigan, you'd swear his ancestral home was a bowl atop a Tokyo bar, because his brand of deep tech-house is like those Japanese treats: It's all about the tactile. 

Dear's individual style has developed parallel to a scene that has transitioned its allegiance from micro-house to minimal since Y2K. And somewhere out in left field, Dear has explored abscesses and excesses until pop has finally been baked into his sound's snaps and crackles. Popular from the blogs to the boîtes, Dear uses his laptop to invest prerecorded sounds with a precisely jackin' personality, sending submerged tones to finally emerge, seasoned. Clipped resonance and spectral reflexes will take place alongside melody, melancholy, and an askew metronome when SAFE presents Dear at the Electric Pickle this Friday.