Hi! My name is Matthew and I am a electronics and software engineer, recording musician, and proprietor of Extralife Instruments. I enjoy all things D.I.Y. and have lived in San Francisco since 2011. On this website I share some of my projects. You can find some of my hardware, software, music, and videos below.
In August 2017, I traveled to South Carolina to observe the total solar eclipse. I brought with me an old Celestron C90 spotting telescope and my camera to see what I could capture. I was very lucky, as we found a secluded lakeside location to view the event and were just able to see totality before clouds descended on us.
Data/Debt was my primary musical project for about 5 years. Combining dark techno synths, french house sampling techniques and disco rhythms. I released 2 EPs and a spate of singles and remixes with Heavy Disco Records and others.
Xylobox is an open-source wavetable synthesizer built on the Axoloti prototyping platform. It was my first foray into electronics hardware and instrument design. It kick-started my interest in electrical engineering as well as sparking some interest in the Axoloti platform.
The APC Mono Sequencer is a maxforlive device which combines Cycling 74’s sequencer device with a dedicated hardware interface to Ableton’s APC40 controller. It combines a grid-based step sequencer with encoder controls for the attributes of each note.
The skills that an artist needs to make a great single aren’t always the same as those needed for an album of equal caliber. Ideas which on one song may be endearing can grow grating over the length of an LP, and the rich vocabulary of a track can be become repetitive if used in too many variations. An artist who excels at albums is possessed of boundless creativity and a strong desire not to repeat oneself, while at the same time obsessed by a single idea of sufficient depth to bind such a work together. Their creation is quasi-mystical, and when the creator emerges at last from the desert of their artistic exile bearing in hand such a golden record, they are often just as mystified about whence it came as we are.