“Social Distance” is an electronic concept album based on real life that started as a daily challenge to create a full song every day during the first two weeks of isolation in the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. Each day, Matt created a new piece to reflect the vibe of that day as he experienced it. The shift from a chillout/synthwave space to a darker tone and more harsh, industrial sounds as the record progresses captures the out-of-control, roller coaster-like quality of this historic event (coupled with a personal loss) as experienced locked inside a house near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. All 15 tracks are unique in style and substance and are exactly as long or short as necessary to get the day’s message across; they come together as a collection to form a singular, expressive vision that, despite lacking lyrics, is easy to identify with and a joy to experience front-to-back.“

Starting on March 11, 2020, I began “social distancing” in order to help slow the spread of the coronavirus causing the COVID-19 illness and which has ground most of the world to a halt. Since I’m lucky enough to work from home anyway, this did little to change my routine, but naturally it did drastically increase my level of isolation.

Now, I know most of you wouldn’t have known me as an electronic artist- I’m a guitarist and a singer and mostly, that’s how I have always written songs; but electronic music has always been an interest of mine and I’ve been known to dabble. On that first day of “quarantine,” I sat down at my computer and began playing some simple things on my midi-keyboard, and decided to whip it into a short little piece which I wrapped up in an hour or two and shared with some close friends, as I’ve been known to do (this became track 1 on the record, “3-11-2020.” I enjoyed the feeling of productivity this availed me, and thus I began my Pandemic Daily Music challenge, which meant making a new song every day. I had no intention of releasing these tracks and at the time was just sharing them to my personal Facebook for the enjoyment of my small friends list, whom I’m usually just bombarding with memes. People seemed to enjoy the tracks, and some even wanted to share some of their music with me in response, which was really cool too.

Here’s one of the posts I did as I was churning out these songs each day:

The Daily Challenge initially had no end date, and to be honest I was secretly hoping to keep going for at least 30 days, but alas, after precisely 15 days of 3- to 6-hour sessions making new songs with a self imposed deadline of TODAY, in addition to my normal routine and work, I burned out. I took a break for a few days, and the realization struck me that I was sitting on over 40 minutes of cohesive, themed electronic music and that I could release it as a record! I got back into the studio, collected and remastered all the tracks, and used CD Baby to distribute the record to all the streaming platforms and pretty much everywhere you can listen to music.

As it turned out, there are a lot of different electronic sounds present in the record ranging from chill out to funk to industrial and even dubstep to some extent. Each track is simply titled that date on which it was made, and it’s such an odd experience for me to go back and listen to it, returning to the feeling of each day of that intense two weeks like a sort of wordless audio diary.

Note: during this time a dear friend of mine was in the last few weeks of his life (not coronavirus-related) and I know that aside from world events, this was also weighing on my mind and must have also had a big impact on the content of this record (see track 9, “3-19-2020”) What a strange time to be leaving the world!

Here’s an embed of the official streams on Youtube in case you want to check the record out right now! It’s also on Spotify, Apple Music, and pretty much everywhere else. The distribution service also put it on iTunes for sale, but don’t worry about buying the tracks, just stream them for free and enjoy!

Here are my social links- I’m most active at the moment on Instagram!