MTVoid — the duo comprised of Tool bassist Justin Chancellor and Sweet Noise vocalist Peter Mohamed — unveiled their debut album, Nothing’s Matter, in 2013. The LP saw the pair (alongside some guests) incorporating their revered specialities into new musical and theoretical paths. Bursting with philosophical insights, culturally specific attributes, and avant-garde techniques, it was a refreshing and rewarding art rock journey as only they could’ve created.
For various reasons, however, the project had been silent until this past November, when MTVoid unleashed the follow-up, Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1.
A “pan-dynamic tapestry of sound and thought, twisted together and pulled taut, a connection of ideas remotely fused between Los Angeles, California and Swarzędz, Poland” – as Chancellor states in the album’s official press release – the new LP sees the duo pushing themselves further creatively and conceptually. With help from Isabel Munoz-Newsome (Pumarosa), Andy Morin (Death Grips), and Aric Improta (Night Verses, ex-Fever 333), Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1 absolutely delivers everything fans could’ve expected (and then some).
The duo recently caught up with Heavy Consequence to discuss what led to the project’s resurrection, what makes Matter’s Knot, Pt. 1 a fitting yet surprising successor to Nothing’s Matter, and more. Pick up MTVoid’s new album here, and read our full interview with the duo below.
Can you speak a bit about the decade-long break between albums and what led to restarting the project?
Justin Chancellor: Well, I mean, I was very busy with my day job. Obviously, Peter had a lot of stuff going on, too. Multiple sound projects. So, yeah, the first album we did was kind of a bit of an experiment. Consider it more like it’s us getting our feet wet. Just a demo. It was us trying to understand how to use a proper mixing desk together. We actually did it together in L.A. Once we’d done that, Peter went back to Poland and we just kind of got on with our lives.
We did a few tracks together, but it was COVID that really pushed us into doing this next album. We found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands and we’d accumulated some ideas along the way. Because we’d already gotten quite good at file sharing and doing some other tracks with some friends of Peter’s, we realized that we could make quite a lot of progress quite quickly just doing this in our own studios in Poland and L.A. So, that kind of spurred us on.
We were just, like, “Oh, wow, now’s the time.” We never really had a schedule before that because we had a lot of other stuff going on, but very quickly, we realized that this was the moment to seize, and we got on with it.
