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In honor of our People Issue, which will hit newsstands and computer screens November 25, Cultist proudly presents “100 Creatives,” where we feature Miami’s cultural superheroes in random order. Have suggestions for future profiles? Email cultist@miaminewtimes.com with the whos and whys.
88. Gustavo Matamoros
A cat’s meow, nails on a chalkboard, glass breaking — we all know what those sound like. But what about wild shrimp hunting in the Biscayne Bay? You can thank sound artist Gustavo Matamoros for recording that. He’s been meddling with acoustronics since before the Subtropics Experimental Music and Sound Art Festival debuted over 20 years ago. Today, he counts the likes of Rat Bastard and Dino Felipe as his contemporaries.
According to Matamoros, “Experimental music is not a style, but an attitude toward creating music.” Matamoros soundly embodies this ethic in his recording, cataloging, manipulating, and displaying of sound-experiments for the Interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop, the annual Subtropics Music Festival, and as a member of the sound art collective/experimental band Frozen Music.
He’s received grant money from the Knight Foundation and was also nominated for a New Times Mastermind award. You may have heard his work anywhere from Sleepless Night on Miami Beach to the Miami Art Museum.
1. List five things that inspire you.
– Coincidences
– What sound is trying to say
– How the world
speaks through sound
– Girls, I like them, they also inspire me
– Everything that inspires other people
2. What was your last big project?
My last big project was a piece for the New Works Miami at the Miami Art Musueum it
was a sound installation and it was called Coincidence. It was basically
a sound piece that explores both the resonant frequencies of a small
space and it also displayed the sound of shrimp. The sound they make
while they are hunting food in the water is a lot like the sound they
make in the pan when they’re being cooked. I had both sounds recorded and playing together as displayed through hypersonic speakers. What that did was create two
kind of sound worlds that existed together, sound dimensions.
3. What’s your next big project?
My next big project is in the works and has been short listed for a Knight Foundation grant. It’s for a “listening gallery” on Lincoln Road; a 24
channel sound listening gallery. Surround sound is 5.1, 7.1, up to like
10.2, that’s speakers plus subwoofers. That’s how people in film
understand the localization of sound in space for theater purposes. This
has no subs, just individual channels of sound that can be used
independently or together to make different sound experiences. We want to create
an infrastructure for sound artists to have a venue to present their work
in a way that people can connect with it.
4. Why do you do what you do?
Because I can’t do anything else, I have no choice. I think I have a sound mind.
5. What’s something you want Miami to know about you?
My phone number: 786-206-7886
What’s something you don’t want Miami to know about you?
Hahaha. Why would I tell you? Hahahahah.
The Creatives so far:
89. Shareen Rubiera-Sarwar
90. Kyle Trowbridge
91. Clifton Childree
92. Jessica Gross
93. Danny Brito
94. Nektar de Stagni
95. Anthony Spinello
96. Vanessa Garcia
97. Justin Long
98. Rosie Herrera
99. Rick Falcon
100. Ingrid Bazin
