blue one: Matt Collins

C30 + download code

We’re very proud to announce that the first release on the new blue tapes label is a solo release from former Ninja High School leader Matt Collins.

Toronto’s NHS were arguably the 00s most overlooked band. Their ferocious 2005 album, Young Adults Against Suicide (Tomlab) - feted by Plan B, Pitchfork, Drowned In Sound, etc - is one of the greatest albums by bands who only ever released one album ever! Their self-styled “positive hardcore dance-rap” was a life-changing racket that, when screamed in your face by four faces backflipping around the venue, made for seriously one of the greatest live shows we’ve ever witnessed.

Matt’s The Grin Without The Cat or The Cat Without An Outline is a severe change of pace from that band’s ever-escalating levels of energy. Entirely instrumental, dense with almost Tangerine Dreamy textures, The Grin is an impressively sculpted piece of dreamsound. At some points on this release Matt sounds exactly like the kind of producer Björk should be ringing right now to supply a classic sequel to Vespertine.

Colours and shapes mood-shift across this C30. If things start getting too relaxing the ghosts of ambient rave are chased by away by sky-strafing synth jetstreams and psychotropic flamethrowers. If things start getting too abstract then Silver Apples drums shuffle in, ushering us towards a resolution.

Lacking none of the imagination of his early work, The Grin sees Matt source new power in haunting our spaces between waking and sleeping, summoning whole new feelings out of nothing but tones.

Praise for The Grin Without The Cat or The Cat Without An Outline:

"Former Ninja High School leader Matt Collins is back with a solo album titled, The Grin Without the Cat or The Cat Without an Outline. The tape is positively perfection. It is glitchy, spacey, propulsive, and contemplative all at once. At times I'm reminded of the quieter moments of Radiohead's Kid A. Some of the keyboard work also recalls the most far out of the 70s German electronic travelers. All in all, this is great electronic music." - Cassette Gods