Machine Listener

Cleveland-based producer, sculptor, and visual artist Matthew Gallagher (2) records music under the name Machine Listener. Through most of the 2010’s, Gallagher has been a central fixture of the Cleveland noise scene by way of his now retired concert series Research and Development and through his continued role as a mastermind of the annual Voice of the Valley Noise Rally festival in West Virginia. Gallagher has collaborated and performed extensively with a range of Northeastern Ohio artists like Le Creuset, Moth Cock, Khaki Blazer, Fire Death, and Tiger Village. Crafted from squelching synth voices and swathes of fibrous, granular glitch, Machine Listener’s tracks pile together into twitching blobs rendered in high-resolution detail, like dribbles of iridescent plastic allowed to congeal together and dry overnight. Just when his sessions seem to teeter on the edge of total abstraction, Gallagher introduces bizarre beat structures into his mixes that bump and slither into legible grids that build alongside the swirling voices that have accumulated up to that point.