Please introduce yourself and share a bit about your background.

I'm Matt DeMello, I'm originally from the suburbs of Providence, RI where I cut my teeth in community theater and basement noise shows. I had a few bands in high school and college – mostly emo, classic rock covers, or jam bands – until I moved to New York in 2010. I've always prided my musical projects on nearly self-sabotaging degrees of eclecticism and diversity. I think my favorite feeling in creating music is tricking listeners into listening to genres or tropes they wouldn't normally be exposed to in any directions.

I'm also very much a nerd for song construction, formalism, traditions, technique – and how to inject chaos and dissonance in the right place of that formula. I always have one foot in West Side Story and another in the Velvet Underground.

How would you describe your style of music? How is your personality reflected in your work?

In the past I've called myself as a "singer songcyclist", I resonate with the tenets of songcycle as a genre – right down to how much Randy Newman identified with this form of songwriter from the eponymous Van Dyke Parks album in interviews. I think – if nothing else – it means that, no matter what arrangement, rhythm, melody, vocal style I'm executing, that the goal is to embody what the song and the album it's on are meant to be.

Describe your creative process when you write new music.

Unlike a lot of musicians, I've accepted that the work is best served by not trying to turn into a day job. In fact, even from my high school days, my music is best if it's a "distraction" from what I need to do to get good grades, or these days, to pay my rent. That really motivates the voice memos I take in the shower of different song ideas, or just following a completely ludicrous idea (like, say, a psych prog Christmas rock opera about Cassandra the Red Nosed Reindeer leading a communist revolution against the fascist dictator Santa Claus because he deadnamed her) to the ends of the earth.

But a lot of it is compulsively documenting small ideas from daydreaming, or some distraction from working on something I probably should be doing to pay my rent, and letting those accidents form a larger tapestry based on a theme that usually surfaces over time.

What is the name of your latest release? What was the inspiration for that release? What challenges or unexpected moments did you encounter during the writing/recording process?

My last full-length original album from 2022 is called Confetti in a Coalmine. I've put out some covers, rereleases, and B-side material since then, but that's the last major original work. The title came from having contact with friends who were getting absorbed in the autism and ADHD social media support algorithms. I was on a ritalin prescription as early as 1996 when I was 9 years old, mine was always considered a mild case I would "grow out of" and… I guess that happened?

So a lot of these friends sort of sought me out as a sort of real-life version of the support they could only find through these YouTube videos and other content. A huge theme of a lot of this content tends to be that kids with these conditions – if society actually gave a fuck about their experiences – are perfect canaries in the coalmine for problems in education and labor systems.

In my experience, the "talents" that whatever ADD I had seemed to enhance were always the first to be deemed "useless" or some sort of adulthood liability by the adults I grew up around.

At the time I was finalizing the album, the idea was actually it would be two EPs: one EP with live/rock-band oriented material that could be performed live with my backing band at the time, the Significant Looks, and another of "laptop music" I was making for myself without anyone else really in mind. The first would be called the "Counterpoint EP" and the other called "Confetti EP" – one for parties, one for work.

When COVID struck, the band was scattered across the country, and all of a sudden it really seemed like these songs belonged to a unified approach. I got attached to a sequence of the songs and while the ADHD online community was sort of saying "If you had paid attention to the problems our community were highlighting in education systems before COVID struck, the crisis would not be as bad as it is."

Then the name hit me – because what's more useless than confetti in a coalmine?

What strategies do you find most effective for promoting your music?

An easier question to answer is what doesn't work and I think that actually should be talked about more to help other musicians from falling into similar traps in how they think about promoting their music.

But at the end of the day this is a lot easier said than done: Don't work with bands or artists whose music you don't even like because they have some sort of following you might feel entitled to. When you do find a band or artist you love, help them out and support them anyway you can while expecting nothing in return.

I think the other thing that doesn't get talked about enough – or at least until David Byrne's How Music Works – is that, for whatever musical style you want to play, it needs to fit the venues you're playing them in. There's a reason that African hand drums sound like shit in a gothic cathedral, or why gregorian chants sound like shit in an African open air marketplace.

After that, I really try to think of my music as a way of finding new and better friends. It always has been for me. "Community" is a big word everyone seems to be throwing around a lot, but that to me has always been downstream of how people used to talk about "networking" after the 2008 financial crisis.

You don't need to focus on "building community" or "networking" if you're going about something you love with authenticity and passion, keeping some humility about, and trying to stay as open as possible about with whomever your work is connecting on a deep level.

It's a very "eat your vegetables and work out every day" advice, but at my age you come to understand there are no shortcuts. In music or staying healthy.

How do you engage with your fans online and offline?

Probably the best channels for me are:

• My Bandcamp dashboard messages to all my direct followers
• My email list
• Transfering whatever and whoever I'd make a discord channel into my direct DMs and just trying to hang out with those "super fans" as much as possible

Twitter – up until Elon took it over – really was probably the channel for the most intimate and supportive scene I've ever been a part of. We're all trying to make the best of it on BlueSky now. I hit around 1k followers in under a year, which feels like nature is healing, but a lot of that early pandemic magic of the "adjacentwave" scene is harder and harder to come across.

What upcoming promotional activities or releases are you most excited about?

I know I tend to take my sweet time between original releases but I think I've stretched my audience a bit thin on covers, B-sides, and re-released material. This is stuff that was taking up a lot of space in the vault while I managed new jobs and started a family, so no regrets on cleaning out that vault.

But the vault is much more manageable now, the family's off to a great start, it's probably time to get back in the ring with originals and that will very much be part of my plan late 2025 - 2026

Folks can contact me most easily by my email mdemello67@gmail.com or my BlueSky account at https://bsky.app/profile/themattsdemello.bsky.social.