Matt Mehlan

about

Matt Mehlan has been recording his songs, wherever and whenever he can, since he was a kid. Raised a Midwestern hustler in the City That Works™, his longing for a kind of Transcendental Escape in Music was always coupled with a worker’s pragmatism. When he moved to New York in 2005, abandoning his mall job in the Chicago suburbs, the reasoning was as practical as it was whimsical: live with the band, wake up and hit record, subsidize costs and share, build a self-reliant community for making art and music in the City That Never Sleeps™. It kinda happened: Mehlan’s Skeletons b(r)and (AKA SKELETON$™, Skeletons & the Kings of All Cities, Skeletons & The Girl Faced Boys, Skeletons Big Band) and label Shinkoyo, both founded with like-minded collaborators while students at Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, indelibly marked New York’s underground music scenes over the past 12-13 years. Among friends, Mehlan lived and worked communally in Brooklyn and Queens, making records and putting on shows in the warehouses and old office spaces and leaky derelict church basements where he and his friends lived and played (i.e. The Silent Barn / Paris London West Nile / St Cecilia’s). The group became regulars in a vital scene that revolved around musician and experimentation friendly venues Zebulon, Death By Audio, Less Artists More Condos, Cake Shop, Secret Project Robot/Monster Island… a scene that somehow landed this group of weirdos opening for Erykah Badu in Damon Dash’s basement,

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