The Easy Way Is Hard Enough

Description

It is difficult to follow the fragmented life and musicianship of Matthew Schneider. His dual trajectory has always embraced both a steady love for Chet Atkins and the virtuosity of the Nashville session scene, as well as a frustrating but fruitful flirtation with Chicago’s underground and post-rock milieu. In his home county of McHenry, as a teenager, he was a guitar phenomenon, a local pride engine playing hymns and old standards for delighted townies in a buttoned-down shirt and a buzz cut. His scrapbook is filled with accolades garnered from his performances at Dobbyn's Home along the Fox River. The fact that he made it through high school is partly due to the fact that he provided the soundtrack to many of his teacher's drunken evenings and was let to slide as an all-star athlete. In a parallel, simultaneous universe, he was brought in to play with bands like Adhesive and Filament (two different bands sharing members and lovers) that had more in common with Seam and Tortoise than Chester or Les. In the summer of 1998, immediately after graduating from high school, Schneider went to Nashville for several weeks, where he found it to be more of a ghost town than a welcoming home for a burgeoning session player. Chicago’s fertile melting pot of jazz and rock was much more attractive. He settled in Wicker Park with his Adhesive bandmates and participated in a succession of acts: The Exciting Trio, then Toe (where he and Griffin Rodriguez replaced Jeff Parker and Doug McCombs of Tortoise respectively), then ex-Codeine Doug Scharin’s large fusion ensemble, HiM. After touring Europe with HiM, Schneider retreated for six months to his mother's empty house in Marengo, Illinois. He recalls, “I wanted to learn the instrument.” Maintaining his idiosyncratic trajectory as a musician, Schneider never quite returns to the road. He retreats instead to Chicago, creating increasingly complex methods and tunings for his acoustic guitar while focusing on his children and his woodworking. He becomes, in a classic sense, the hidden secret of musicianship in Chicago. Confronting his playing, intrepid performers are constantly stunned. Without enclosing his work in dubious spirituality, he channels something simultaneously both poetic and mathematical, like Kepler's "music" of the spheres. Each composition is instantaneous, improvised and launched as if it were completely formed, making sense only in relation to its own spontaneously formed rules of interaction.