The Easy Way Is Hard Enough

Description

It is difficult to keep up with the fragmented life and musicality of Matthew Schneider. His dual path has always embraced both a constant love for Chet Atkins and the virtuosity of the Nashville session scene, as well as a frustrating but fruitful flirtation with the underground and the Chicago post-rock milieu. In his native McHenry County, as a teenager, he was a guitar phenomenon, a source of local pride who played hymns and old hits for an audience of delighted townswomen under a button-down shirt and a close-cropped haircut. His scrapbook is filled with praise for his performances at Dobbyn’s house, along the Fox River. The fact that he managed to get through high school is due in part to the fact that he provided the soundtrack for many of his teacher’s drunken evenings and let him coast like a star athlete. In a parallel and simultaneous universe, he was drawn 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 discovered that it was more of a ghost town than a warm welcome for an up-and-coming session player. Chicago’s fertile melting pot of jazz and rock was much more appealing. He settled in Wicker Park with his Adhesive bandmates and took part 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 grand fusion ensemble, HiM. After touring Europe with HiM, Schneider withdrew 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. Instead, he retreats to Chicago, creating increasingly complex methods and chords for his acoustic guitar while focusing on his children and his woodworking. He becomes, in a classic sense, Chicago’s hidden secret of musicality. Facing his playing, fearless performers are constantly knocked out. Without locking his work into dubious spirituality, he channels something that is simultaneously poetic and mathematical, like Kepler’s “music” of the spheres. Each composition is immediate, improvised, and launched as if fully formed, making sense only in relation to its own spontaneously formed rules of interaction.