When I first meet Matt Lorenz for our interview, he’s crouched low in the kitchen, watching like a lab attendant as the product of his labor bubbles away: a 10-gallon carboy filled with bright wine, busy fermenting and outgassing.
In context, that seemed a natural thing to do. The world Lorenz is busy constructing for himself is full of the flowerings of his fascinations. The effect is less house and more wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities”: wood and metal birds hang nearby, almost blending into the background of a wall full of boxes and cubbies stuffed with detritus of unimaginable provenance. Near them is a stringed instrument that’s pretty much a stick, a string, and a tin can. It’s one of perhaps two dozen similar noisemakers. Pieces of wood, old books, bits of ceramic and string turn up everywhere. There’s a Brothers Quay sense of animated decay, as if somewhere beneath the fall leaves out in the yard, something is brewing.
In the far reaches of what used to be an attic, Lorenz lives in a couple of rooms that seem designed for uncluttered thinking. Many of those small parts that keep turning up went together to form a rustic and comfortable-looking chess table that sits in one of them, a chamber furnished with little more than a couple of chairs for reading. It’s a sort of minimalist mission control away from all that raw material, a place from which all sorts of imaginative projects are launched.
“I got really obsessed with buttons for a while,” says Lorenz. He smiles, and demonstrates a wide-eyed, fevered look. “I would go to the antique shop and be like, ‘I need all your buttons. Give me them!'”
One of Lorenz’ friends shared a tale with him upon witnessing the large pile of antique buttons that resulted (with which Lorenz makes jewelry). “Apparently there was some arctic explorer who went out and perished with his men, and when they finally found them, they had been poisoning themselves by cooking in the lead cans that they had food in,” says Lorenz.
“So they all went crazy, and buttons became their thing they went crazy for. So when they found them, they had all these stashes of buttons that were, like, their reason to live or something. Really weird. So someone came up here and was like, ‘Huh. Did you hear about that guy with the crazy buttons? Any lead in this house? What’s going on?'”
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Lorenz and his sister Kate are the vocal duo at the heart of Rusty Belle, and the band makes music that’s steeped in a learned and sophisticated musicality, but which courts happy accidents and unusual timbres. Rusty Belle makes some the most intriguing and original sounds in the Valley, pairing junkyard percussion with accordion-fueled rhythms and smart guitar work to back up the Lorenz siblings’ harmonies. The textures seem to have themselves risen from the cast-off materials that surround Lorenz and his bandmates, who live in the same rambling house.
The central driving force behind his mining of cast-offs is something that seems, at first blush, to qualify Lorenz as a classic mad scientist: “I like giving life to inanimate objects,” he says.
But Lorenz hasn’t gone mad—a listen to the music he creates reveals a deft touch and a heady knack for assembling sounds that’s anything but nuts. What he lends his projects is, rather, a smart brand of obsession. “I hate waste. I find it a hard thing to believe in, that waste could even be possible,” he says. “There’s always a repurposing that can happen.”
That’s the sort of obsession that seems to be required for digging deeply into raw materials and turning up something truly distinctive. It’s a trick few artists, even good ones, manage.
“With a lot of these objects, you can see the life in them already. There’s a story behind them, the hands that they’ve passed through and the story behind the object really piques the imagination a little bit,” says Lorenz. “It’s the same thing with music. I’ve got these strings, just sitting there until you do something with them.”
A film Lorenz paired with Rusty Belle’s music is a perfect metaphor for his creative process. In it, the myriad objects that he gathers, “the detritus of other people’s lives,” are literally animated. The baby shoe that currently adorns his bass drum pedal parades through a little proscenium; rusty nails and knobs and buttons assemble and disassemble. “Who knew that you could actually take deer teeth and make them dance?” Lorenz asks.
Now, thanks to him, we know they make a surprisingly adept chorus line.
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It’s not surprising that Lorenz (like other members of Rusty Belle) has interests beyond just one band. For Lorenz, that’s mostly taken the shape of a one-man band project he’s dubbed The Suitcase Junket. Though, naturally, it has similarities to Rusty Belle, it’s a very different beast.
Lorenz says it’s become second nature for him to unpack the Junket—it truly is a sort of orchestra that travels in a suitcase. Inside, he’s got percussion—a high hat, a couple of metal objects, a washboard—and the suitcase itself becomes a bass drum. Lorenz adds to that a guitar he says came straight from the trash. It’s small, made of plywood, and cranks out an extraordinary amount of noise.
On his website (www.makingwhatiwant.com), Lorenz offers video of the Suitcase Junket in action. Usually, one-man band setups lend themselves to comical, vaudeville-esque tunes. Not so here. Lorenz found the most resonant pitch to use in tuning his junked guitar, and, once he strums into action, he blends into the guitar’s huge tone with a low, guttural drone. That drone is quickly joined by a high, whistling overtone—Lorenz, while driving around with nothing better to do, taught himself a trick usually heard only in parts of Mongolia: throat-singing.
His tune unspools with a melancholic yearning, and, once he’s drawn you in with the compelling spectacle of one guy making all those sounds, ends with a matter-of-fact statement about the low quality of the mic.
He talks in similar terms about his art and his music. “I’m sure it’s all stuff that’s been done before, but it doesn’t make it lose its shine,” Lorenz says. “In music, it’s really hard to create a new style or genre, even a new sound, but to do stuff that’s similar to what’s been done and stuff that’s part of who you are as an artist or a musician and to give it a different tone, give it a texture that’s unique, that’s probably where it’s at.”
It’s par for the course for Lorenz. He studied music at Hampshire College, and he can talk flat nines and experimental composition, but there’s a straightforward, all-in embracing of his fascinations that allows him to take what might be heady and turn it into something that’s simply a good song, a song that connects emotionally, not technically.
Even when Lorenz explains why he likes watching homemade wine bubble away, that same ability is evident. “You take all this stuff that’s good, and pretty benign—you know, fruit and honey and water—mix it together and it bubbles and goes crazy,” he says. “Next thing you know, you’re getting drunk!”
Rusty Belle opens for Sonya Kitchell and the Brooklyn String Quartet Oct. 10 at 7.30 p.m. at Memorial Hall in Shelburne Falls.
The Suitcase Junket plays the Rendezvous in Turners Falls Oct. 23 at 9 p.m. The event is also a reception for the exhibition of Lorenz’ bird sculptures.
