Jacksonville, FL · indie rock · folk

Emperor X

1 upcoming festival →

Chad Matheny's brainy, restless indie-folk project — science-teacher lyrics and lo-fi urgency, songs like field recordings from a collapsing future. A left-field Fest gem.

Emperor X is the recording name of Chad Randall Matheny, born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1979. He got his start in music at age nine, when his grandparents gave him a Casio SK-1 keyboard, and he recorded his first album on a Tascam four-track before he turned twenty.

His songs mix lo-fi indie rock and folk with unusually dense lyrics that draw on physics, geography, transit systems and infrastructure, delivered in a hurried, high-strung voice over guitars, drum machines and tape hiss.

Matheny worked for a time as a high school science teacher, which surfaces in his vocabulary, and in 2004 he abandoned a master's degree in physics to focus on music full-time. He is a testicular cancer survivor and has low vision, which leaves him unable to legally drive.

He has released records on a series of small independent labels and is known for distributing music in deliberately awkward physical ways: for the 2011 album Western Teleport, he buried 41 translucent purple cassettes at GPS coordinates across North America, many still unfound, a project that drew attention from NPR's Weekend Edition.

Matheny has lived in Berlin since 2012, where the train network made touring easier given his limited vision, and he continues to tour across the US, Mexico, Canada, Australia, the UK and Europe. In 2020 he co-founded the artist-run label cooperative Dreams of Field Recordings with Christian Holden of The Hotelier.

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indie rockfolk