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 project of Chad Matheny, an American songwriter who has recorded under the name since the late 1990s. 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 science teacher, which surfaces in the vocabulary of his writing, and he has released records across a series of small independent labels. He is also known for distributing music in deliberately awkward physical ways, including burying recordings and posting clues for listeners to find them.

indie rockfolk