Peace to Mateo is Matt Black, a Detroit producer and founder of Young Heavy Souls Records. Black launched the label in the Spring of 2011 while still attending college in Kalamzoo, Michigan. After making a name for himself locally as a rapper, Black performed sets opening for Black Milk, Talib Kweli, Naughty By Nature and Del the Funky Homosapien.
After taking some time off from releasing music to focus on building the label, Black returned in 2016 with the release of Bouquet, a 10-song lo-fi beat tape. Meant to display his skills as a producer, Bouquet pays homage to Black’s boom-bap influences. In early 2017, he released the single “Thinking of You” through the internet collective éasca.
Currently Black is prepping the release of his debut studio album, Some Strange Reason. Written and produced over the past two years, the album contains a tight eight-song track list, each an evolved composition containing only fragments and samples of their original demos. Sonically, Some Strange Reason is cinematic and surreal, with heavy inspiration from trip-hop, dub, dream-pop, and glitch hop. There was also a large emphasis on experimentation during the creation of the album, with some songs going through nearly 20+ iterations before becoming what is heard on the album.
Some Strange Reason is set to be released on Young Heavy Souls August 31, 2018, and today, Ghettoblaster has the pleasure of premiering the album open. This is what Black said about it:
“I picked ‘Dream of Peace’ as the album opener because tonally I felt it was really well balanced. When sequencing an album, I like to imagine the first song as the first scene of a movie, something attention grabbing that sets the tone, but also primes the listener for what’s to come. It’s got some musical nods to dub, hip-hop and electronic music and has a fun melody during the chorus that’s one of my favorites on the album. The end of the track also introduces a motif that you’ll hear a couple times throughout the album.”