Emperor X – the US-born singer and songwriter Chad R. Matheny – will be giving a performance in Malta on September 21 at Stella Maris Band Club in Sliema.

Touted as one of Said The Gramophone’s “favourite discoveries” thanks to memorably-titled 2009 track A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp, the artist is known for his inventive and unique way of creating music, using collage, voice fingers on string and more methods of experimentation. Salon.com went a step further, hailing Western Teleports – the artist’s fifth album – as one of the most underrated albums of 2011, describing it as a “wonderfully bizarre idea of what rock music can be” and a “lively and eccentric record, yet triumphant in its deep empathy and humanity”. The album was influenced by the artist’s self-confessed obsession over technological advancements while he was living in California. To promote it, he buried 41 nodes at different random locations throughout North America, each containing a cassette with either B-sides or early versions of songs on Western Teleport. Emperor X credited his inspiration for the idea of burying cassettes for others to find when he became concerned about the environmental impact of making multiple copies of the same album. He later concluded that the best way to ensure that the physical musical recording had its own worth while also ensuring the music would be heard was to make just one copy of each song.

Lively and eccentric... yet triumphant in its deep empathy and humanity

Pop Matters agreed with this assessment, calling Emperor X’s music “enviable for its utter lack of pretentiousness, perfect imperfections and a magnificent jumble of uncertainty. If you’re looking for the real America, leave that last Arcade Fire record behind and follow Emperor X.”

Emperor X has released seven studio albums to date, his latest being the 2014 release The Orlando Sentinel. The album was inspired by, and named after, the humid, desolate urban sprawl at the centre of his home state of Florida and was the result of a chance aventure in a German music store. During an extensive European tour schedule to support the mostly-acoustic release Nineteen Live Recordings back in 2013, Emperor X found himself in a music store in Leipzig, unable to put down a used Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesiser. He bought it on fierce impulse just as the store closed and spent the next year making an off-beat, songwriter-influenced version of the electronic music he heard every night after his acoustic shows throughout Europe, delving deeper into the dubbed-out, beat-driven sounds of his earlier work and the electronic compositions on Western Teleport Nodes. The project moved into full-fledged EDM territory in early 2014 when Emperor X was booked to perform an improvised live-mix/DJ set alongside Thurston Moore and Sun Kil Moon at Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal. The product of this new direction for Emperor X was The Orlando Sentinel.

Emperor X will be supported by The Suburbanite and singer-songwriter Television Suicide. The event is presented by Be-Wild Events. Doors open at 6.30pm, first act starts at 7.30pm. Tickets are available at the door.

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