Gateway to the Ether 13 ~ Matt Gibbs

August 21, 2024

Matt Gibbs of the Brooklyn psych band Evolfo invites you to explore the mysterious world within his headphones in this high-minded mixtape.

Matthew Gibbs is a dynamic and unconventional singer, guitarist, and recording artist whose work with bands like Evolfo and The Means of Production has earned him a cult following on both coasts. With roots spanning from Brooklyn, NY, to the San Francisco Bay Area, Gibbs is known for his energetic performances, distinctive songwriting, and genre-defying guitar work. Beyond his musical pursuits, he shares insights into his creative process, love for Star Trek, and the profound connection he discovered between music and cannabis from a young age.

Hey Matt, Where are you now?

Matt Gibbs: I’m at home in my apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

What do you do with your time?

MG: I try to spend most of my time making music, ideally for fun and personal enjoyment rather than work. Evolfo, a few friends, and I built a little studio in a building in Brooklyn, where we record, jam, experiment, and make records. Beyond that, I love going to small shows, watching Star Trek (currently watching the Voyager series), reading, and watercolor painting at home.

Do you get high when listening to music?

MG: Occasionally! It’s definitely not a regular thing, but I do still have valuable experiences listening to music while high.

Describe a typical music-weed session (bong, joint, dab, headphones, turntable):

MG: When I’m with friends: mostly, I’ll smoke a bowl with Rafferty (from Evolfo), and we’ll play our records for each other. On my own: occasionally, I’ll take a hit of a bong, bowl, or joint, put on headphones, lie down, and listen to a favorite record.

What is your earliest memory of connecting the dots between music and cannabis?

MG: Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I knew from a very young age that people got high to enhance their enjoyment of music. I’ve always been aware of this. As a kid, I would go to festivals in Golden Gate Park like the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival and Power to the Peaceful, where people never hid their weed use. I grew up seeing it as a very natural and enjoyable thing to do.

When I started smoking weed myself around the beginning of high school, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to get high and listen to music. My favorite early music-weed connection experiences were arriving home still high after being with friends. I would take advantage of my residual high to lie on the floor with my headphones and listen to music. I re-experienced music I had loved even before I started smoking weed. I specifically remember coming to appreciate the band Spoon in this way. My stony little ears began pointing out all the cool and subtle things in the recording to my brain. I started noticing how the bass sounded so warm, round, and big or how I could hear all this space around the drums. Sometimes I’d think, “What the hell is that sound? A guitar? How’d they do that?” I began to love the recordings themselves, not just the songs. Listening to music became a new adventure, a mysterious world to explore between my headphones. I feel I can credit weed with deepening my connection with the art of recording.

Alabaster DePlume

A Gente Acaba (Vento Em Rosa)

This is one of those tunes that makes me want to lay my head on the carpeted floor of a smoky living room, close my eyes, and daydream. There’s a very specific type of stoned itch I get that a tune like this can scratch. It’s that dark nostalgic bliss that feels sincere without becoming too serious, and it’s atmospheric without becoming too unfocused, self-indulgent, or meandering.

Roy Ayers Ubiquity

Everybody Loves the Sunshine

Just bees and things and flowers 🌞

Can

I’m So Green

Hot damn, was it hard to pick a Can song! But I knew I had to include one because Can is my go-to listening for stony occasions. Ultimately, I decided there’s something about I’m So Green that embodies that stoniness. It’s groovy, it’s wacky, and it’s got the most satisfying guitar hook in the chorus. It just feels good. Your body wants to move, but it’s still off-kilter enough to cause that classic Can intrigue.

Mulatu Astatke

Tezeta (Nostalgia)

For that nostalgia fix, of course. Not much else to say about this one! It’s just a perfect musical representation of a nostalgic feeling, and I often crave it. It perfectly scores a sunny, nostalgic day.

Miles Davis

Great Expectations

When I first heard the album Big Fun by Miles Davis, it was through my headphones while I was on a tractor in California. This song is 20 minutes long, and the album itself is over two hours long. It transformed my day of work on the tractor into what felt like a full-blown psychedelic trip, bubbling with energy and adventure. It’s easy to be transported by the electric sitars, tablas, multiple bass players, and drummers. It drones, it grooves, it even gets anxious and then sentimental. It really is a well-rounded trip.

The Greenhornes

There Is An End

“Thoughts rearrange, familiar now strange” is a lyric that describes my stoned brain well. Holly Golightly nails it here with the psychedelic wordcraft. But I think the main reason this song made it onto the list is that when I get stoned, the 12-string guitar melody often pops into my head. This recording has a truly quintessential sun-baked sound—so laid-back, groovy, and a little sad.

Molly Lewis

Miracle Fruit

I love Molly Lewis’ dreamy world. This song is blue and hazy, like a dusky sunset replete with the succulent miracle fruit. Molly Lewis whistles in my dreams.

The Clean

Anything Could Happen

Sometimes I just need this song. My stony mind can really buy into the story that “Anything Can Happen,” and I get to feeling optimistic. The song is so sunny and deeply unpretentious, and though it’s a little sassy and disaffected in the vocals and lyrics, it really suits me sometimes on a sunny day.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre

Anemone

Another one, sort of like There Is An End, that’s just the sun-baked, bleary-eyed, everything-is-moving-in-slow-motion feeling put down in musical form. This is the song that plays right as the flame bursts from the end of a lighter to start the session.

Tame Impala

Half Full Glass of Wine

There is a reason why stoners tend to prefer early Tame Impala. For the record, I personally love it all. But there’s something about the early stuff that just says “stoner.” The guitar tone is heavy with sagging electricity on this one. And the groove has a relaxed informality—just cruising. So hefty and natural feeling, it rides with you into the haze.

The Means of Production

Silver Pools

As you’ve probably deduced by now, I love a recording that is a well-rounded journey. This track leaps into so many different little scenes, it’s like a series of short musical vignettes. It travels from silver pool to silver pool, swimming in each, and relates the experience of the cool waters.

Lambchop

2B2

There’s something about Kurt Wagner’s wordcraft and Lambchop’s warm, mellow production that gets right in touch with me and instantly puts me in a state of understanding. When I watch Kurt Wagner, I feel like he’s channeling wisdom from a prophetic place submerged in his unconscious mind—he’s built a pipeline. To me, there’s nothing more psychedelic than stringing together words in just the right way to convey meaning and feeling, and I think you have to be in a flow state to get it right. When substances are working for me, not against me, they can help me connect in this way.

David Bowie

Art Decade

The Bowie/Eno instrumental, ambient moments have become a go-to stoned listening experience. I’ll put on the album Low and love that record, but in truth, at this point, I’m just waiting for the instrumental tracks at the end. Art Decade is my favorite of these songs with its hypnotic drum machine and sparkling sci-fi synths. What a trip to another world!

Faust

Jennifer

It was hard to pick the right Faust song for this list—they’ve become possibly my favorite of the German experimental rockers. I ended up choosing the song that’s had the most staying power for me. It’s the sentimentality that sets this song apart for me; it cuts a little deeper. It’s still weird—just listen to that off-kilter tremolo on the bass. And of course, there’s about two minutes of soundscape and wacky tack piano playing at the end if you need that experimental fix.

Ghost

Rakshu

This song is an experimental, slow, sweet, and melancholy psychedelic trip from Japan’s super underappreciated ’90s psych/experimental rock band Ghost. This song has piano, 12-string, bongos, human-made wind sound effects, flute, piccolo, and, at the forefront of it all, oboe. I love a band unafraid to experiment on the record. They capture a vibe and run with it unapologetically. It’s so fun to let my mind wander around inside these sounds, stopping to appreciate what one sound is doing against the backdrop before checking in with another. The vocal melody grounds it all together, almost Brian Jonestown Massacre-esque, into a cohesive form and song.

Neu!

Hallogallo

I could pretty much vibe out to this groove for the rest of my life and never get tired of it. It’s my most-loved groovy Motorik beat, and it feels like candy for my stoned brain. I spend much of my time seeking more songs that will scratch this itch. Many have tried, but I think Neu! captured something very, very special here.

Evolfo

Zuma Loop

This is one of my favorite tracks that Evolfo has recorded. It’s groovy but slow, hypnotic, and mysterious. It’s one that Rafferty Swink wrote the lyrics to and sings—he definitely tapped into wisdom here to craft words that speak of something beyond words. This song will almost certainly please the stoned mind with its warm, inviting tones.

Mort Garson

Plantasia

I tried to think of another song on the record I love more than the title track, but for me, track one is it. It’s majestic—a triumphant march through a lush rainforest. The sounds Mort Garson makes are so round and soft on the ears, floating their way gently into the brain, where they cause thoughts to grow. And I do indeed play this record for my plants, and I believe they love it.

Growing

Variable Speeds

It’s a bit more than just music for me—like a health elixir for the soul. It defines its message with glacially slow guitars and oscillators. It drones and vibrates its way into dusty corners of your mind, shaking some stuff loose. It also might just realign some things that are out of sync up there. Being a little altered might even let the music in deeper. I’ve got to try that again soon!

Fripp & Eno

The Heavenly Music Corporation V

I believe they found some angels hidden in the magnetic dust on their long reels of tape in this recording. I particularly love how this song starts so tense and then relaxes into long guitar sighs, bringing the first half of the album to a peaceful conclusion. I’d have to recommend enjoying this whole record rather than just a single song. It’s another one like Variable Speeds—ambient drone, heavy glacial sounds for dislodging the ego to make easier access to the soul.

Spoon

Everything Hits at Once

In my interview above, I talk about Spoon awakening my ears to all the magic that can be packed into a recording. This song, in particular, has so many interesting sounds and textures. It’s so fun for me to close my eyes and listen to the picture they’re painting. Listen for the alternating warbling Mellotron patterns in the bridge and the perfectly timed guitar stabs at the end of the chorus hook. It’s a perfect little puzzle to wind your ears around.

Aphex Twin

This is my favorite track from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works. It’s another sad, nostalgic one—I guess that’s just my vibe at the moment. I love to hear how Aphex Twin speaks through his compositions. His freedom and drive to create is such an inspiration; he is so committed to working sincerely from a deep place. Really getting into that deeper zone is what I’m always hoping for when I am stoned and listening to music. It’s awesome to hear feelings and notions put down in music and go, “Yes, that’s true,” inside yourself.

13th Floor Elevators

May The Circle Remain Unbroken

One of those moments where I believe Roky Erickson channeled an angel for a time. This song is so strangely ahead of its time. It sounds more like something a modern lo-fi artist might do. It’s so real and timeless, simultaneously sad and full of joy. I could listen to Roky Erickson and co. experimenting with tape echo all day. It is such an essentially psychedelic sound to me. This is a great one to end the playlist on because it’s a sort of sad, but hopeful and beautiful “goodbye”!

BIO

Matt Gibbs is an eccentric singer, guitarist, and recording artist known for his highly energetic performances and distinctive songwriting style. With roots in both Brooklyn, NY, and the San Francisco Bay Area, he has played as a sideman and studio musician in several underground bands on both coasts. However, it is primarily through his work with the Brooklyn-based bands Evolfo and The Means of Production that his talent truly shines. Gibbs’ musical vision is consistently expansive, with songs that explore both the depths of the mind and the vastness of cosmic journeys. One Evolfo show might be a glacially slow, shoegazing desert quest, while the next could be a foaming-at-the-mouth, fuzzy, raw, and reckless experience. The only certainty with Gibbs and his bands is that expectations will be defied. His music is a playground for open minds and adventurous ears.

"Psychedelic" is a key word in any project involving Gibbs. Evolfo is a psych-rock septet of college-era friends with two albums and an EP in their growing catalog. Their debut album, *Last of the Acid Cowboys* (2017), received much praise for its conceptual depth and raucous energy, while its first single, "Moon Eclipsed the Sun," has been streamed over six million times on Spotify alone. Their 2021 album, *Site Out of Mind*, marked a turn toward a colorful inner landscape, featuring sonic bliss, fuzz waves, and ethereal currents of reverb and delay.

Gibbs’ other primary outlet, The Means of Production, is a six-piece instrumental improv-based group where he contributes lead guitar. The Means were originally formed as the backing band for vocalist Ben Pirani in 2016. Their self-titled debut LP, released in June 2024, was crafted straight from hours-long improvised sessions in Gibbs' Brooklyn studio, The Sound Home. His signature Silvertone twang bubbles in and out of this potent kaleidoscope of electric jazz, psych, and soul.

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