Emperor X | |
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 Matheny in 2016 | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Chad Randall Matheny [1] |
| Born | April 8, 1979 Louisville, Kentucky, United States |
| Origin | Jacksonville, Florida, United States |
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| Years active | 1998–present |
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| Website | www |
Chad Randall Matheny, known professionally as Emperor X, is an American singer and songwriter. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 2012. [3]
Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1979, [4] Matheny got his start in music when he was given a Casio SK-1 by his grandparents at age nine, and recorded his first album on a Tascam four-track before the age of 20. [5]
Matheny tours across the United States regularly and performs around the world as well, including tours in Mexico, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. [6]
In a self-described attempt to "address the diminishing utility of physical copies of music and the expanding role of marketing in the experience of art", [7] Matheny often hides or buries one-off physical copies and associated visual artwork of b-sides at GPS coordinates and posts them online as a part of a geocaching game to unlock MP3 copies of the audio. For the release of the 2011 Emperor X album Western Teleport , 41 "translucent purple audio cassettes" were buried across North America, many of which remain undiscovered. This received a feature on NPR's "Weekend Edition" program. [8]
In 2012, he left the United States for Berlin, where he found that the country's trains helped him tour easier as a near-blind musician. [3]
In 2014, Matheny was commissioned by 99% Invisible to write a song titled "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)" based on Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri's concept of a millennia-long nuclear waste warning message in the form of a folk song about genetically engineered cats. Matheny wrote it to be "so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years". [9]
In 2020, Matheny and Christian Holden from The Hotelier started an artist-managed record label cooperative known as Dreams of Field Recordings. [10]
Matheny is a former high school science teacher, [11] and in 2004 he stopped his pursuit of a master's degree in physics in order to dedicate his career to music. [12]
Matheny is a testicular cancer survivor and has low vision, which makes him unable to legally drive. [13] [3] [14]
| Authority control databases: Artists |
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