Cut Worms & Universes in THE MATRIX

You are in a matrix in the original sense of "source". It is a "small-world" network, meaning that the nodes inside it — mirroring human society & the 6 degrees phenomenon — tend to within a few steps of everybody else inside it. The matrix was built to allow regional Brazilian musicians to be discoverable-degrees away from everybody else in the arts world (and so the whole world), and by logical necessity this m.o. requires not only that the great Brazilians be matrixed, but so far as possible, all working artists in our time. Ergo:

This Cut Worms matrix node is steps away from the entire planet by the well-known small-world ("6 degrees") phenomenon dictating that in human society you yourself are within several degrees of Cut Worms.
THESE ARTIST NODES are routed to from this Cut Worms node.

Are these Cut Worms's personal recommendations?

CURATION STATUS

Worldline Generation: Routes by The Matrix

Who & Where

Name: Cut Worms
City/Place: Brooklyn, NY
Country: United States
Hometown: Strongsville, Ohio

Current News

What's Up? “The cut worm forgives the plough.”
– William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

Life & Work

Bio: Cut Worms is the nom de plume of Max Clarke, assumed while studying illustration at Chicago's Columbia College.

Despite a .300 batting average and a 63 mph curveball from the mound, Cut Worms' Max Clarke was the black sheep of his baseball-centric, Midwestern family. He was drawn to the creative shadows, drawn to the basement 4-track and late nights in the art studio as much as he was the dugout. He had a born knack for conjuring warm sounds and fine images. His songs in particular crackle with the heat of a love-struck nostalgia: golden threads of storytelling, like visceral memories, woven together with a palpable Everly Brothers' influence and 50s/60s naiveté. But the kid still has a pretty mean curve. Like one of his creative pillars David Lynch, Clarke's songs and artwork are also curveballs with a curious underbelly.

A Cut Worms song may impress an innocent summer stroll across fields of tall grass and lavender, but there's undoubtedly a severed ear out in there in the grass. Some unseen dark forces are always lurking at the edges of songs' sunbursts. Bright, beautiful lap steel or a cheery harmonica accompaniment often belie an impending doom or crestfallen narrator.

Clarke didn't necessarily seek out a life as full time musician. Before releasing music under the moniker of Cut Worms, Clarke went to school for illustration with the idea of a sensible career in graphic design, then took on a string of handy-man type odd jobs. Still, songwriting - that semi-secret practice Clarke had been cultivating since the age of 12 - kept gnawing at him. It was the only sort of work that didn't feel like work. Plus, if there's ever a time to do something as unreliable, unrealistic, and imprudent as throwing yourself wholly into music, might as well be done when you're in your twenties.

A number of songs that make up his LP, Hollow Ground, bloomed from his time in Chicago during period of driven creativity. In particular, "Like Going Down Sideways" and "Don't Want To Say Good-Bye" find new life on Hollow Ground, polished from their initial appearances on Cut Worms' 2017 introductory Alien Sunset EP. Both still fizzle with a lo-fi 60s sound, but cleaned up, they gleam.

The remainder of Hollow Ground was written in Clarke's current home in Brooklyn, where he still home-demos songs. The record was recorded partially in Los Angeles at the home studio of Foxygen's Jonathan Rado, and partially in New York with Jason Finkel at Gary's Electric. Clarke, who plays keyboards, bass, and lap steel in addition to his main guitar, handled most of the instrumentation across the set. He explains he's always strove toward a specific musical aesthetic, and Hollow Ground marks the closest he's gotten to hitting it thus far.

Hollow Ground is imbued with a sharp, self-aware lyricism; as strong as the music is here, Clarke shows an affinity for evocative storytelling, striking the balance between cerebral and simplicity. Look no further than the chiming, rollicking standout "Cash For Gold." For a song with so much sock hop energy, it's actually about being trapped in one's introvert head â€” stuck on the couch or against the wall at the edges of the dance floor.

Sometimes, on Hollow Ground, we find characters impossibly lustful, sometimes brooding, while in other parts they fumble along, hopeful and painfully self-aware. If the music can be said to have any sort of through-line, it revolves around Clarke's obvious delight in singing his heart out through varying degrees of agony. His songwriting both evokes and explores the raw realm of youth, its weightlessness and possibilities, but channels it through the lens of someone more restrained, who's been through it all before. Someone who's old enough to know better but still gets drawn back in to the romanticism of teenage feelings - and knows how to take the listener along, too.

Media & Markets

▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://cutworms.bandcamp.com/
▶ Twitter: cut_worms
▶ Instagram: cutworms
▶ Website: http://www.cut-worms.com
▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz5hJCVnP3Ncst-wbeni7gw
▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/5DjGD8R6AQvAWvH1MapfKK
▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/1S8gajzgABaeR8H97cEYi5
▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/1VVWKqYxHbbSMujAfHjECQ
▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/4KT0AeT5CkE4vt3B9udfo2
▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/3ZmKoFGptmMcYODWwlsqws
▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/1EPukiudJ8qDehmB6sQjGR

Clips (more may be added)

Cut Worms - Castle In The Clouds
By Cut Worms

208 views
Cut Worms - Like Going Down Sideways (Official Video)
By Cut Worms

110 views
Cut Worms - Cash For Gold (Official Video)
By Cut Worms

111 views
Cut Worms - "Song of The Highest Tower" | A Do512 Lounge Session
By Cut Worms

156 views
Cut Worms - Don’t Want to Say Good-bye (Official Video)
By Cut Worms

95 views
Cut Worms - "Till Tomorrow Goes Away"
By Cut Worms

129 views

These artist nodes route to this Cut Worms node:

THE MATRIX WAS BUILT HERE, inspired in (the kabbalah-inspired fiction of) Borges' El Aleph, that in the pillar in Cairo's Mosque of Amr, where the universe in its entirety throughout all time is perceivable as an infinite hum from deep within the stone... The Brazilian "aleph" is different though...it doesn't hum...it sings!

Sprawled across broad equatorial latitudes
Stoked and steamed and sensual in the widest sense of the word
Limned in prosody and cadenced song
brəˈzɪl / from "brasa" / Latin for "ember"

w/ David Dye for U.S. National Public Radio

Given the immense untapped power of the small-world phenomenon, from Brazilians the matrix was expanded to include nodes per jazz artists, given jazz's common roots with Brazilian music (nodes based in publicly available information; some artists we informed — Bob Mintzer, Kamasi Washington, David "Fuse" Fiuczynski, Vijay Iyer, Greg Osby — and got thumbs up, others we'll get to), and moved on from there. Artists/academics/"creative people" are welcome to create their own nodes and curate (connect to other artist nodes, so that others may follow). BTW, our logo is a cortador de cana, cane cutter. It was designed by Walter Mariano, professor of design at the Federal University of Bahia to reflect the origins of the music the shop specializes in.

MUCH MORE on all of this in the window below (which, if you are logged in, will instead contain instructions on recommending), and in the window within that window (which includes a "radio" called by The Guardian one of "10 of the best music radio stations around the world"):