Mattin, Seize the Means of Complexity, 2024

Mattin’s Seize the Means of Complexity is a plea for social media users around the world to unite: “We are in the asshole of history. Broken individuals grappling with mental health, media obsession, the need for attention and legitimacy. Burning souls searching for validation, suffering from impostor syndrome in a post-Netflix wasteland. Something can be built from the ruins of our subjectivity. Something must be built. To grasp the means of complexity, we must understand the tools of algorithmic subsumption and harness knowledge to direct their development toward an open source conception of subjectivity. We should all have access to the codes, technologies, patterns and complexities that shape our lives. This adaptive and open source subject, embracing noise rather than shunning it, could pave the way for a future that transcends capitalist realism and its end of history, forging a new form of communism fit for the 21st century.”

Seize the Means of Complexity is a recomposition of some of the materials used by Mattin in his interactive performances over the past year: a mass of musical fragments that crystallizes as a call for mobilization. As the album’s title advises, or rather states: in order not to be crushed by the symptoms that social media produces on us, we must seize the opportunity opened by the Internet in its broader complexity. How can we collectivize the psychosomatic consequences produced by meganets? How can we reverse-engineer social media? Mattin’s new record, commissioned for Xong collection, contains recordings from TikTok and Instagram (hits, pop songs, advertisements and voices), which can be listened to as a chorus of fragments of the multitude addressing psychic destabilization and the horizon of paranoia and alienation. This plunderphonia of sounds broadcast by the global media opens up the possibility of addressing what it means to be human beyond the liberal individual. Seize the Means of Complexity is a proposal, a sound stage for something to happen.

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