Matt Gooderson on the importance of creative work during a crisis
Matt Gooderson is a music producer, songwriter and composer with a remarkable music industry career. He is a founding member of the band, Infadels, which had a successful ride for almost a decade with more than fifty thousand sales and one number one dance album. His productions have been used in different international media projects including advertising, video games (FIFA, GTA) and television (BBC1, BBC4, CSI Miami).
We caught up with him to see how things were going during the pandemic, the work he has produced when in lockdown, and his take on the COVID-19 pandemic as a creator.
Matt was inspired by '“the silence of lockdown”, as he called it, living in a less visually stimulated world, and the creative work of those who were trying to connect with others more than ever. He began to channel his creativity into more personal projects, and reflect about his role during the crisis as a member of a bigger community.
“I'm fascinated by my latest creative project which has been building a compositional instrument, a way to make music without a computer. I've not ever given myself the time to do those kind of things before, and this means I feel deeper into my artistic practice and deeper into the world of ideas. I’ve also wanted to set up a live stream in relation to it, because the central drive for me now is to engage with the community of makers. That feels more important than a commercial output”
Photos from @mattgooderson
Like many creators in our research, Matt told us how the pandemic galvanized his desire to make art because, in his words, “it felt like a really profound moment in time that I wanted to diarize with my art form”.
Understanding creativity as a constant state of flux, and seeing how everything was changing at great speed, made him realize that COVID was a tremendous opportunity for creatives to bring new ideas to the table. He believes in the power of creative work to provide a space for both refuge and transformation in society.
“I do know that a lot of seminal creative work has been born out of extreme restrictions. And that’s fascinating really, because you then start to question, maybe we’re better creatives when we have this opposition, or just maybe different circumstances. It certainly gives rise to a much more focused discipline, because it must be done… To me as an artist it’s of absolutely unquestionable importance that work must be made right now.”
At the end we asked Matt what advice he would give to the creators out there who are also navigating the pandemic and trying to make the best out of it. He said:
