Sneaky Bones

Date: Monday 23 January 2023

Venue: Whangateau Acoustic Music and Social Club,

Time: Starts at 06:00pm

Restrictions: R18

"I'm going to give it 10 records and then I'll disappear," Bean jokes. After releasing his 4th LP LITTLE WORDS, Matthew Bean (who goes by the moniker Sneaky Bones) is almost halfway there. "Things are growing, slowly, but I don't mind – someone asked me what my goal was with music and one word popped into my head – longevity." Bean has been gathering a fanbase around the world, having completed three extensive tours of Europe, two inter-island tours across New Zealand, and a scattering of shows across the western US and Canada in between. With every tour, more merch disappears, rooms fill up and sell out, and most importantly, the music continues to grow.

“It’s strange to release a record with the possibility that it might never be heard live.” Bean released LITTLE WORDS in May of 2020. Songs like OUTLAW, ALREADY THERE, and SWITZERLAND quickly found their way onto radio playlists around the world, building momentum and anticipation for return tours. “Sometime in the summer, I realized it would be years before I would play live again,” Bean remarks, “but I was completely okay with that. Honestly, I didn’t really understand why – until I bought my first synthesizer.”

Bean spent the fall of 2020 in France, living in a pseudo artist residency, and diving deep down the electronic music rabbit hole. "A close friend died in late 2019 and left behind a massive and profound body of unfinished work in the form of scrambled ableton sessions. 2020’s pause was my gateway into midi, synths, sequencers, drum machines, filter boxes, and other various robots that now occupy every inch of free space in my tiny home studio." So although Sneaky Bones was on hiatus, Bean was working more than ever. "Designing patches and figuring out how to link my entire studio together via midi and cv kept me up at night -- my bedtime reading was manuals, it was a little crazy, but it has completely changed the way I think about music, and the way I make music."

The fifth Sneaky Bones record currently resides across a few 1/4" reels, scattered amongst ambient sketches, Berlin-school sagas, and ratcheting drum machine electronica. "I have no idea where this is headed or what it's going to sound like or even what form it's going to take, and that makes me more excited than I've ever been about making music."