Having moved into his new Rochester, NY, studio space with treatments by GIK Acoustics, Matt Curlee of Third Strand Music is taking a brief hiatus from commercial projects to get underway with a new project of his own, a record entitled Only Now.
“I knew I wanted to work with GIK Acoustics as I was planning my move,” says Matt. “Bryan was unbelievably patient and helpful, dedicating hours of his time to helping me get two rooms sounding stellar, and Christina oversees the job from start to finish with a rare degree of personal care. Working in these new spaces lets me be a musician again. Thanks to GIK and their great engineering, I find myself doing less engineering and more creating in these new rooms.”
A free download from Only Now is available at ThirdStrandMusic.com.
Matt’s full bio:
Equal parts performer, producer, composer, and educator, Matt Curlee is the president and creative director of Third Strand Music and an instructor of undergraduates and graduate students at the Eastman School of Music. Through a journey that included two stints as a student at Eastman and an international touring and recording career as a classical artist, Matt eventually found his true passion in creative partnerships with close friends. At the age of 19, Matt was one of the youngest musicians ever to win the Grand Prix de Chartres, considered by many at the time to be the most prestigious organ competition in the world. After a few years of worldwide touring, Matt began to struggle to assemble his diverse musical influences and skills into something that was a better fit. In the jazz-fusion outfit NEOS, Matt brought together his background in contemporary, groove-driven music with his organ career, joining with four other musicians for several years of successful music-making, and a record entitled Mackerel Sky, lauded by one reviewer as “truly worthy of a Grammy.”
Matt’s continual creative exploration has more recently led him into the realm of songwriting, of composition and arranging for film, tv, and multimedia applications, and as a producer he mentors independent musicians and songwriters through the process of developing and recording their music.
An instructor in the Department of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music, Matt has a special love for teaching upcoming musicians in a highly musical way. Starting this fall, he will also serve as affiliate faculty in the Conducting and Ensembles, and if he can get all the right people to write him back, the founder and director of a new (in 2013) improvisational music festival at Eastman called Add Your Voice. Matt also teaches at the groundbreaking Rochester Contemporary School of Music, the designer of their theory curriculum, and also teaching classes in songwriting, composition, music production/technology, and more. Matt lives in Rochester with his brilliant and vivacious border collie Francie, and at night sleeps only 20 feet from his studio.
