Object of Thought begins with an experiment that sounds simple enough to become dangerous: Mattin enters a studio, records himself thinking aloud, and then treats those thoughts as raw material. Voice becomes tape, language becomes texture, and the supposedly private movement of consciousness is turned into a physical object that can be pressed onto vinyl, priced, distributed, collected, copied, and judged. The record’s central contradiction is already present before a sound is heard. Mattin wants to examine how capitalism objectifies thought while simultaneously manufacturing a commodity from his own intellect. He is both the person under examination and the worker conducting the examination, both the instrument and the material being processed. Object of Thought does not resolve that contradiction. It keeps cutting into it until the voice no longer sounds like evidence of a stable individual.
Across two untitled sides, fragments of speech emerge, collide, interrupt one another, and disappear beneath feedback and electronic abrasion. Mattin rarely permits a thought to proceed cleanly from premise to conclusion. A sentence begins, another voice enters from a different position, a whispered phrase rubs against a louder declaration, or distortion destroys the distinction between argument and noise. The familiar authority of spoken language begins to fracture. Ordinarily, a recorded voice asks to be followed. It assumes that the listener will identify one speaker, recognize a coherent sequence, and treat the words as an expression of that person’s intentions. Here, the voice is multiplied until intention becomes uncertain. Mattin speaks, but the recording repeatedly prevents “Mattin” from remaining a unified source.
This fragmentation is not merely an aesthetic version of confusion. Mattin is interested in the fact that thought itself is already socially produced. The words available to us, the concepts through which we understand ourselves, and even the apparent intimacy of an inner monologue have histories outside the individual. Language arrives preloaded with class relations, political assumptions, inherited categories, and expectations about what a coherent person should sound like. Mattin’s use of English sharpens this problem. English is not his first language, yet it is the dominant language through which international art, theory, technology, and commerce often circulate. By thinking aloud in English, he is not simply translating an already completed self. The language helps construct the thoughts while placing them inside a wider economy of recognition.
The music’s violence comes from making that construction audible. Feedback presses against the voice as if the recording system has begun refusing its assigned role as neutral carrier. Distortion does not simply make the speech more aggressive. It exposes the material underneath communication: breath, mouth noise, microphone pressure, digital cutting, repetition, electrical overload, and the mechanical fact that a voice can be detached from its owner. Some phrases remain understandable long enough to suggest theoretical argument; others are crushed into rhythm, hiss, stammer, and vocal debris. The record continually moves between language as meaning and language as damaged physical sound, never allowing either condition to become secure.
There is considerable craft inside this deliberate instability. Mattin later acknowledged that editing the material through musique concrète techniques led him toward what he called the “authority of taste.” Once the recordings existed, he had to decide which cuts were effective, which collisions produced tension, how long a fragment should remain, and when noise should interrupt speech. These decisions create a difficult trap. The project aims to dismantle the self, yet the editing process allows the artist’s preferences to return as invisible government. Even an attack on personal expression can become a highly personal composition. Object of Thought is compelling because that failure is not hidden. The record becomes a document of self-reflexivity reaching the point where it encounters its own feedback loop.
This makes the album more musically satisfying than its severe conceptual framework might suggest. The overlapping voices generate dense counterpoint, with repeated syllables functioning like percussion and sudden breaks creating dramatic changes in scale. Quiet passages pull the listener toward half-heard language before louder interruptions rupture concentration. Some sections resemble an argument occurring simultaneously in several rooms; others feel like one thought being examined from incompatible temporal positions. The work has movement, tension, accumulation, and release, even while questioning the authority through which those qualities are recognized as desirable. Mattin may distrust aesthetic pleasure, but he cannot prevent the record from producing it.
The title itself has several sharp edges. An object of thought can mean something toward which consciousness is directed, but here thought is also made into an object. The mind appears to turn outward, inspect itself, and discover that no completely independent observer exists. Mattin cannot escape his language, historical position, recording technology, artistic reputation, labor conditions, or knowledge that the final product will enter an experimental-music market. The objective viewpoint he seeks is continually contaminated by the subject attempting to reach it. Rather than treating this as an intellectual puzzle solved through explanation, the record stages the problem as sound. One voice observes another, only to be interrupted by a third voice whose own authority is immediately damaged.
The decision to work ordinary office hours adds another layer. Five consecutive days from nine to five transform the studio into a workplace rather than a romantic chamber of spontaneous inspiration. Mattin imposes discipline, clocks his intellectual labor, and uses the institutional shape of the working week to produce a record about the commodification of thought. The gesture is both practical and darkly comic. Even an attempt to improvise with the unconscious requires scheduling, equipment, editing time, and a production framework. Thought may wander, but the studio has opening hours.
The physical record intensifies this contradiction. Mattin has long supported anti-copyright circulation and made his work freely available, yet Object of Thought was also issued as an unusually attractive limited vinyl object by Presto!?. The release asks whether critique can survive becoming merchandise, but it also demonstrates why physical form retains power. A digital file may circulate freely and almost invisibly, while a carefully made 12-inch commands attention, money, shelf space, and cultural value. The object gives weight to an investigation of objectification. It is both evidence against the commodity and a seductive example of one.
Object of Thought occupies a crucial position in Mattin’s work because it turns noise inward. Rather than using feedback to overwhelm an audience from outside, he directs it through his own language, confidence, theoretical identity, and desire for self-knowledge. The record’s subject is not simply consciousness but the impossibility of possessing consciousness privately. Every thought arrives entangled with systems that precede and exceed the thinker. Mattin records that entanglement, edits it, criticizes the editing, and releases the contradiction into circulation.
The result is not a lecture disguised as noise. It is a portrait that destroys the face while being drawn. Speech remains present enough to promise access to a person, but every technique used on it reveals another layer of mediation. By the end, Mattin has not recovered an authentic voice beneath capitalism, language, or technology. He has produced something more troubling and useful: an audible demonstration that the voice we call our own may already be a crowded public space.
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