Biography Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
Emperor X is a pop/noise/folk music project headed by American musician C. R. Matheny. The project often performs and records with little more than Matheny on an acoustic guitar and a dynamic microphone, but sometimes also employs large groups of musicians on percussion instruments, various electronic noisemakers, brass/woodwind/string ensembles, and traditional rock instruments.
The lyrics of Emperor X songs have been described as simultaneously "hallucinatory" and "precise," and discuss subjects ranging from plate tectonics ("A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp"), paramilitary religious fanatics ("Allahu Akbar"), the nature of time as it relates to car accident casualties and the 2009 Port-au-Prince earthquake ("Defiance (For Elise Sunderhuse)"), failed attempts to fix broken air conditioners (“Compressor Repair”), and mass transit ("Everyone in Jacksonville", "Right to the Rails" and "Edgeless").
Emperor X tours the United States very frequently, and has completed several small tours internationally including trips to Mexico, Canada, and Australia.
In a self-described attempt to address the diminishing utility of physical copies of music and the expanding role of marketing in the experience of art, Matheny often hides or buries one-off physical copies and associated visual artwork of b-sides at GPS coordinates and posts them online as a part of a geocaching game to unlock MP3 copies of the audio. For the release of the most recent Emperor X album Western Teleport, 41 "translucent purple audio tape cassettes" were buried across North America, many of which remain undiscovered. These hybrid art/marketing projects received national attention including a feature on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition" program.
