Hi, thank you so much for checking in. This post is about my story (so far) and finally gaining the courage to release work (under my own name). I am building a world, and I sincerely hope it inspires all of you to follow your creative dreams and share them with the world. xxxx

Who am I?

I am an electronic artist living in the heart of the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Born, Matthew Robert Clyma Gooderson in the industrial town of Dartford.

My father, Richard, a blues guitarist (and Lonnie Donegan’s paper boy), and music-loving social worker mother Janet, brought me up with a deep love of everything from the field recordings of Alan Lomax to the cyclic repetitive grooves of bluesman Junior Kimbrough and sonic experiments of Miles Davis, via Mike Oldfield, Tina Turner and Underworld. My older sister, Sara, was born profoundly disabled and was unable to see, walk or talk, yet demonstrated sheer joy when listening to music. Especially John Coltrane and Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. Thus, the power of music to instil elation and forge connection was made abundantly clear. My path was set.

Having dabbled with violin and piano, I really began to gain creative traction when dad brought home a Fostex 4-track and ZX Spectrum 8-bit computer. I experimented and obsessed over the combination of programmed lo-fi bleeps from the Spectrum mixed with the hiss, wobble and otherworldliness of tape looping and vari-speed experiments. The final piece of the jigsaw arrived in the shape of an antediluvian Akai S950 sampler. With its oceanic blue display, and no presets, the Akai S950 was an experimental too, offering the possibility that any sound could become a musical instrument itself.

Diagnosed as dyslexic, school didn’t work for me (although he was crowned Bexley Lego Champion in 1989...). Instead, I sought sanctuary in sonic worlds, later, recognising dyslexia as my superpower, allowing creative discovery by turning left and taking the long path rather than the shortest distance to the most obvious answer.

While studying popular music in the early 1990s at the University of Westminster, I met future musical collaborators Alex Bruford and Wag Marshall-Page and together with singer Bnann and keyboardist Richie Vernon  formed frenzied electro combo Infadels. Inspired by, yet elevating beyond, the rain-soaked, rundown Hackney of the early 2000s, Infadels were early adopters of MySpace and built a community of outsiders forging a decade-long career, touring globally and sharing stages with the likes of Metronomy, Hot Chip, Faithless and The Chemical Brothers. 

Following an exhausting decade of relentless performance, I emotionally and metaphysically collapsed, and effectively quit music. However, after meeting and marrying folk singer, saxophonist and improvisational composer Megan Watkins, I exchanged Hackney for the sanctuary of Forest Row and slowly but inexorably set about squaring the circle that was being an urban, sample-based electronic musician transposed to a bucolic, ‘organic’ landscape. 

While slowly rebuilding, I adopted meditation (a practice I once hated because it seemed alien to his frenetic East London lifestyle) and began to create music inspired by the shimmering and emergent patterns in nature, forging a connection with West Coast minimalist electronic artists such as Terry Riley and Suzanne Ciani. Around this time, I also discovered that 18th century English romantic poet John Clare was my great-great-grandfather. The planets were clearly aligning, and in 2018, I joined multi-instrumentalist and Brian Eno biographer David Sheppard in the new minimalist ensemble Snow Palms, receiving support from BBC6 Music’s Mary Anne Hobbs and Elisabeth Alker, winning plaudits in Electronic Sound Magazine and MOJO and playing a memorable live performance at London Southbank’s Purcell Room on the hottest night of 2019.  

Latterly, I work in collaboration with Megan, setting about creating music as a function of family life. Reminiscent of vintage Cluster films, we create the music on the kitchen table and in the garden, eschewing the sterility of the professional recording studio. Consequently, our work is decorated with children laughing and shouting in excitement, bird song and or bleating sheep, the compositions seeking to capture nature’s ever-changing and evolving patterns using simple elements: electricity, tape, voice, sampling and field recordings. 

My work explores themes of; repetition in nature, spirituality in the technological epoch, masculinity (in the 21st Century) and the complex relationships between our ‘real’ and virtual life(s).

I have joined Wild Awake, a Web3-based collaborative project exploring the creative freedom, community and shared love of independent record labels Ninja Tune, Warp and XL Recordings). 

My first official single as Clyma, ‘The Circling Sky’, will be released on June 22nd 2023 through Wild Awake & Token Traxx

Thank you for reading and I am looking forward to going on this journey together. Clyma xxx