Matthew DeChant

Bio

– PROFESSIONAL BIOS –

FOLK MUSIC BIO

Hailing from the rust belts of Wisconsin, Matthew DeChant is a modern musician on the cutting edge of the current traditional folk/roots renaissance. Taking inspiration from modern trad-folk giants such as Lankum and Rhiannon Giddens, as well as genre-benders like the Dreadnoughts and Gogol Bordello, DeChant takes traditional songs from all over North America and Europe and interprets them in his own high-energy alternative style. Performing mainly on Irish bouzouki (a type of Irish folk guitar) and accordion, he plays traditional and original tunes as well as covers of folk classics.

A passionate advocate for the fact that traditional music belongs to everyone, Matthew also organizes community events focused on all people making music, not for performance but for the simple joy of making merry noise as humans always have. He organizes the Fox Valley Folk Singaround in Appleton, WI, as well as other events in the Northeast Wisconsin area.

Matthew is currently coming off the release of his newest album Transmutations, a mix of traditional and original songs written over the past several years. He has performed everywhere from street corners to college music festivals, and to quote the wise words of Goblin Band, strives to “make a space for new audiences to experience traditional music in a manner which is both riotously joyful and deeply sincere.”

CLASSICAL/APPLIED MUSIC BIO

Matthew DeChant is a composer, musician, sound artist, and aural storyteller. He holds a degree in music composition from the Lawrence University Conservatory, and is active in many different artistic spheres, from contemporary classical to traditional folk, avant-garde theatre to video games and podcasts. Matthew is passionate that all artistic mediums, new or old, niche or popular, are equally deserving of artistic value and academic respect.

His music takes influence from many different places: the esoteric harmonies of the medieval composers, the counterpoint of the Baroque period, the theatricality of the Romantics, and the joviality and zest of contemporary media music. He also enjoys drawing on his experience as a traditional folk musician to incorporate the spontaneous and fluid ornamentation of traditional music into his works.

Standout projects for him have included performing at the 2023 New Music Gathering as part of the ELM Trio (Ellie Lutterman/Lucian Baxter/Matthew DeChant), creating an hour-long original theatre production that combined contemporary classical music and Brechtian metatheatre cabaret, and writing incidental + dance music for a staging of the Fin Kennedy play The Domino Effect. 

Matthew has studied with composers such as Joanne Metcalfe and Asha Srinivasan, theatre-makers such as Kathy Privatt, Timothy X. Troy, Margaret Paek, and Mauriah Donegan-Kraker, and other artists such as Tim Albright, Michael Clayville, Ann Ellsworth, and Loren Kiyoshi Dempster. He is currently working for the Center for Spiritual and Religious Life at Lawrence University, as well as doing freelance music work in Wisconsin and around the country.

– PERSONAL BIO –

I consider myself a professional emotional manipulator, in a benevolent way. In short, I want to use the art of sound to make people feel things, and maybe once in a while, think things. In the world of music, I have a bit of a split personality. There is:

  1. Matthew DeChant, the folksinger and songspinner. He is a folk musician who specializes in traditional unaccompanied singing, with an emphasis on English-language folk songs (of all nationalities and origins). He is also fluent in Wisconsin polka, Anglo-Celtic-American trad, and various Central and Eastern European folk musics. He writes and performs original folk songs, as well as playing for folk dances of all varieties.
  1. Matthew DeChant, the “classically-trained” composer and performer. He makes weird funny noises, and most of the time, writes them down on paper so other people can make them too. He composes music for concert stages, theatre/dance, and film/other media (he also performs on stages through trombone and accordion and dance and voice). He would visually describe his music as the following:

Occasionally the two sides of me interact, and they are always aware of each other’s existence, but more often than not they’re content to let each other do their own thing. The two kinds of music I make fulfill very different purposes for me, so I don’t blend them as much as other multi-genre artists might (see the program notes for Rosario for a longer explanation of my thoughts on that subject). That being said, both have had significant impacts on my worldview and the way I think about musicking.

When I’m not making music, you can find me long-distance backpacking, sailing, studying western esotericism, or decomposing in a bog.