SNS: *Were you active in all elements at the time? * MM: If we put it in realtime.. 83 to 84 I was b-boying, 84 to 86 I started DJing and then by the late ’80s around 87 I started producing and during all these years I was writing graffiti as well. I went by the name Matzo.

SNS: Back to music. How did you find your music during those early years in Stockholm? MM: Record shops. The best thing with hip hop is that it is like a family tree. You start with the root and work yourself up to the branches. You might find a James Brown sample or an Aretha Franklin record and move on to another soul record to find yourself digging in the jazz section and there you’d find a Coltrane sample and move on to a Latin record. The whole tree just evolves. The Jungle brothers had a house track on their record, and I would be like, wow, House music? What’s that? A friend of mine, Alex Strehl was living in New York and told me about the house music scene there. So, I just kept evolving. That was the new thing but I would say even more inspirational for me was a few years later when I hooked up with these guys B Bop and Damon. Damon Frost was a HUGE inspiration for me. He taught me James Brown, funk and disco and things outside of hip-hop. Damon came to Sweden from LA and stayed, we have become great friends over the years, and I've released his music on one of my labels.

SNS: Damon is a part of the group Hearin´Aid with Aron Phiri. One of the most groundbreaking groups in Swedish rap. MM: I mean… If you want to listen to an album that was truly groundbreaking but not necessarily got the attention you need to listen to The Boom Lucy by Hearin’ Aid.

SNS: Sonically The boom Lucy is way up there with the classics. MM: I remember every time I brought the album over to the US or the UK, people were like, is this really from Sweden? They just couldn’t believe it. It did well outside of Sweden, but here, it was too real or too American. I mean Damon was American, and Aaron comes from Zambia, so it did not have a Swedish context which made it kind of tricky to work in Sweden.

SNS: It had that Detroit “Dilla” elements. You could hear the influences, but it was way beyond that and stood solid on its own. MM: It was Dilla but with a twist. Damon Frost has always been a beat maker and has “Space Lab Studios” that is just insane. It has all these weird machines, and he’s the most original person I've probably ever met. Back in the day, Damon used to work in this bike shop in Stockholm. He was down in the basement working on bikes but he also had a drum set there because he was a drummer. He used to show me clips of the legendary drummers, Buddy Rich, and Clyde Stubblefield and others. He used to play his drums down there and you know...He wasn’t classically trained but he was a million more times funky than all the trained musicians in Stockholm at the time. To me, and that was very influential. The thing with music is that you don’t necessarily have to be taught, you have to experience it and then create your own sphere. It’s like DJing. I don’t like DJ schools. If I were to have a DJ school, I would teach them how to search and enjoy music first. Get to know the basics of what they REALLY like. A lot of Dj's think that playing records is about getting appreciation but it’s about expressing yourself and that can be tricky because there are so many detours and cheating by playing tunes that everybody likes. That’s the easy part.

SNS: I have had these feeling over the years, that you're frustrated with Stockholm as a city at times. MM: Well… You know when you meet someone in music that is content, I’m like, He’s lost it! All the Dj's I know that are really good are a bit moody and not that happy when they see something good, they’re like, That’s good but they feel they can do better. , It’s a competition and you want to be better than the other guy.

SNS: Are you competitive? MM: Hell yes, I’m very competitive. I’ve matured a bit and realized that music is in the “eyes of the beholder “ but for me when I go to a club and it might be the best damn party I’ve ever been to. I feel like I can do that better, hahaha. That's always in the back of my head.

SNS: If you had to sell the city to someone who’s never been here, what would you say? MM: I think even though as you mentioned earlier there are some frustrations, Stockholm is pretty awesome actually, in some aspects. I like the fact that we had a really good jazz scene in the ’50s and had a lot of people come here from all over the world that colored our musical scene. We also had pop music acts like ABBA that gave us songs. ABBA could write melodies and when you add the golden era of Swedish jazz to that you get melodic soul music. This is why I think we have maintained a solid musical pop scene. We have created a lot of musicians and pop artists.

SNS: Do you have a residency anywhere at the time? MM: Every year I play at this club Garito Café in Mallorca a good friend of mine runs the club. Mallorca can be quite cheesy but my friend is a real enthusiast and the club has been running for twenty years and it’s a place where you’ll find the local population. I used to play a lot in New York at APT and I’m going there soon to play at Le Bain. I haven’t done that many residency’s but I do play outside of Sweden a lot. I like New York. I have a bunch of good friends there and even though it’s a huge city I always feel relaxed there. You can stroll around and walk everywhere. It was very different in the early ’90s. It could be dangerous In a cool way. Now it’s more relaxed and the club scene is not at all like it was back then but still good. New York has become a friendly city in my opinion. The Meatpacking District still got some goods spots but there’s this place in Brooklyn called the Good Room that I really like and I was supposed to play there but I had my son with me and I can’t work every night.

SNS: Known and unknown facts about you. You’re a soccer coach. MM: I work as a coach for an academy team with the best players born 2003-2004. I used to play football up until I discovered music 84-85. The music kicked it to the curb but the passion came back when I started watching football again in the mid-’90s. Arséne Wenger and Ljungberg joined the team and it got interesting again.

SNS: Let’s talk about your labels and the successful club Raw Fusion which made a great impact on the Swedish club scene for many years. MM: Yes. I run quite a few labels. The Raw Fusion label sprang from the club which was a Wednesday party in Stockholm called Fusion but with moving locations and direction we renamed it Raw Fusion to signal that we had gone more underground and we booked all these great Dj’s from all over the world. (SNS Note: Peanut Butter Wolf, Theo Parrish, Jay Dee, Carl Craig, Laurent Garnier, DJ Harvey, Gilles Peterson, and Kerri Chandler to name a few) Around the same time, we started the label. We put out everything to hip hop to house and jazz, all types of good music. In 2011 vinyl kind of died and I thought that maybe it wasn’t possible to continue to be doing labels but I teamed up with my partner Tooli and we started Local Talk which is more of a house label. We have opened up to other genres and we’re not just releasing house music and we are more into the process of forming and building artists. Prior to that, it was more about releasing singles.

SNS: Your last project ‘Digging beyond the crates’ was released on the UK label BBE. Why release it there? MM: The guy who runs BBE, Pete is a huge Arsenal fan and he used to have a party named 'Barely breaking even' in London where I played a few times and he started to do compilations and the label just grew. They’ve put out some great music over there. They released Jay Dilla and Pete Rock and they have an amazing catalog and they asked me if I could do a compilation for them two years ago. I put one together and it came out good and was really fun to do. It’s very me. It’s very mixed and got a bunch of styles in it. I was digging but not just vinyl and that why it’s called ‘Beyond the crates ‘

SNS: What are you looking for ‘digging‘ crates?

MM: Vinyl was a necessity for djs from my generation. It was the only format out there. So, we had to dig otherwise we didn’t have any music. Today it’s a culture and something you put on your Instagram to show that you’re digging, I’m not feeling that. I think they’re missing the point. It does not really matter if you’re playing cd’s, USB or some kind of controller. It’s what you choose to do with it. I still go to record shops but not at all like I used to. I dig at weird sites and exchange music with friends. The most important thing for a DJ is not selecting it’s deselecting because of the massive amount of content out there. You need to filter away a lot of stuff and that’s the essence of being a good DJ. You should be able to pick a song and put it in a new context. Nobody cares about how much music you have, what matters is what you put in that two-hour set.

SNS: *You’ve been doing this successfully for a long time. Where do you see your space in music today? * MM: I’m just enjoying it! When I started the club Fusion and the label Raw Fusion I was on a mission. I wanted to Hip hop heads to like jazz and the jazz heads to like house music. I truly was on a mission to connect the dots. My hunger is still there and I do think that it is a sign of the times in a way. When I grew up I was looking to New York and London. Everything happened over there but then around the time when techno got big everything shifted towards Berlin. Everyone started to wear black and go to raves in the woods to take drugs and dance. I thought that music got lost and that’s one of the reasons we chose more of a house approach with our label Local Talk. Today we are working on putting out more organic music and it wouldn’t surprise me if we release a hip hop album soon. I feel that’s it’s coming back and I see that the vinyl thing is growing stronger too and that helps. I mean I love soulful, funky and organic jazz music, I like melodies, songs, and structures.

SNS: *Thank you Mats! *