SOKOL

"You used to play so quiet and simple... what happened?!" -Singer of Matt Sokol's old band, in 2009...

What happened is Matt, aka SOKOL, discovered that it's a grand old time to beat your drums half to death, like a sober John Coltrane channeling his hectic spiritual energy via drum set rather than saxophone, drawing from influences as disparate as Hella, Punch Brothers, James Blake, and Dirty Projectors... in the following six years, he's made a name for himself as one of New England's most promising up-and-coming progressive musicians.

Most recently, Matt's current band Oculesics opened for a sold-out show alongside Gates and Chon in Hamden CT, performing to 250 people. Oculesics' second full length record, prominently featuring Matt's avant-shred-groove drumming came out in the summer, entitled "Arm's Race", described by Fecking Bahamas (math rock's biggest music news site) like this: "The explosion of senses I felt, chaotically at odds with each other yet to so strangely symbiotic, thrown about in a maelstrom due my inebriation; these are the sensations [that] are at once recollected when I listen to Watching Machine by Oculesics."

Now Matt turns his attention to a long-awaited solo outing as "SOKOL", blending the symbiotic chaos of Oculesics with a calmer, more nuanced approach that harkens to indie rock giants like Modest Mouse or Cap'n Jazz, fusing creative rhythms and lush chord/melody structures with intensely poetic lyricism and laser-tight grooves. He's perhaps the only experimental musician to enjoy Skrillex as much as he does Zach Hill, and if the songs he's released via Soundcloud for the last year are any indication, his debut EP (April 2016) will be like nothing you've heard before.