Interview by Emma Riva
Our neighbors in Ohio might not have the same hills we have, but there’s a plethora of talented musicians and artists there. Matthew Nichols of Ashtabula, Ohio, performing under the moniker L’eveil, is one such artistic voice.
I get a fair amount of music releases sent to my inbox, but something about Wars of Abstraction really grabbed me. The simplicity of an acoustic guitar on its own allows for complex emotions beyond words to come through in the music. Though I didn’t cut my teeth as a music writer and lack the technical vocabulary to engage with the work on that level, I felt compelled to talk to Nichols about the album and conducted the below interview. Hearing what Nichols had to say about the work made me appreciate it even more, and I hope you will too.
Petrichor: What is the origin of the name “L’eveil”? And then, on that, how did the title Wars of Abstraction develop?
The word came to me years ago after watching Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I had been thinking about the Chauvet paintings being sealed in darkness for millennia and then, in a sense, being awakened back into relationship with the world. I remember looking for the French translation of “awakening,” and L’eveil stuck.
Chauvet felt strangely personal to me, which is probably why I had the impulse to look up the word in the first place. “Awakening” obviously carries a lot of connotational baggage, and I am fairly allergic to the guru version where you arrive at some permanent state of enlightenment. Life is more dynamic than that. What I’m pointing towards is discovering something latent that has been sitting within us, perhaps long before we have the language for it, and then entering into relationship with what we found.
That word sat dormant for years before the music began. For most of the writing process, I was not consciously thinking about Chauvet at all; L’eveil had taken on a life of its own. Only later, after the larger album arc became visible, did the connection return in a meaningful way.
Wars of Abstraction came from a much more immediate experience. By conventional measures, my life was going very well, but internally I felt like a walking black hole. I had accumulated many of the things I thought were supposed to tell me I was moving in the right direction, and over time I had wrapped much of my intellectual and emotional identity around them. The accomplishments themselves were real, but I had allowed them to become a kind of armor.
“By conventional measures, my life was going very well, but internally I felt like a walking black hole.”
Panic attacks started sending me to the hospital, and more than once I genuinely thought I was having a heart attack. Eventually, it became impossible to ignore the distance between the life I had constructed and what was actually happening underneath it. I had built a very convincing mask; when that realization landed, I could almost hear the proverbial bone china come crashing out of the cupboard.
That tension is where the title came from. The abstractions weren’t false, but I had asked partial representations of my life to stand in for the whole thing.
Petrichor: Could you say a little bit about the musical lineage of the album, i.e. the world music influences?
L’eveil: My dad is a drummer, so I grew up around a drum set and spent a lot of time dabbling. I also play entirely by ear, and those two things have likely shaped how I listen to music more than I usually give them credit for. In a given piece of music, I’m listening to the drummer as much as the guitarist, and sometimes I’m not even sure I separate the two.
Growing up in a suburb of Cleveland, I cut my teeth on a lot of ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s rock, much of it coming through local radio stations like 100.7 WMMS, 98.5 WNCX, and 97.5 WONE. Rush was definitely my first introduction to progressive music, and I still adore Neil Peart’s playing. Later, my uncle Tom gave me a copy of Dream Theater’s Falling into Infinity, and that kind of kicked the progressive door wide open. Days of the New was also really important because they demonstrated that an acoustic guitar could still sound heavy, dark, and complicated.
As I’ve gotten older, my listening has continued to widen. I found Dead Can Dance, Tenhi, Rachel’s, Esmerine, Musk Ox, and a lot of other music that didn’t fit neatly into the categories I had grown up with.
So I think the “world music” influence on Wars of Abstraction is probably there more in the way I hear and organize music than in any conscious attempt to borrow from a particular tradition. The record is still rooted pretty deeply in progressive rock and metal, but by the time I wrote it, I was hearing those things through a much wider lens.
Petrichor: This is a written 11-album project. Is there a narrative arc to the series and how have you approached such a large-scale undertaking?
L’eveil: There is a narrative arc, but I did not intentionally write one from the outset. It became visible retrospectively because the albums had essentially been documenting the path I was walking while I was writing them. In that sense, the larger project feels less like a story I plotted and more like an embodied diary.
My writing process probably explains how that happened. Before I write any music, I spend time identifying the emotional territory of an album and working through the album title and individual song titles that seem to belong there. I think of those words as emotional coordinates; they establish an orientation without telling me what the music has to become.
Once I start composing, the relationship becomes bidirectional. I may have some intuition about what a title means when I begin, but the music usually tells me considerably more about what I was trying to name. So the writing localizes my relationship to an emotion, and then the material responds. I am following it as much as I am shaping it.
“’I wrote this’ has never felt like the whole story. At its best, writing feels more like documenting a dialogue with something beyond the part of ourselves we can explain.”
That is also why I have always been a little uncomfortable with the language of ownership around creativity. “I wrote this” has never felt like the whole story. At its best, writing feels more like documenting a dialogue with something beyond the part of ourselves we can explain. And that connection requires participation and intention. When it is active, though, I am lucky to get a rough demo of one song down before the next idea starts unfolding.
Practically, that is how something this large became possible. I was never attempting to write an eleven-album suite. Instead, I was trying to remain attentive to the connection, fifteen minutes at a time. Only around album nine did I truly recognize that these individual emotional territories were describing a larger trajectory.
Petrichor: What are some of the techniques you used for producing Wars of Abstraction?
L’eveil: Simon Larochette, Nathanael’s brother, recorded and mixed the album at Sugar Shack studio in London, Ontario. The recording setup itself was fairly straightforward: Simon used three microphones around the guitar, two angled in front and another over my right shoulder, along with a direct signal that could help temper some of the natural room noise.
Winston Larochette, the beloved studio cat, also slept behind my chair for a good portion of the sessions, so I assume some percentage of the album’s more ethereal qualities can be attributed to him.
But overall, we wanted to keep the record as organic and vulnerable as possible. We didn’t layer guitar parts, and the album mix is essentially dry. A single acoustic guitar presented that way gives you very little to hide behind, and that felt right for the emotional territory of the record.
Sugar Shack itself feels warm and lived-in, and I think that comes through too. The record feels exposed without sounding sterile.
Petrichor: How has the landscape and energy of Northeast Ohio influenced your work?
L’eveil: Northeast Ohio, much like Pittsburgh, is a collection of working towns, and I love that about this part of the country. There is a deeply ingrained sense of doing here. People are building, fixing, improvising, and generally keeping things moving without needing to mythologize it. That is certainly the world my family came from.
But more fundamentally, Northeast Ohio is home. It’s difficult for me to know where Northeast Ohio ends and I begin. Running in particular has been an important part of the writing process for me, and of course those miles have happened here too. A lot of the emotional processing that eventually finds its way into the music happens while I’m moving.
“But more fundamentally, Northeast Ohio is home. It’s difficult for me to know where Northeast Ohio ends and I begin.”
I’ve never consciously tried to make music that sounds like Northeast Ohio, so I wouldn’t assign the region a set of musical characteristics after the fact. But this is the place that formed me, and it is where the work was written. Whatever is in me from being here has inevitably touched the music.
What do you hope people feel when they listen to it?
L’eveil: I wouldn’t prescribe what someone should feel when they listen to the record, but I do hope they feel as much as they listen. There may be plenty of compositional structure in the music, but it would be a shame for someone to only encounter the machinery.
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