End to End Excellence: The People Behind the Product

I’ve always liked music,” says dCS Product Manager Mat Taylor, “because my Dad used to drag me along to see The Sisters of Mercy. That was quite an upbringing for someone who spent their childhood in the sleepy county of Buckinghamshire, around Aylesbury. “Yes, my Dad influenced me and directed me onto certain music I shouldn’t really have been listening to. But I was always fascinated by sound. For example I was involved in amateur dramatics as a kid and loved helping out with the sound effects – you know, creaky doors and that sort of thing! I liked lining up the cassettes and pressing play, and then one day I thought I could do it with my home computer. I started sampling sounds and allocating them a key on the keyboard. Suddenly I was writing industrial ambient music…”

At the tender age of fourteen, Mat joined his first Death Metal band, as you do. “It was quite cool, being that age and doing gigs. I used to take my computer with me; I didn’t have enough money for a keyboard stand so I used to borrow my mother’s ironing board! I was composing electronic music from around 1993, which was the golden age of all that trance and electro like The Orb and Orbital, that kind of stuff. I always believed I needed to do something related to my passion, which is electronic music. Then I saw B&W’s blue Pod loudspeakers, and they really inspired me. I got interested in the idea of doing speaker design, so I went to university and studied music technology. This was a combination of acoustics, electronics and other all-round things like composition and mathematics…”

At that time, Mat was playing many live gigs in Cambridge, and at Anglia university. “I got quite active in the local scene around the city and got playing at Strawberry Fair. Then when I graduated I worked for hi-fi multimedia company iMerge doing software tests on their music server. Then I moved to NXT, and stayed for eight years, including a three year stint as an acoustic engineer. It was great because I was working with some massive brands like Apple and Blackberry. One of the coolest things I did was designing a speaker system that went into a Terence Conran sofa; it was great to be able to hang out with Terence, working on that sofa with him and making it boom!”

When Matt went to Hong Kong to do some special projects, from iPod docks to putting a transducer into a Hallmark Christmas card. “I had to do some clever audio processing on that and as a direct result it arrived working perfectly on budget; the lady responsible for the managing the project duly got a massive promotion! They sold over ten million of these things, which is not to be sniffed at. After this, it was back to the UK to work at B&W for six years. I worked on the headphone and wireless speaker products, as the Product Marketing Manager. Then it was off to Cambridge. I wanted to try working for a small, ‘family feeling’ company, so in 2016 I joined dCS as Product Manager. It is totally different because of the size. Things are more direct and everyone knows each other. I love it…”

Although finding his time very precious, he does still have time for the love of his life – which is music. “These days I am a total modular synth addict. I have always loved synthesisers because when I got involved it was all about twiddling knobs and making noises. Back in the early days I bought some classic synthesisers like Moogs and Sequential Circuits, and I am fortunate enough to own a Roland TR909 drum machine and TB303 bass synth. These days I don’t release anything, but I make noise and dance around with my little boy, so it’s not just sitting in my loft! And now over the past three or four years I have been investing quite heavily in the Eurorack modular synth world. I love my modular synth stuff. You start off with an idea and you end up somewhere totally different. It is a proper TARDIS of time when you start playing around with stuff like that. You always ask yourself, where has the weekend gone?”

“The great thing,” says Mat, “is that modular synths are broken down into separate components. In a traditional synthesiser you have some oscillators, some envelopes, some filters, some kind of modulation LFO generators, but in a modular synth they’re all standalone components which you have to cable up to one another. It used to just be in an analogue world but now it has crossed over into the digital world as well. So, people have got really creative on the type of things you can do, and it is just bonkers. It is quite expensive and highly addictive. You end up buying new racks and filling them up with new modules…”

Synthesiser-mad Mat finds it hard to name his favourite band. It’s like asking him a deep, profound philosophical question that he cannot just answer off the top of his head. After much soul-searching however, he volunteers Wendy Carlos as a great inspiration. “She innovated so much. She was most famous for the soundtrack to the nineteen seventies cult classic Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange, which was extremely cool at the time. These days I am massively into industrial music, so the likes of Skinny Puppy and Psychic TV are very important to me. I get so much enjoyment out of this music, which is so off-the-wall and creative.”