Interview with Rosetta and Ghost Lode’s Matt Weed

Matt Weed is a founding member, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter in the highly influential Philadelphia metal band Rosetta. Weed is also the main driver of the ambient project Ghost Lode. House Vulture had the pleasure of talking with Weed in a wide ranging interview where he discusses both projects, the idea of water and drowning in his music, how the city of Philadelphia permeates his art form, and the possibility of new Rosetta in 2026.

https://theanaesthete.bandcamp.com/

https://ghostlode.bandcamp.com/

Would you discuss the dynamic between power and beauty in both Rosetta and Ghost Lode?

Matt – You’re certainly not the only person who hears something like that in both Rosetta and Ghost Lode. I don’t know that I can account for what the intent behind that is. It’s something that probably emerged organically.

You start a band and you're exploring the sounds that you're interested in, sometimes things just happen, and you like them, and you do them again.

I don't know if it’s that easy to talk about all this stuff as though we're all on this journey to find transcendence and it's a very purposeful journey. But in reality it's actually just a lot of times taking shots in the dark and seeing what happens.

So I think for Rosetta, at least in the early days, there was very much this kind of reward seeking or habit forming type behavior where we would just improvise at practice and you just figure out what you like, and you keep doing it again and again and again.

And it's, by virtue of repetition that you refine, you explore, you refine, you explore, you you refine, and over time, you kind of figure out the sounds you want to make. And at least in the early days, It didn't feel like the band was trying to make a specific statement.

It was just like, I want to make something that is first, satisfying to me and my friends here, and then maybe off chance will be satisfying to someone else. And then, as you grow over time, it does become more purposeful. You begin to plan out in advance and think about, what it is that you want to say, and here's how I'm going to do it.

But in so far as the music communicates, I don't know that it's primarily about communicating. It's maybe more about making something that then goes off into the world and has a life of its own.

So I almost think of the music more as like an object. I don't want to get into like super abstract stuff about subject object distinctions, but the the music feels like I built something, I made something, we made something, now it's out there, and it is what it is, and it exists apart from me. It's not my transmission to the world or something.

More made in the time, more made of the time, and then pushed out the world and kind of allowing other people to make that distinction of what it means. I think of each Rosetta album as an artifact of the time in our lives that it was created.

And when people ask, Why do you have these huge shifts in your sound? It's not as simple as just, oh, we got bored of what we were doing before, and we wanted to do something different. It's the ground that you're mining when you make this stuff. It's an intuitive process, because what you're making, you’re just asking yourself, what is satisfying to me in this moment?

People are always like, well, why is the Anaesthete the angriest? Why is it so angry and so weird and out there compared to the other albums?

It's because we were writing it in an unheated garage in the middle of the winter with neighbors that were calling the cops on us constantly.

I don't have a more complicated answer than that about those sorts of things, not to mention that that was a period when the band was totally broken, not sure that we were going to keep going.

And then why is Quintessential Ephemera just like nothing but guitar solos? And it's weird because we added Eric Jernigan to the band for Quintessential Ephemera, and there was an exploration that was happening there. Not all of it was successful, but like we did something that was fun and satisfying to us in that time of of newness and exploration, and that's what emerged.

Maybe better than saying object. It's better to say that each piece of music is almost an artifact.

Think about archaeologists digging up artifacts, or anthropologists looking at artifacts.

What are they trying to understand? Something about the people who made those things, who used those things, the times in which they lived that type of thing? I'm not saying that my life is interesting enough that somebody is going to want to mine it for that type of meaning.

But I think that when you encounter an artifact that is a byproduct of someone else's life, maybe there's a point of connection between your life and that other person's life, and you're going to experience a resonance when you hear that music, because maybe there's some parallelism there.

I think that's where the listener can make their own meaning in that and it can speak to them in a way that maybe I didn't intend.

It's very important to to say those things out loud, because when people start to find meaning in that music they want the artist to have that meaning too.

It's important to say there's a point in my life I was here, I made this sound. It was because of the environment I was in and it's just because we thought it was cool at that time.

These are a bunch of people in a situation, and they are reacting to that situation, and they're trying to work through that situation with each other. And this is the artifact that is left over from that period,

There's the transcendence that the artist experiences by making the thing, but it's a different transcendence that the listener experiences by listening to the thing and by having that thing almost illuminate a part of himself that maybe isn't accessible to them otherwise.

And I think that's with a lot of the music you have when you sit there and you think about where it's coming from and kind of and you may not have intended for it to be that way, but other people feel that thing too. Sometimes that's the human dimension of it really is that it's like, to the extent that you can say, there's a community dynamic.

Of course, there's a community dynamic among the members of the band because we're making something together. But then there's the community dynamic with the listener. It's facilitated by the music. And this is something that I harp on all the time is that I'm REALLY suspicious of connecting with listeners based on like the persona of the musician I want if there's a connection between the artist and the listener I want THAT to be based on the art itself on the music itself.

I'm fond of the aphorism that music is transcendent and musicians are disappointing. It's just the the artifice that goes into cultivating this. A public persona is always going to let you down as a listener.

That is a requirement in a lot of the music industry, because we are selling a product, and people who need to make their living off of it, they need to be out there, and they need to to cultivate that cult of personality that allows them to sell records or whatever. But I think what it really is, at least for Rosetta, was always much more this suspicion of personas and of the connection with the listeners, again, being about the musician, rather than about the music.

If you want to know us just listen to the music coming.

Rosetta, and your other project Ghost Lode, are intertwined with more ambient sounds but do you think Ghost Lode are afterthoughts of Rosetta, or something that stands on its own.

It’s really just like myself indulgent guitar ideas without bass, drums, and vocals, and I'm not going to pump it up as anything other than that. The reason that, Lenten Distance is so titled, is that um I have been fond of using lent as a period for personal exercises of sorts. I'm not really super into asceticism and self-denial and all that kind of stuff. But what I would do during Lent is would challenge myself to write and record an entire piece of music once a week all the way through Lent. So that’s the seven pieces that make up Lenten Distance.

It's six tracks on a bonus track were all recorded on Saturdays during Lent in 2020, which, of course, is right at the beginning of COVID.

So in in many respects that was music that I did not intend to release, and it was just stuff that was coming out of me during that period of time. And then when I looked back on it after finishing it, I was like, oh, this is an artifact. And maybe because of the weird moment that we were all existing in, right?

Everybody was like unshackling themselves from their own conventions and their usual sounds and doing a weird record.

The Oracular material I did having done Sower of Wind with Rosetta was really recent in my mind. The thing about Sower of Wind is that that record is really a collaboration between me and Mike (Armine) and Eric (Jernigan)

And I think Mike’s samples and found sounds were kind of the organizing principle of Sower of Wind. And Eric and I played guitar and piano and bass on top of that stuff.

And then when I came to doing something on my own, I didn't have the bed of weird samples and textures, and found sounds and stuff, which is totally Mike's domain,.

I just really enjoyed trying to just make weird sounds and figure out what the structure was, what structure was emerging from.

At one point you called Ghost Lode “The Sound of Sinking Places” what is the meaning behind that statement?

It's more just like Ghost Lode has, over time, become very much a place based, kind of a thing. And, this is what I was just saying when I first started working on Oracular, totally unmoored from the textural bed that Rosetta always has with the samples and the weird tracks and sounds and stuff. Oracular and Lentin Distance, neither one of them had any field recordings or found sounds. And then with Terrestrial Bodies I did a lot of field recording. And so it's like the home of sinking places is almost just like the whole, the whole of terrestrial.

I had this idea that was bouncing around in my mind beginning in 2017, after Rosetta’s Utopia record. Where I was having pretty frequent chest pain, and doctors couldn't figure out what was going on. And years later, it turned out that it was actually a gastro intestinal issue, like a hiatal hernia.

But there was this period of time where I really thought I might drop dead of a heart attack at any moment, And I was really stressed out about my health, and just had no idea what was going on. But during that period, I needed something a little bit more intense that I can do more quickly.

So I started running. And on these runs, I was running through southwest Philly. Through areas that were sort of these bombed out industrial zones. But there were also parks along my route, and then residential neighborhoods.

And it just was like looking at the tension between the man made built environment and the nature that was sort of trying to poke through it. And I was thinking about my own body in the context of this tension of man-made and natural and started to think a lot about climate change at the time.

I mean, I've been obsessing about climate change for many years. I would go on these runs, and would have these thoughts where there was a tangle of me thinking about my body being broken, and then also about the natural environment being broken, and about this conflict that was going on. And I was thinking about what is the purpose of exercise?

And that's where the concept of bodies for play and bodies for survival came from, because it was, am I training my body so that I can do the things that I enjoy doing and live longer and better? Am I training my body for play, or am I training my body because all hell is about to break loose, and I am going to need every ounce of strength to encounter that.

And my alignment, you know, people versus the world, all of those alignments completely changed, and there was this cataclysm that we had to encounter.

Terrestrial Bodies was very much like a “Let me explore this idea of my body and the inevitability of death”, and then also the natural environment, and also possibly the inevitability of death in the natural environment. And field recordings became an obvious way to explore that further.

And the field recordings on Terrestrial Bodies all came from the outer Banks of North Carolina during the winter. So, the hum of sinking places is in some respects is a reference to the sounds on Terrestrial Bodies, including the marsh frogs singing at night, and the birds in the maritime forests and the waves on the sound side.

And, um, there are large sections of dead dried reeds that kind of clack against each other. And that's a sound that occurs repeatedly. And then, of course, there's the ocean that happens at the beginning of the second track.

There's this undercurrent of rising water that's happening in the the found sounds, because it begins with, like, the sounds of animal life at the beginning of the record, but at the end of the record, it's just nothing but water.

And I have this whole weird thing that goes way back to living in rural Virginia, near the swamps in southeastern Virginia when I was a little little kid, and just thinking about water all the time. And I've dreamed about water on and off through all the years.

Drowning is a theme that's come up in Rosetta at points. But I think the drowning that I'm thinking of is not something that is terrifying trauma followed by death.
It's more something that's slow and inevitable, that's what The Sound of Sinking Places .

You alluded to growing up in Virginia and then forming Rosetta in Philadelphia. How did the band come together?

Rosetta formed in Philadelphia. I moved up here when I was 8 so I was in Virginia for my very earliest years, and my parents are still living in the same house on the edge of Philadelphia that we moved to in 1991.

So I kind of grew up in two places, but met the other dudes when we were all in high school, and then we ended up all staying local for college. And Rosetta formed while we were all in college. And was already doing weekend tours and stuff while we were still doing college classes.

And basically, we embarked on our first full US tour right after we all graduated in spring of 2006. The Galilean Satellites  had come out while we were still college students.

How do you think the City of Philadelphia permeates the music you make?

The other four of us, besides Eric, grew up in the late nineties in the old inner ring suburbs just to the west of Philadelphia. Philadelphia proper, within the city limits, was really, really tough in the eighties and nineties. And encountering it as a little bit of an outsider as a kid definitely shaped my thinking. When I went to college, I went to University of Pennsylvania, which is pretty close to the center of the city, like it's very much an urban university. Dave (Grossman) was at Drexel, which is an urban university. Mike (Armine) was at Temple, which is an urban university. BJ (Bruce McMurtrie Jr.) was what was then called the Art Institute of Philadelphia, urban center, city type stuff.

We grew up in hundred year old, very tense, inner ring suburbs. We took public transit everywhere, but we were not in Philadelphia proper, but we all ended up in an even more urban environment during college in those early years where Rosetta was forming. And to be honest, like the vibe in Philly in the early 2000s was quiet. Philadelphia had this unique quietness to it that you would never find in like DC or New York or Boston, which were always way noisier.

Philly was grimy, but it had this quietness to it that was honestly kind of beautiful. There was an undercurrent of optimism during that period of time, because that was right when Philadelphia stopped shrinking, stopped losing population, and people started moving in again. And so I remember kind of being there, being in college and feeling like, holy Cow, these neighborhoods are changing.

Like seeing the the old coal train tracks by the Schuylkill River turned into what is now one of the coolest urban parks in the entire world. A lot of our friends were like, dude, it's cheap and great here. Let's live here. Let's invest. Let's stick it out, so my wife and I ended up buying a house in 2009. We owned that house for 13 years. And, I mean, honestly up until COVID, things got better every year in Philadelphia.

And I don't mean this in a political way but essentially the halcyon days corresponded to the Obama years, the Obama years were an incredibly cool time to live in Philadelphia, because it was very affordable. There was a band practicing on every corner. There were venues popping up everywhere. There were cool restaurants that were New York quality, but not New York prices. And it was an amazing environment. It was very cool.

Philadelphia has always been a little bit of a hard city, and it definitely kind of chews up outsiders a little bit. But if you could make your peace with it, there was a period of almost 20 years where it just felt so cool, and I loved living there. And the reality is that even when things got tough with COVID, my wife and I had no intention of leaving, we intended to stay in that house on 52nd Street indefinitely and raise kids in it.

But we lost that house to a fire about three years ago. The house two doors down, was an illegal rental. The stove didn't work. And somebody was cooking on an electric skillet on the dining room table, and started a grease fire, and they poured water on it. And less than 5 min later, the fire spreading to the adjacent houses. So, three houses totally destroyed. Our house was the next one in line, and we ended up with smoke permeating every room in the house. We ended up moving to this other old, inner ring dense suburb called Narberth. And we did, in fact, start a family, and now I have a son.

The media talks a lot about the Kensington part of Philadelphia.

Kensington was not like that in the relative recent past, because I had a buddy who lived at K and A, which is the epicenter of the opiate problem in Philadelphia, and he lived there until 2011. And I would just take the subway up there at night and just walk to his house. It was totally fine. There was nothing wrong with that neighborhood back then, it was not affluent there were really low-income people living there. But it was not what it is now. It became what it is now very, very quickly, because of neglect

That was an early microcosm of what happened to the city large when Covid happened because we had massive, massive protests around the Floyd murder in 2020, and people had just been cooped up for three months at that point, and everybody's blood is just boiling for like a thousand different reasons. All the frustrations were multiplying. Everything's closed, so there's nothing cool to do. And there just was ugliness everywhere. There was nothing beautiful to be had anywhere.

And, and people acted out. And the city just kind of ignored it. And they did stupid stuff. They brought in the National Guard, which just made everybody feel like it was even more bananas and, and it just felt like murders exploded, theft exploded. The whole city just became really grim. Like in in late 2021, we were getting used to hearing gunshots out the dining room window during dinner, multiple nights, from a neighborhood that, when we moved in in 2009,  but like it was all families with little kids playing around on the sidewalk.

And just completely different vibe. Nobody went out in 2021, and it just, it got really grim. And the thing is, it's getting better now, but in the context of it getting better, it's also getting a lot more expensive and unaffordable.

At what point in your life did you figure out that you were going to be a musician? What made you decide to pick up a guitar and do this for a living?

I think it was punk rock, but music was always a part of my life. I started taking violin lessons when I was eight. And so I had a violin tutor from age eight, actually, all the way through the end of high school till I started college. But I think with violin, or relentlessly classical practice of violin, I was always playing somebody else's music. And I didn't necessarily feel like the violin, the violin was enjoyable for me to play, but it didn't feel like an instrument that facilitated any creativity. Of course, I'm saying this in hindsight, because I would not have been able to articulate that to you as a 15 year old.

But then I picked up a guitar, because I realized that the punk rock that I was enjoying listening to was really just three or four chords, and they were power chords, and you didn't really need to know much about the instrument to just be able to immediately jump into it. So it's like, oh, let me get this guitar. Let me go on Yahoo and search for, “how do I play Basket Case by Green Day”. And you figure out, oh, there's these guitar tabs, and I don't need to read the sheet music for guitar. I can just learn how to play it from these little numbers on a sheet of printer paper. And you learn to play the songs, and you realize they're not that complicated.

Then all of a sudden this whole world opens up to you about I can do something with this That's really mine. And that's kind of where it started. I started playing punk guitar tabs on an acoustic guitar in eighth grade. That was 1997 and by 1998, I was already trying to start a band. And it's the accessibility of it from a technical it's like, it's weird, because these, these songs are incredible.

These people, the people in these bands, are incredible songwriters, and they're doing so much with so little from a technical standpoint that it you as a listener you realize that barriers to entry are so incredibly low, right? That you can just pick up a cheap guitar and do the thing. And suddenly then you realize, like, I can do this thing with other people, and it's going to be even better. And you find other people who are interested in the same thing.

I think I tried to start three or four different bands before I finally started playing with BJ. We started a band in late 98 maybe early 99 with two other guys and that was by that point I was deep into, like Sunny day real estate and the sort of the weird side of emo before emo, like, had any association with Metalcore or anything like that, and so we had a Sunny Day Real Estate rip off band together that lasted from 98 until maybe 2003.

We were called Sundayrest And we played, I don't know, a dozen shows during that period of time. And then made a home recording that was five songs and, and then as soon as Rosetta came along I was into much, much heavier stuff.

It was so much fun. I have that same nostalgia for what it was like to do all day Saturday band practices, right where you just like you wake up and there's no school, and you're like, I'm going to spend the whole day playing music with my friends. And you're excited to get out of bed, and you call your buddy up on his parents' land line, and you're like, hey man, are we going to practice today? And it's like, 10:00 rolls around, and you're already making your drum shattering noises.

Then you go out for pizza, like, three times, and you go home at 09:00 p.m. And collapse, a I  would do anything to get back to that vibe. And it wasn't that that band was good, it was that playing music and eating pizza for 11 h on a Saturday was the absolute best thing in the world. When I sit down to write music now or to practice, I don't have anywhere near that attention span, and I would kill to get that kind of motivation and drive and stamina back.

It’s just part of aging, I guess, you know, most definitely. But it's, it's, it's something that I miss so intensely.

Do you think that having children and a family has changed that perspective at all?

I assume that it has, but I'm really, I'm really new at the parenting thing, because I have one kid, and he's almost seven months old, so it's like he just started sleeping through the night, like two months ago. I've been in survival mode for that entire period of time.

But honestly, I think probably the more salient event for me was the fire in 2022, um, because I have not actually released any music since then. The last thing that I know was Terrestrial Bodies in 2021. And the fire, the fire created a block for me for a really long time. And about exactly a year ago, I knew we knew my wife was pregnant. And I just, I tried, actually tried to do the Lent exercise again, and I just completely face planted at it. I had no motivation to do it. I didn't want it. Every time I picked up the guitar, just like I felt dead. I felt like I had nothing to say. I had no ideas.

And I really do kind of feel like I've had no ideas since the fire happened. Trauma is a word that gets thrown around a lot, doesn't really mean anything at all anymore. But I do feel like I was stuck or a long time and I ended up finding a therapist whose background was not actually in therapy, but was in German philosophy. And I really connected with her.

She did, what's called EMDR, which is a really relatively new therapeutic technique that's often used with combat vets and stuff like that. And she and I did some really trippy stuff together, and it was enormously helpful to me. And I came and, and I was doing that in part because I was like, dude, I'm about to have a kid, and I need to not be bringing this baggage into my relationship with my son. And I felt like, I think I did 16 sessions with the therapist, and I ended up coming out of that, just feeling like it that was what I needed. I don't think about the fire anymore since I, since I finished that process with her. And it's like not the type of thing. If I hadn't really committed to that, it would not have been useful to me.

And, it ended up being one of the best things I ever did, but I'm not going to say that it got my creative groove back. My time is totally monopolized with being a parent. And yet I am playing guitar just for fun, like ten times more than I ever was in the preceding two years, like the two years immediately after the fire.

So something has changed. And I'm hoping that, like, in the middle of that, that that it'll just organically, like the creative spark will come back. I was doing a lot of Ghost Lode stuff before the fire happened and I felt like I still had a lot to say. A lot of ideas, I didn’t feel like a washed up has been who is totally out of any new ideas and has nothing to say just.

This is where that there is a new Rosetta record and that new Rosetta record got written from December 2019 to February 2020. The songs were demoed, instrumentally, demoed, and then just got put on a shelf for literally two years. And we came back together in 2021 and we actually did this huge weekend where we fully flushed out all the demos, got everything down to a click track, created the structure of the songs and then nothing happened because of the fire.

I will totally own that the reason that the new Rosetta didn't come out two years ago because I had the fire and then I had a kid it's not the other dudes fault at all it's very much me that's been the block because there's just been so much going on, and I've had this huge creative block. But after I finished that cycle of therapy a year ago I was like I'm about to have a kid. Let's track this thing for real. So I actually got access to a hundred year old church sanctuary for a week.

And BJ (Bruce McMurtrie JR.) and I set up his drum kit and about 25 microphones and this huge rack of recording equipment in this sanctuary, and we tracked all of the drums for the new Rosetta album in this church sanctuary. And I was so excited that process was incredibly life giving for me. We had a ton of fun doing it, and the stuff sounds great, and I'm really, really pleased with it. And then ended up taking a week in August, about two weeks before my son was born, and Dave, Mike, Eric and I went to Connecticut and hold up with Will Benoit, he’s the main guy in the band SOM, and he used to be in a band called Constants, and he's toured with Rosetta.

Will has a studio in Connecticut. We went up there and tracked all the bass and guitars in August. So all the basic tracking for the new Rosetta album is done, and we're just looking for a chunk of time to be able to sit down and do the vocals. So it's like all the instrumentals for the new Rosetta album are actually finished, finally. And I was like, well, let's get to it. So, I haven't written any new music, and I'm still struggling with this core, this core block of, like, of creativity and ideas and the flow of ideas. But in terms of the motivation to get these songs out into the world and to have something new for Rosetta for people to listen to. I'm so stoked on those songs when I hear them now, and I want them out in the world, and I'm actually motivated to make it happen, and I think it is going to happen.

For me, I'm like, I love this. I love every single song on here, which is actually not something that I can say about any previous Rosetta album. There's always been some song that rubbed me the wrong way on every previous Rosetta record. But I am really excited for it to be out in the world. And right now the big hurdle is I want to be the one to track the vocals. But I think the loose plan would be, let's try and get all of the tracking done by the end of the summer, and then see if we can send it to mix sometime in the fall.

And then we could potentially be looking at 2026 as a release date.

What’s next for Matt Weed, Rosetta, and Ghost Lode?

I’m  just delighted that even after not doing anything for five years that there's some people out there who still care about our band makes me even more excited about the new stuff that I think those people will be excited to hear it.

We have all very consciously left the music industry behind at this um. And that's part of why what I was saying before about totally missing those all day Saturday band practices.

It's like what got me away from that was selling T shirts, managing revenue. Who's going to put out the vinyl version? Like business. What's our licensing deal?How are we going to convert these Euros to dollars? It's just like that stuff ends up taking up so much of your time.

You realize, like, I spend 80 % of my time doing management and 20 % of my time actually playing my instrument when it comes to the band time. And when I go down to the basement and just rip some death metal, I'm like, I'm getting a little inkling of what it felt like to have all day Saturday band practice.

It's not so much about being true to yourself. Because I think as you get older, you realize, like myself is nothing special. It's more just about… I'm not going to cultivate artifice for the sake of making money, because that's not what I'm here for, and that's not what the listeners are here for.

And I just have to do the thing that is true.