Once a month, music journalist Andrew Matson brings his music blog Finals, and the "old internet" it's inspired by, to life. At CWW Radio Shop in Crown Heights, Matson hosts Generator, a night where DJing music journalists go back to back with professional DJs like Brooklyn producer and beatmaker Laron.
Matson initially launched Finals in 2021 as a 44-page full-color print magazine, featuring new and emerging writers along with his own writing, in the style of blogs he grew up with in the '90s and 2000s like Cocaine Blunts, So Many Shrimp, Maurice Garland, and The Martorialist. "The old internet, especially the old blogosphere," Matson said, "was a lot of people ripping and uploading their own music collections and sharing expertise about stuff they knew about. People were enriching each other."
That's something Matson noticed has changed since "the internet became owned by three major companies," he said. These days, Finals publishes online about twice a month, mostly long-form interviews, "because I think they age well," he said. "And they're not that difficult to do."
That "passion project" energy is precisely what Matson promises you'll find at Generator, where people who sit around and listen to music all day get to share with an audience the music they sit around and listen to all day. Those people include music journalists like Matson, authors like New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, who was playing New Orleans bounce records at Generator the night before his memoir won the Pulitzer Prize, and musicians like Laron, who Matson met through a Finals interview and who now co-organizes the parties.
Generator "has helped me open up more of the music that I do have in my head and the music I listen to in the crib," said Laron, who has produced for artists like rappers Navy Blue and XXXTentacion. He's 27 years old, "so a lot of my friends are transitioning into their older years," he said. He also grew up reading hip hop blogs like 2DopeBoyz and Kanye West's UniverseCity, along with assorted Tumblrs, where he honed a tendency to plumb the depths of the internet looking for sounds to make beats from. He still does that, and said Generator has been helpful "just be able to have a spot where you can explore."
Matson said the series is an opportunity for music journalists and music makers to share their enthusiasm for crate digging. "When Laron said that he wanted to link up, we saw it as like his world and my world mixing, and those worlds don't often coexist," Matson told me. He said music journalists and musicians have "different swags," but they're complimentary: Musicians can play stuff they're still working on, and music journalists can play things they've found that no one's heard before, all brought together by a curiosity about the obscure.
"I think we both had an understanding right away that it's cool to give people opportunities that maybe have never DJed before," Matson said. "We're not snobby about anybody's technical ability. We just want people to feel comfortable and casual, but to unite with a real passionate feeling about music."
I asked Matson for recommendations of events people with a passion for music should check out in the next few weeks.