Interview: Matt Baldwin
How to Play Guitar (and Navigate the Unknown): Matt Baldwin on Psychotherapy, Edge Experiences, Punk Philosophy
Talking with psychotherapist, guitarist Matt Baldwin on his collection How to Play Guitar, an “anarchist cookbook for the creative process, an heirloom seed library of underground values and culture, a map of inner and outer edge places” (Tartantula Press 2025)
On motivation from V. Vale, the philosophical underpinnings of punk, on Nassim Taleb’s anti-fragile thinking and auto-didactic survival strategies, on John Fahey psyche, on low-res analog magic, on creativity as automatic cascading thought, on taping paper to paper at the kitchen table, on making art without handholding or explanation, on psychotherapy as edge work for the creative unconscious, on hypnosis and ontological shock, on alien abduction and lost time, on ketamine, on UFOs and the government’s, on synesthetic perception shifts and reality’s mutability, on rescue music, on DJing in therapy, on uncertainty as the engine of therapeutic change, on not-knowing as technique, on urban exploration of the haunted margins, on freight hopping and riding trains into wasteland, on survival and longevity as an artist, on stepping outside surveillance into forgotten spaces where trees grow through living room floors, on being, on enjoying being wrong, on religion and spiritual practice, on practice, on life.
Interview Excerpts
On Returning from the Edge
I think I say that in the book somewhere, it’s valuable to go crazy if you know how to come back.
On Paradigms
What did it destroy? It destroyed something about my reality, and how I think about reality. So it was this kind of weapon against my paradigm that I was holding onto.
On End Points
I think it’s more a case of, it’s time to face the answer rather than to find the answer.
On Music in Therapy
It’s all you have to do. Just listen to the music. And that was very reassuring. And if you do that, you realize that the music is this carrier wave that pulls you through the experience. And it can energize the experience or it can make it more tranquil.
Interview contains samples from Matt Baldwin’s Album NEW UNIVERSAL SOLAR CALENDAR
Intro: Did you See the Eyes
Outer: Old Sand Roads
Links:
Matt Baldwin’s Psychotherapy Practice: https://mattbaldwin.net/
How To Play Guitar by Matt Baldwin
