Field Recordings, Hydrophones, Bass music and Collaboration: Matt Sephton Releases Debut Album VĀ
In the NZ winter of 2025, Coromandel based artist Matt Sephton and his wife - ceramic artist Caitlin Moloney - journeyed on their first explorative artist residency together, to the Tiapapata Art Centre in the hills above Apia, Samoa. Both arrived with their respective tools: microphones, field recorders, ceramic tools, and no idea of the outcome.
The purpose of this residency was simple: to step outside familiar surroundings, be immersed in a different culture, and see how being in a new environment might transform their work. Listening and creating: to the land, the water, the people, and to what exists in the space between.
VĀ, released 27 March 2026, is the result of that time of sonic and cultural exploration. A place-based work merging field recordings, found sounds, hydrophone experiments, collaborations with the land and people, blended with bass heavy electronic production.
The production aesthetic is open and exploratory: bass-heavy, playful, physical. Tracks shift between momentum and stillness, small sounds given room to breathe, low frequencies allowed to pulse and move. Underwater sounds captured with hydrophones, the textures of village life, forests and spoken word, sand and coral shifting, water drops, large wooden drum tones, woven together with bass-rich electronic production. Eleven tracks that work as both music and document: a sonic journal of place, time, and connection. Capturing the beauty, the warmth and the challenging rawness of the experience.
The album takes its name from the Samoan concept of relational space: the space between people, between land and ocean, between sound and silence, between movement and stillness. Sephton found this idea alive in the texture of daily life on the island: not as an idyllic retreat, but as something more demanding, a living space charged with energy and friction, and the real work of being present somewhere genuinely unfamiliar. VĀ reflects that. Music made in the spaces between, in the places where people and environment meet.
Sephton and Moloney worked side by side in Tiapapata’s studios and surrounding open spaces, Sephton with microphones, hydrophones and various sound machines; Moloney with clay. The place itself became a kind of shared collaborator. One track, Clay, came directly from that exchange: the sound of clay dissolving in water, captured beneath the surface at the moment of collapse. Form giving way. Structure becoming sound. This experience was such a surprise and thrill for Moloney. These sounds of the clay collapsing brings an insight into her medium she would not have otherwise experienced, now a visceral and treasured memory of their time together.
Perched in the lush hills above Apia, Tiapapata sits close to village life, away from the coastal resorts. It is a hub for artists, academics and cultural leaders from Samoa and abroad, with a strong focus on the restoration of traditional knowledge and skills. With a ceramic studio open to the tropical weather, a papermaking workshop making paper from native and pest plants, a dojo where locals and expats practise MMA, boxing and jiu-jitsu, a café and large communal gallery and performance space, it is a place which inevitably encouraged the sharing of ideas and inspiration. A perfect environment to explore new work.
Collaborations on the album include Tau’ili’ili Alpha Maiava who performs fagufagu (Samoan nose flute) on Horizon and contributes vocals on Turtle. Local rapper Badi, AKA Moonshine OSKK, lends vocals to Siva. Ben Percival adds percussion across multiple tracks, while Steven Percival plays foa (conch shell) on Horizon and Moana. Ghanaian papermaker Awal Muhammed, resident at Tiapapata’s papermaking workshop, contributes spoken word and the quiet, tactile sounds of handmade paper.
VĀ is released under Sephton’s own name, not his long-standing bass-music alias Matt Rapid. The first in what he intends as an ongoing practice of place-based music-making, work that goes somewhere, listens, and brings that place back in sound. An exciting shift for Sephton into something more personal and not bound by genre expectations.
This is an album designed to be heard as a whole.
VĀ is released 27 March 2026 on streaming platforms, or for download on Bandcamp.