Matia Guardabascio didn’t come to North Carolina looking for a music scene; she came looking for a way out. After years of grinding through 100-hour work weeks in Boston, sleeping five hours a night, and stretching $15 grocery budgets, a layoff became an unexpected lifeline. Armed with severance pay but no plan, Guardabascio took the biggest risk of her life at 27: a one-way move to Durham.
As a fellow yank transplant who moved south rather spontaneously, it’s an “origin story” I can relate to. It’s one thing to move to a new city, but the culture shock of a new region can be debilitating. Fortunately, what started as a fresh start for Guardabascio evolved into something far more meaningful. Through her zines — Durham Beat and Secret Astronomer — she has become one of the Triangle’s most authentic voices in music journalism, not through traditional assignments or editorial deadlines, but by simply following her curiosity wherever it leads.
When my fellow collaborator, Stephen Mullaney, put me in touch with Guardabascio, I knew we needed to do more than just talk shop. Before I embarked on a chaotic uprooting of my own (albeit to move houses, not states), we gathered at Joe Van Gogh in Durham to discuss building community, trusting your instincts, and why the best way to start is simply to pick something and do it.
What have you been listening to lately?
Matia: Every year, I build a mood playlist based on what I’m feeling at any given moment. I’m making one for a friend, so I have actually been revisiting some old music. A little bit of Viagra Boys, some Blind Willie Johnson, Ligeti Quartet, Anna Meredith, Benjamin Booker, Edith Whiskers, The Null Club, Gia Margaret, and Bob Dylan.
You’re putting all of those artists in a playlist for your friend?
Matia: Yeah, some of them. He’s an avant-garde classical composer, and I wanted to make a robust playlist of music that’s adjacent to that style or meaningful to me to share with him.
I go through phases where I’ll revisit something and that’ll be the only thing I listen to for months. But then the only thing I want after that is anything I haven’t heard before. Or I’ll go down a rabbit hole of seeing who someone collaborated with, or finding a random old album and digging in for a music history tour. Over the past year, I’ve been building a catalog of avant-garde classical or contemporary classical music that’s more experimental.
What leads you down that sort of rabbit hole?
Matia: Curiosity, certainly. Something will catch my ear or surprise me, so I’ll investigate it and get as much out of it as I possibly can. I basically treat it like a research project.
What is the first musician that you remember either discovering on your own or having somebody introduce to you and obsessing over?
Matia: I’m not sure I have the ability to answer that question in the general sense, because there’s so much. But if we’re talking here in North Carolina, the answer is sister,brother. Somebody who used to work at Sam’s Quik Shop (RIP) recommended them to me. I went to go see them play and was wowed, so I talked to them. It turned out they were about to play Moogfest, so I decided to cover that with a zine.
At that point, the Durham Beat was just getting going, but hearing them and going to that show set me on that journey. I made a short documentary about them. I taught myself Premiere Pro over four days and just made it. The film looks like what they sound like, so it works.
What originally brought you to North Carolina?
Matia: The desire to fundamentally change the course of my life. And a layoff. I’d been living in Boston, working three jobs, seven days a week, 100 hours a week, and freelancing on top of that. I was sleeping about five hours a night, trying to live on $15 a week for groceries, and being crushed by my student loans.
My weekend job was at this farm stand. It was honestly the best job I ever had. It was like $13 an hour to work at a cash register and do some manual labor for 20 hours on the weekend. When it was slow, I would just sit in the sun and read books and eat peaches. All of that is to say that life in the Northeast was unsustainable. I wanted out, but I was trapped because I didn’t have any savings, so I couldn’t leave. My day job was working at Macmillan Publishing, the higher ed division, in a low-level communications position. That was during a huge transitional period of years for corporate publishing in general, and so there were eight rounds of layoffs before they got to my department, and then they laid off my entire department except for one person.
So I took my severance, packed up all my stuff, and moved to North Carolina.
Had you visited before or was it a spontaneous “get me out of the North” move?
Matia: Originally, it was going to be Providence or Philly. But then I came down here to visit one of my old friends from college, who was living in Raleigh and working as a chef. I’d never been to the South before. We went to Pizzeria Toro, danced at The Station, saw a show at Cat’s Cradle, and got drinks at Criterion (or I guess it was still Whiskey then).
And then, the Monday I got home from that trip, I walked into the office and lost my job. So I took it as a sign, made a pros and cons list out of Post-It notes on the wall of my room and stared at it for two weeks before picking North Carolina. It represented the biggest risk, but I decided that’s what I wanted. So I packed up my stuff and moved here with no job and no plan at 27. And I just figured it out from there.
What was the timeline between moving down here and getting that sister,brother recommendation?
Matia: My first couple of years here was really just adjusting to living in the South, which was a huge cultural adjustment for me. The pace of life is different here. Just the way that people interact with each other is different. It took me a while to kind of shift from living in a bustling northeastern city to living in the South.
I started hanging out at the Quik Shop after I got a job at Duke. I wandered in there, realized it wasn’t just a gas station, and it became t my place to meet people and make some friends. After conducting about a year of in-depth music scene research, I decided to launch the Durham Beat at the end of 2017.
How do you approach covering the local music community?
Matia: I do what I feel. I have never enjoyed working for a publication. I’m not interested in assignments or deadlines. I’m interested in authenticity. And so, I think the reason why the work has been good is because I’ve only done the things that I’ve cared about. Or at least, the things that have called to me the most.
It’s impossible to separate myself from this stuff because I write in the first person. You’re following me around while I’m doing this stuff. And that’s the point.
I’ve written somewhat extensively on this and plan to write more on it as I age, but I don’t believe there’s such a thing as objectivity in media. Purporting the notion that we’re coming at something from an unbiased perspective leads to inauthenticity. If you just own the fact that you have a bias and you have a unique perspective and you come at it straight up from whoever you are, you’re going to write from a place that’s true. And so, when people engage with your work, whatever it might be or whoever it might be about, they’re going to know it comes from the heart. And it’s going to be easier for them to connect with it.
Connecting with people through art, whether that’s them reading a story I write or a song they’ve listened to or an art show they went to or a t-shirt they saw sometime, that’s what I’m interested in. Capturing that on a page or in some way, even if it’s through an event or through a photograph or video, if I can do that, then I feel like I’ve done a good job.
From your perspective, how has the music scene changed in the last eight years?
Matia: COVID is like a void of time that exists culturally everywhere in the world. But in North Carolina, and the Triangle especially, I think that it made the scene more isolated. I don’t think that was necessarily the case before. The demographics of the city have changed a lot too, and so it’s affected the scene a bit.
I would like to see Durham artists playing outside of Durham more. I think this scene needs to tour more because what’s going on here is interesting. There’s a lot of heart here and it should be shared more. Pre-COVID, Durham was very active. You had Raund Haus, The Conjure, and a lot of really active groups of people that were doing stuff that was highly collaborative.
COVID kind of pushed everybody back into a corner a little bit, just existentially, and so I think the scene is trying to get back to its collaborative roots. One of the things about this place that I love and that was really obvious to me when I first came here was that it’s adamant about being itself. It’s interested in collaboration, not competition. That dynamic has shifted a little bit in the post-COVID world because the existential dread of that moment altered everybody’s lives in a really strange and unpredictable way.
I think we’ve unlearned how to socialize in some cases, too.
Matia: There’s a massive crisis of social intimacy, and I think that art can help to relieve that. People need to know where to go and what to do.
That’s honestly one of the reasons why I wanted to turn Durham Beat into a monthly show listing. It has an established following already and I love the idea of a massive calendar with a bunch of cool stuff going on.. If you put that in front of people, you open up a world of curiosity. All I have to do is dedicate a week of my life every month to looking at every calendar that’s ever existed and putting together a cool list. Which is a lot, too much sometimes.
The other weekend I co-hosted a show over at Shadowbox for a zine collaboration that I did with my project Secret Astronomer and Duped Zine. There were a couple of Duke students and former UNC students who got together, did music interviews, and we worked together to put together these zines, and put on this show.
I’ve been really inspired by what I’ve been seeing from the younger generation coming up. There’s a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity among them. There were four generations represented at this show, from Boomers to Gen Z and even some toddlers. It was really nice to see that coming together because we need more of that.
To that end, what advice would you give to someone passionate about art and music who doesn’t know how to start in the local scene?
Matia: There’s no right way to start, just pick something and do it. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you hate it, then pick something else. There’s no right or wrong way to engage. You just have to do whatever works for you. If you want to go to the chess club at the public library, then go to that. If you want to go to the 919 cypher on Friday nights down at the Bull, then go to that.
The point is to feel a connection to something. That’s entirely personal, totally subjective. You can’t screw up. It’s not possible. Go to a museum, read a book, listen to an album. Pay attention to what elicits a reaction in you. There’s no point in reinventing the wheel.
I’d also say lean on your friends and family. Then all of a sudden you have a nice social activity where they get to support you in this thing and you get to try this new thing out while cultivating a relationship
Who are some of your favorite local/North Carolina artists?
Matia: I like many different types of art, including music. Gown is a band I really like; they’re a cello-based rock band. BrassiousMonk and Jooselord are fantastic. Magic Tuber String Band is cool. I don’t have any favorites. I love what the scene is doing in general, and so maybe you can find a little bit of something for everyone.
Venus Wraps does really cool wire-wrapped jewelry. Sorreal Art makes really cool pottery. Everything that ArtPost is doing is very inspiring. Same for Manifest Skate Shop. And Shadowbox Studio, such an important space in Durham.
Wutang McDougal is a wonderful design artist. Sass is a fantastic photographer. I also recently contributed a little visual writing piece to this new zine called 9th Street Underground.
I am extremely partial towards noise and experimental music, so I could probably give you a pretty long list of stuff in that category. But I also really enjoy visual art, photography, and various types of craft works. I try not to confine myself to a singular art path. It’s too limiting. I’m way too curious for that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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