A Matter of Time
Mick Moss has been digging through the archives, including an old four-track recorder from the 1990s, for music he never expected would see the light of day. Parallel Matter marks the 25th anniversary of his dark-prog project, Antimatter. The Liverpool musician tells Prog about the “rollercoaster ride” of the last two and a half decades and his plans for the future.
Words: Chris Cope Images: John Johnson
Mick Moss isn’t ready to jump off Antimatter’s rollercoaster just yet.
At one point during Prog’s chat with Antimatter’s Mick Moss, he plucks an old four-track Tascam cassette recorder from a shelf above him.
It only has volume and pan controls – “no bass, treble or EQ, and there’s no scope for putting effects in,” he explains – and in this day and age it looks better suited to a museum of recording artefacts than a studio. But it’s not just an old piece of junk collecting dust. It’s the four-track on which Moss recorded his formative material as a fledging musician in the 1990s, and perhaps acts as a symbol of his journey through the ranks over the last 25 years. Moss has delved back into those recordings for his project’s latest release, Parallel Matter, with the early four-track tunes featuring on a bonus disc called Mick Moss Prototapes: The Home Recordings 1995-99.