Denver-based electronic artist Joseph Kechter — better known by his artist name, Motifv — makes music that reflects the duality found within humanity. Humankind is a species of contradictions, dichotomies, opposing forces constantly colliding. Light and darkness, love and hate, melancholy and joy dance endlessly within each person who walks this Earth, swirling around and intertwining with each other like lovers existing beyond time. It is the dance that makes humanity what it is: the good is unable to exist without the bad, and the contradictions shine gloriously like the sun behind the moon during an eclipse. Each person is their own cosmic event, the likes of which this world has never seen.
Motifv recognizes this and crafts his music around it. It reflects the most beautiful aspects of being alive, the sweet joys that can come from accepting the fact that there will be sadness in this life, and that that’s okay. Resilience exists within his music, the willingness to keep going, keep climbing toward the light when things are at their darkest. These feelings pervade all his work — one reason of many for the great amount of attention Motifv’s acquired over the course of his relatively young career — but they’ve never been more apparent than they are on his most recent companion EPs inspired by the solar eclipse that occurred at the beginning of April, Where the Sun Sets/Behind the Moon.
303 Magazine recently spoke with Motifv about the EPs, his history with music, his approach to sampling, his place in the music scene and much more.
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Born and raised in Fort Collins, Kechter’s been making music since his high school days, saying he truly got started “when [he] was about 16 or 17.” For him, it all started with hip-hop. He said that while he’d always been a hip hop head, it wasn’t until he heard Pete Rock that he began to see all the pieces that go into crafting a hip hop song, lyrics and melody working in conjunction with the production to create a fully rounded piece of music.
It was also around this time that he heard Bonobo’s 2000 album Animal Magic for the first time, saying that “it was the first time [he] realized that sample-based production could be that focus of a piece of music.” This led to his first real interest in sampling. Kechter said, “I started finding the things that Bonobo was sampling, the tracks that a lot of hip hop producers had sampled to make the songs that I like and came to know and love. That’s really how I got into it. I just started dissecting hip hop songs, listening to soul music and funk music and realizing that there was a direction that you could take it that’s larger than just being a beat.”
This realization led to regular trips to his local record store, picking up obscure funk and soul records that he felt would serve his music but also that he believed more people should know about. This was the first time in the conversation that Kechter revealed a sense of altruism in the way he creates. He makes music that he enjoys but that he also believes will improve the lives of those who hear it. This eventually led to his exploration of the duality of man, creating songs that sounded the way people felt.
His experiments with sampling also led to his choosing the name Motifv. He said, “The name Motifv came from that as well, because I was finding all these old sections of soul records and stuff, and I was sampling them and trying to give them this new youth and bring them to an audience that may not like to hear that kind of stuff. The name came from the underlying theme throughout my art and my music, which is bringing that from the past up into the present.”
As high school came to an end and Kechter’s producing and sampling skills continued to improve, which he described as “something that seemed to come pretty easily to [him],” Kechter decided to move to New Orleans when he was around 19. It was there that he truly decided to take music as more than something to make for fun. In addition to being immersed in the music there, he also started work on what would become his first album, 2019’s The Path.
After a couple of years in New Orleans, he decided to move to Denver to be closer to family and to join the music scene here, which has welcomed him with open arms. He finished The Path after returning to his home state and truly kick-started his career.
In the nearly five years since The Path‘s release, Kechter has grown a lot both as an artist and as a human being. He said his early projects were more focused on “just making what [he] thought sounded cool.” Now, he approaches his work with more intention, meticulously handling each detail, from the samples to the sound design to even the cover art himself.
This growth is fully apparent on Motifv’s new, eclipse-inspired joint EPs, Where the Sun Sets and Behind the Moon. Describing the projects as his “babies,” both are incredibly mature and thematically deep efforts that also happen to be groovy as hell. Kechter said that he’d always been fascinated by the concept of an eclipse from a metaphoric point of view. They represent that which lives in the heart of each person, light and dark coming together to become something greater, something cosmic that only ever occurs once in a lifetime. The EPs fully reflect this, with Where the Sun Sets representing the light and Beneath the Moon representing the dark.
True to the concept, the former feels brighter, like the sun shining on a glowing green field on a cloudless day. The latter is decidedly more muted and more mellow, with the feeling of looking up into the vast night sky and realizing just how small you are captured sonically. In tandem, they serve to comfort as much as they do to vibe to. It hearkens back to that idea of duality, the sun and the moon living inside all of us.
Motifv’s music feels like the soul of humankind put to a beat. It captures the elation associated with the light without neglecting the melancholy that can come with the dark. It serves as a reminder not to worry when you can’t find the sun. The moon can be just as bright.
Stream Where the Sun Sets/ Behind the Moon here!