Emperor X
Marty Magee's Irish Pub
110 Lincoln Ave.
Prospect Park, Pennsylvania
July 2, 2025
I planned to cover an ambient show in West Philly Wednesday night. Then I got a call from my friend Chad Matheny, who's based in Germany. He asked me if I want to hang out tonight – he’s playing somewhere called Prospect Park.
“Brooklyn?”
"No, there’s a Prospect Park, Pennsylvania. I’ll find the address and text you later."
Chad, by the way, is Emperor X. For those who don’t know, Emperor X is the long-running moniker of one of the most original artists the American underground has ever produced.
Home-recorded? Since the '90s.
Playing every instrument? You know it.
Writing some of the most uniquely verbose, the-personal-is-the-political, Christ-haunted, compassionate and sci-fi-fried songs ever imagined? Absolutely he has.
Touring the country via Greyhound bus, leaving geo-cache’d cassettes scattered in his wake? He's done that many, many times.
More importantly to me, Chad is a dear friend. I met him when I was doing my undergrad in Connecticut in 2009. We were both asked to play a late-afternoon-into-sunset rooftop show in Boston, and I ended up joining his “acoustic guitar army” that night. When we were done, he asked me, “Do you want to go to this house called The Butcher Shoppe and play another set?” (You can hear some of that on his album, Nineteen Live Recordings.)
We’ve been friends ever since, and over the years, we’ve toured and performed together countless times. I even accompanied him years ago at the show that led to his deal with Bar/None Records, which released the seminal Western Teleport in 2011.
So even though Chad didn’t formally ask me to play this show with him, I planned to bring instruments, just in case. That’s how it is with Emperor X: you plan for the unplanned. Hours later, Chad called me back. “Are you bringing any instruments?” he asked.
“My banjo and my OP-1.”
“Hell yeah you are!!”
I showed up at Marty Magee's a little late, around quarter to 9. The first band of three, Baby Jones Locker, was playing their last song. I cased the surroundings: the room was small and packed. Classic Irish bar situation, very bright. It felt taken over by the punks, with some regulars mixed in for good measure. A funny tension that I love.
As Baby Jones packed up their gear, Chad approached me. “So what are we gonna do tonight?” he asked. He grabbed a guitar. I grabbed my banjo.
He led me to a spot in the bar’s backyard and taught me several new songs – we were apparently going to play all of them. (I knew well enough to expect that could change in the moment, or I could end up playing on others, too. Listen to a sample of us learning together below.)
We returned inside just in time to catch Second Husband cover “Life is a Highway." Seemingly the whole bar sang along; my friend Mike and I joined in. Mike sang the bassline but sang the lyrics too, which cracked me up. (You had to be there.)
The rest of the night was a blur beyond time. Emperor X (plus me) ripped through a set of mostly new-and-unreleased songs. I was surrounded by friends and wonderful people grinning ear to ear and singing along when they knew the words – which they usually did, whenever the song wasn’t brand new. The set leaned heavily on selections from 2022’s The Lakes of Zones B and C (“False Metal,” “Freeway in Heaven” and “Communists in Luxury” commanded strident singalongs; “The Crows of Emmerich” and “Rojava Punks” the same, though swap strident for dulcet), with several requests for older favorites lobbed from the crowd throughout. Highlights included Western Teleport’s fan favorites “Erica Western Teleport” and “Canada Day." Relative deep cut, “Sincerely, H.C. Pregerson,” made a late appearance, via surprising request.
Few artists achieve and instigate this feeling of communal uplift with the regularity that Chad does, especially not in his no-setlist, impulsive high-wire-act way. We got weird toward the end when Chad busted out the OP-Z for some drum-n-bass-heavy dance pop, with me playing what I’ll call “pitchless banjo.” (Basically, hitting it a lot.) My friend later described this portion of the show as “Mountain Goats meets Boiler Room.” I improvised playing floor and rack tom, with broken drum sticks, for all of eight measures, on one song. Chad closed the night sans-amplification, standing on a chair in the middle of the bar, playing “Use Your Hands” (2005), “Hallelujah” (2007), and a new song about, I think, whales (2025).
It was sweaty and fun and punk and weird and, for a moment in time, the space was not just a bar – it was transmogrified. And fried. Let’s call it transmogrifried. As Chad once wrote: “Music, especially live music, is a cultural object with unpredictable consequences.” I know he’s right, from firsthand experience. Bob Dylan’s phrase describing the folksinger Roscoe Holcomb comes to mind: “[he] has a certain untamed sense of control, which makes him one of the best." Few artists I’ve encountered both embrace and cultivate spontaneity like Emperor X; if nothing else, I think this review spotlights how he demands the very same of his collaborators.
Emperor X is on tour now. Find out more and follow him here.
