Safety Scissors

In the closing years of the 1990s, electronic music from San Francisco began attracting wider notice through Belief-Systems releases, Internet streams on Beta-Lounge, and coverage in the XL8TR magazine. The Bay Area’s growing circle of producers, among them Kit Clayton and Mark Farina, earned a reputation for variety, and Matthew Patterson Curry—working as Safety Scissors—emerged as one of its members. His tracks favored an upbeat, eclectic strain of minimalist dub and appeared on Force Tracks, Context, Plug Research, and Beta Bodega, where he layered his own unpolished vocals and sampled elements, gradually defining a distinct voice inside the Belief-Systems network.

Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Curry relocated to the San Francisco region for a brief period of art school before turning his attention fully to music and entering the Belief Systems/Context Records collective. There he collaborated with Kit Clayton, Sutekh, and Twerk. Although he is chiefly recognized for offbeat ambient pieces, he also issued dance-oriented material on Cytrax and Force Tracks and records under the name Moron together with Seth Horvitz, better known as Sutekh. In 2000 he settled in Berlin, then a creative haven for numerous electronic artists. The next year he issued Parts Water on Plug Research.

Curry and Sutekh teamed up for the 2002 EP Pigeon Funk Presents!!!, which later received a 2004 remix album treatment. Safety Scissors’ follow-up full-length, Tainted Lunch, arrived in 2005 and highlighted the most eccentric and pop-leaning facets of the style first heard on Parts Water. After several years devoted to festival appearances and remixes for Grizzly Bear and Matmos, Curry established himself in Brooklyn and resurfaced in 2013 with In a Manner of Sleeping, widely regarded as the most seamless fusion of experimental, electronic, and pop elements in his catalog.