Damaged Ecstasy: an Interview with Mathew Lee Cothran of Coma Cinema – Ryan Bry
June 5, 2025
Ryan Martin Bry: Yo MLC, you’re gonna live in a world where you’ve put out a 6th Coma Cinema record. That’s a staggering invitation to a stranger and kinder world. Let’s get into the interview. My introduction to your music and you as a person came at a cosmically fragile point—a house show—where I was plastered and acting like king shithead, my friend Blake sat me down in the dark living room alone with the record player and said “you have to listen to this, no dude, you have to listen to this” and then went away to pretend party. What I experienced in those moments was like emerging slime-caked from a murky river to rest at the bird talons of a beautiful crane. That crane was Holo Pleasures (2013) on vinyl. My first question for you if you’re ready for it is how does it feel to be an artist who adds something undeniably extra to his art—call it spiritual, call it personal, call it celestial, but there seems to be this emotional fragment of yourself that you’re okay with offering up to the reality dogs. Not many artists could even consider themselves a fraction of how vulnerable you are in your approach to making worlds out of a song. Everything else just seems so formulized and palatable all for the sake of nothing. What’s it like to live with this energy you’ve created, this organic reciprocation between the cosmos and you? What sorts of characters have emerged from meeting the world with that template?
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Mathew Lee Cothran: I think my music tends to find a certain type of person’s vulnerabilities, and it finds them in the state when they’re most open to it. For everyone who thinks I make powerful music there are billions of other people who think I make dogshit for morons. That’s the nature of all art, but i’ve found that my songs tend to trigger a lot of rage and anger in people who aren’t on the same wavelength, this started when I first started making songs in Spartanburg, SC while I was in highschool. I couldn’t get gigs and other bands in the area would openly tell me my songs were bad and I needed to quit. I was never encouraged by anyone except my uncle Sean, who makes incredible music to this day as The Color of Light, and then I met Justin Blackburn, an amazing poet who could see through the bullshit into what I was trying to do.
A lot of people involved in music don’t love music, they don’t even love art. They love status and attention, and music is one route to that, not a very good one though. It’d be much easier to self immolate, many more people are beginning to see this and you’re starting to see people socially self immolating daily for that dopamine hit. I think as the average person gets lazier, less patient, and more dopamine addicted you’ll see less musicians overall, because like AC/DC said it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock n’ roll, and no one enjoys the long cut anymore, but that’s where all the best ideas are found I think, musically or otherwise.
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RMB: How much does your syrupy, defunct angel sense of humor seep into your creation process when you sit down and want to work on something that the whole world will have access to? Do you ever write something and are like “nah, the world isn’t ready for that?”
MLC: All the time, and sometimes you have to do things the world isn’t ready for. I wrote a song about the notion of innocence and public demonization frenzies called “Adam Walsh on Expired Milk” and maybe in the past before i’d been through the looking glass of what it’s like to be wrongfully lied about and misrepresented by people who exist solely to be the rain escaping a miasmatic cloud of jealousy and self hatred, I would have shelved the song, but I am braver now, out of necessity and survival.
In the song I make the case that OJ Simpson and Casey Anthony are innocent, if someone wants to be angry about that so fucking what? If they want me to get in trouble for expressing it they’re free to come find me and shoot me dead in the street, I don’t care, people become what they hate and by that I mean people self-actualize. I am espousing something different that I see as a means to love and forgive oneself, which begins when we forgive ourselves for being born.
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RMB: Since one of your projects that are all remarkable for dispersing suffering to the corners of psychology land is named Coma Cinema—the most relevant today since that’s what you’re releasing Grand Delusion under—what’s your relationship like with the cinema art? What movie have you seen where you thought “I wish more movies were exactly like this?” If I were to enter a comatose state what kinds of imagery would you send to my void?
MLC: My favorite film of all time is Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. To me the highest aim of film should be to reproduce our dreams. If art is the synthesis of our memories and experiences into something tangible and accessible, dreaming does this without effort and flawlessly. On top of that everyone does it. Kurosawa, in my mind, established himself as the greatest master of that medium when he made Dreams.
I love movies though, if you take a film like Brian De Palma’s Carrie and really absorb each scene it’s constructed like a bewildering, perfect rock album. Every frame of that movie is immaculately conceived, it’s gorgeous and horrifying. Acting is something i’ve always wanted to do but have never been afforded the opportunity. I think Christine starring Rebecca Hall might be the finest example of acting in human history. Rebecca went beyond the confines of entertainment there and struck a vein of something deeper and it markedly changed my life when I saw it.
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RMB: On Grand Delusion there seems to be light songs and shadow songs. The yin/yang you’ve offered (the album cover of the world could even be seen as a yin and yang symbol, a more detailed version) is a fractalized distillation of what one comes to when they come to terms with reality that seems beyond the diabolical. Were you trying with psychological or spiritual effort to transcend the light and darkness in order to transfer that emotion to words or musical notes or were you just making another record? How does that deposit settle into something liveable for you?
MLC: The cover art is actually a photograph of this “moon” my mother painted for me and it has hung in every bedroom of my life since I was born, watching over me. It has both a light and dark side, my mother is perhaps the greatest poet I have ever known and I think, subconsciously or not, she was preparing me for a lifetime that embodied two sides with everything. I am Gemini to the core. The record does I think embody two sides in so many ways, “triumph and tragedy,” “serving 2 masters,” the idea that you can be two different people or more inside and both are true to who you are. For too long, for thousands of years people have tried to put the toothpaste back into the tube when it comes to our personalities. The truth is there are no easy answers and even more so there are no consistent ones, we take a risk every moment we trust anyone, even ourselves, that’s the beauty of it too and the terrifying heart of it, we have no fucking idea where we’re going or why, but we have no choice but to move through time in a linear way. So many try to paint out a destination that can take your eyes off the reality of the road in front of your feet but it’s a fool’s errand.
Then again so what, we are all fools and we love being fooled.
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RMB: Do you think there are healing properties contained in the emotion of angst?
MLC: I think the healing is the truest desire of the angst. Angst is the birdsong, healing is the bird, but we are only viewing this reality. We can find the source of the song but we cannot then be the bird flying away, that’s not our place.
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RMB: Is the artist who excels in just one particular medium a dead concept? Have we finally looked through that ghost? What waits on the other side for someone thinking about branching out of their go-to mode of sculpting an essence?
MLC: I think it’s bullshit that any and every artist is expected to be everything now. You have to be a shitty comedian, podcaster, songwriter, filmmaker, actor, BMX pro silver medalist at the X Games, porn star, puppeteer and puppet somehow, poet, evangelist, marketing guru, and special ops killer. You are expected to be these things but you do not have to be them. I think all artists would benefit from following the path their spirit guides them too, if it’s doing 40,000 things then that’s wonderful, but if you find yourself traveling that many roads and finding no peace, you’re off the path your soul is most aligned with. Belief in something matters more than loyalty to it, there is no correct way but the way that stokes the fire of your belief the most in the moment.
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RMB: Tell me about your public and private interaction with video games. There’s this term that only video games and genre fiction uses called “world building”; I believe, correct me if this is wrong, after steeping myself in your oeuvre (noting the Who Owns the Graveyard? film), that maybe you’ve been affected by this concept? Would spaces that are typically thought of as more for serious art benefit from having a world building approach? If you were to create a video game what would it look like?
MLC: I love video games, and love world building, but to me both are coping mechanisms. World building in myself was how I escaped childhood traumas and suffering, and to this day I find myself practicing “Maladaptive Daydreaming,” but I don’t have a sense of shame around it. A video game like Shenmue is a masterpiece of world building, and expresses something other art forms can’t. I think video games have the potential to replace all art and I am fine with that. I think if I made a video game i’d want it to be like Shenmue, a slice of a life unlivable to me, dreamlike and absurd, something digital that attaches itself to organic memory.
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RMB: Is beauty dormant in this current phase of society? Why are people too afraid to say beautiful things to one another right now? I remember I was dming you at one point and you said something like “I’m grateful to be on this earth at the same time as you.” Humans have the ability to cut through everything with words—why do they not want to reach through with that power and what’s the cost of letting those sayings go by?
MLC: Humans are the virus but capitalism is the air by which it’s transmitted. What is a virus but a soulless being? We have lost touch with our soul and through that disconnect we have lost touch with the greater fabric of the shared spiritual experience. People are afraid of their own thoughts, they call them “intrusive” like they’re a home invader, but no these type of thoughts are the creaking of the very foundation of the house, yet we are terrified of this “noise.” Capital renders everything a transaction even our basic communication with each other, everyone loses something so everyone can gain another something, it’s unfortunate but through self-awareness and bravery we can break through to each other. You have to be unafraid of being taken the wrong way, villainized, bullied, whatever. I think “turning the other cheek” isn’t so much a concept of allowing abuse because suffering is nature, I believe it’s more a practice of normalizing the ways we express ourselves to each other, when we open up to others and they hurt those vulnerable parts of us, I think it’s brave to be more vulnerable in response, and lead by example. Causing another to suffer does nothing to alleviate the suffering of ourselves, and through belief, experiencing suffering does not cause us to suffer but rather to know ourselves and our world and be reconnected to something more than this bullshit life of harmful information and fueling entropy.
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RMB: From listening to the single “Thomas Kinkade’s Grand Delusion” I can tell that you’re interested in giving your listeners something more full-pictured, and more alternately selected, as if you’ve decked out a cave with glittering objects. I think all of your true fans would be excited that you’ve built yourself to this apex, with the obvious footnote that there are many dangers on the way of achieving it. When do you think that collectively we’ll be able to say “we survived the past together, and we deserve a present with good things?”
MLC: I personally don’t use the word “fan” but I don’t mind people that do. I won’t police someone’s language especially when it’s in a positive light, but I feel a greater connection with the people who listen to my music and support me. It quite literally is my lifeblood.
I definitely made Grand Delusion constantly thinking about all the people who have been listening to me for nearly 2 decades now and to disappoint them I think would really shake me to my core, it’s a lot of pressure, maybe undue pressure that I put myself under to continue the legacy of this project. I think what you say about survival and the present we deserve is a big part of this album, I want it to be celebratory for myself and everyone along on this ride with me, I want there to be moments of great catharsis for the listener, and I want that to continue onto the next Coma Cinema record too. I think a record like Loss Memory that is very grieving and forlorn was necessary at the time. I think Blue Suicide expressed a kind of early 20s psychotic frenzy a lot of people experience and I think it was a major connecting call to the audience I have to this day. I want to honor this long term relationship we have with this album and express a hypothesis on existence that I think we can all find some jubilation in, along with the suffering. The last line on the album “Find humor in despair if you want to live in this world” I think sums up the project really well. If anything is my philosophy at 37 it’s that.
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RMB: I’m putting this in here as something for me to look forward to but after I finish filmmaking school which I start in the month of August I’d really love to direct a psychedelic psyche ward drama called Dove Breath that features your music heavily. I’ve currently written 17 pages of it. Any pointers you can draw on as I go to flesh this out? Anything in particular you want to see?
MLC: I think you’d make an amazing film. I think you should cast me in it, for you my friend I would act my ass off.