There is a swamp siren sporting yellow glasses named Matt Kamm, and he’s the Orlando-based, bog-bred mind behind the chameleonic Tele & the Ghost of Our Lord. He’s asking you to square-dance your way through possibly the most Orlando-inspired set you’ll ever experience Saturday at CityArts.
Besides its “day job” as a busy gallery space, CityArts has long served as a sometimes stage for adventurous music, hosting intimate listening room-style shows that allow artists and locals to coexist with downtown organically.
Kamm says it’s his favorite way to perform, blending his sounds with the bustle of downtown life — much like the two sides of Tele & the Ghost of Our Lord.
Kamm received a guitar for his birthday from his musically inclined father on his 12th birthday. That, and his adolescence in swampy Florida, shaped the identity of the sound he continues to summon today.
“It was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, I’m actually good at something,’” Kamm tells Orlando Weekly.
Taking the usual path that young musicians do, Kamm started out in punk rock and strummed his way into a shell that made sense for him to curl up in.
Kamm released his first record as Tele & the Ghost of Our Lord in 2007 before exploring various other side projects and aliases. He ultimately returned to the nom-de-rock with the release of the seven-inch single “Dwell/Black Balloons” in 2017. To Kamm, the alias Tele & the Ghost of Our Lord was a calling of sorts.
“It’s about following instincts — the inklings that don’t always make sense but feel grounded in becoming oneself and answering the call,” he says. “I was living in an abandoned, foreclosed house that I was sure was haunted when I made that first full-length in 2007. There certainly was a presence, and I named it the Ghost of Our Lord.”
Like many longtime Florida residents, Kamm always had a friend, or a friend of a friend, who could get him and the fam into Disney parks growing up.
“My family — let’s just say — we didn’t have a lot of money, but we were resourceful,” he says.
Kamm became utterly infatuated with the animatronics at Disney World as a child, especially the Country Bear Jamboree at the Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland.
“I don’t think I realized it until much later on in my life, how heavily that had influenced the art that I made,” Kamm says.
Kamm recognized the subconscious pull of those influences after people began comparing his music to Disney stars like Thurl Ravenscroft (also the voice of Tony the Tiger), The Aristocats soundtrack and “The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room,” the first song that was written for a Disney audio-animatronics attraction.
Around that same formative time, Kamm grew up visiting ShowBiz Pizza and was similarly enamored with its Orlando-born eccentric animatronic band, The Rock-afire Explosion.
Recently, Kamm tipped his cowboy hat to that influence, playing with the animatronic band in Illinois at the Volo Museum. One can only imagine Kamm’s excitement in reliving that childhood memory, but better.
Drawing from that Floridian childhood whimsy, Kamm channels those memories into his music, creating songs that embrace both the South’s beauty and its many contradictions.
“There’s also a very strange culture to all of that, when it comes to American ideals and the decay of them,” Kamm says. “It’s kind of maybe my way of coping, to work with these things, surrealism and psychedelia, in balloon form. It seems very American to me.”
Kamm, like many middle-class Orlandoans slogging through the murky waters of a crumbling economy and an ever-deepening debt bog, has been searching for a way to stay afloat. Through sound, Kamm wades between those worlds, stirring together Orlando’s concrete sprawl and the swamp’s slow pulse into something that can be survived and heard.
Beyond the folk- and country-heavy sound he most recently conjures, Kamm has always been drawn to keyboards and synthesizers. Building warm vistas of sound with analog equipment is one of his favorite creative pursuits.
“Synthesizers are so environment-building. I’m trying to push this old-world aesthetic,” Kamm says. “Think of that saloon world but hyper-contextualizing it in a modern sense.”
Kamm found that meshing these two sound-worlds would prove to be his life’s purpose, bridging completely different traditions while giving them a modern voice. He spends most of his time sharpening his sound-engineering chops through hours of experimentation and sonic landscape-building.
“Tele & the Ghost of Our Lord is my personal exploration device,” Kamm says. “It’s just a way for me to find my voice and spend whatever amount of time trying to create the place that feels like home to me.”
It took time before Kamm discovered a sound that resonated with him completely, to find something that felt familiar. The soundscapes Kamm builds now with this outsider country music are very close to the hum of his soul.
“It’s one of those worlds where you have to keep going, you have to keep this endless wonder,” Kamm says. “There’s this beautiful Miles Davis quote and I’m going to get it wrong: ‘It takes the longest to sound like yourself.’”
Davis’ actual quote — “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself” — captures a struggle familiar to artists everywhere: the lifelong pursuit of an authentic and creative identity. It is extremely alive in the weirdest byways of Orlando, where artists like Kamm embark on endless pursuits of sundazed self-reinvention.
“Continuing to do it even when it’s very difficult,” Kamm affirms.
Now, Kamm is taking his ever-evolving sound all over Florida. He’d be much obliged if you join him and Gainesville’s dreamy indie-folk crooner Jordan Burchel for a musical walk back (and forward) in time Saturday at CityArts. The night also features an acoustic set by Jonas Van den Bossche and Bryan Sherbrook’s keening bluegrass melodies.
7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, CityArts, 39 S. Magnolia Ave., downtownartsdistrict.com/cityarts, $16.
