Martin Cilia and Joe Matera To Team For Instrumental Surf Collaboration

During the Covid lockdowns Sydney’s Martin Cilia and Melbourne’s Joe Matera have teamed to remotely record a couple of surf instrumentals.

Since 1999 Martin has been a long-time member of The Atlantics and between 2014 and 2020 the guitarist for Mental As Anything. Joe has five albums to his credit and pre-Covid was a regular in Europe with Swedish band Rough Rockers.

Martin said in a statement, “I first got to know Joe when I was on tour with Mental As Anything. Occasionally when we played in Melbourne, Joe was the opening act. I had previously seen Joe’s name as author/journalist for many articles in music magazines. It turned out that Joe is a huge Shadows fan, as am I, and loves the rhythm guitar work of the great Bruce Welch. Joe contacted me to see what I was up to, as COVID restrictions were making touring impossible. We started to work on a song together over the internet between Victoria and New South Wales. The first song we collaborated on was ‘Sunday Island’. That came out well, so we decided to try a second song which became ‘St Kilda Bay’.”

Joe says, “I’ve always loved Martin’s work with The Atlantics as well as his own solo instrumental material, and his guitar playing with Mental As Anything. So I sent Martin some demos of music I had put together and Martin really loved what he heard, so we fleshed out the ideas further into songs. We then recorded our parts in our own respective studios, adding our own shared influences. The songs echo our love of The Shadows, The Atlantics, The Ventures and all the classic guitar instrumental groups from the 1960s, infused with a high dose of melody and surf inspired, feel good grooves”.