First of all, I’d like to wish all of the visitors of Above & Beyond, may they be daily, weekly or even monthly, a happy new year, I might have missed the annual Merry Christmas officially, but I am definitely standing guard for new year/’s eve.

To that I’d like to add that while years come and go, what really stays are the memories that are built and forever attached to them. 2009 was certainly up and down for me, while more stable than 2008, I could have passed on alot of things that’s for sure. For 2010, expectations are high… I’ve recently decided that having high expectations saves you from having low standards, which I sometimes tends to oblige too easily with my care-free attitude.

I also realized that while I used to post alot of personal posts (which I’ll restart to do in twenty ten), I’ve never actually said anything about who I was or anything for the newcomers, expecting visitors to already know everything about me, since my early visitors were mostly my friends, but as the year progressed, more and more people started to show up and I never really did an official presentation or whatever. I figured that the first day of this new year would be perfect for that kind of post, being a fresh start.

First of all, the name’s Mathieu, or Matt if you prefer using the Shakespeare tongue. I am hailing from the great city of Montreal, which resides in the Canadian province of Quebec, which explains the french canadian name, and while we’re here, I’m also 23 years old. I studied multimedia and currently are on my the verge of the door of my third year working on websites for a big local/national television station. I like every music genre out there and only classify music by being either good or bad, no discrimination as I discovered that the only way to really appreciate music was to set no boundary.

I used to love punk-rock/emo music during high school and early college, even was in a midly successful local band at some point, but I somewhat grew apart from it and went back towards hip-hop music as the years went on. The same hip-hop that I’d barely scratched during those high school years that was introduced to me by Eminem and Dr. Dre, but expanding it tenfold. It was also the beginning of the whole indie music as which local act The Arcade Fire really spearheaded the whole thing for me. Which might explains the lineup of the posts from time to time that goes from a track of Lil Wayne to a new video of Death Cab For Cutie, I’ve always posted about the music I liked and wanted to share with the rest of y’all and not only the music of a specific genre, much like the music I listen to and are part of my iPod rotation.

So there you have it, a little bit of infos on who’s actually posting all of this stuff on Above & Beyond, in case anyone wondered if there was an actual flesh and bones person behind this blog. I used to have collaborators, but they ended up to be not reliable enough, so I came back to the ‘one-man army’ concept as it worked for me so far. Thanksgiving is long far gone, but I want to thanks every single visitors that came across this blog, thank you for sticking around if you’ve been here a long time or thank you for visiting if it’s your first time around the block, but I have to say that I never actually thought this blog would become what it is today and last this long when I first started this stuff. And as stupid as it sounds, Above and Beyond became an important part in my daily life, and colour me surprised when I say that I never thought I had the rigor to hold a blog, but I think that it keeps me grounded and connected especially as I’m always trying to find out which way to go next.

2009, it’s not really sad to see you go
2010, hi, it is nice to meet you

ps. Retrospective 2009 starts next week.