Hi, I’m Matty. I live in Vancouver, Canada. I’m a culture operator and DJ with 20 years in music, working across live events, artist management and the tools behind them. I also DJ, curate and do music supervision as DJ Express.
What’s new
- New: matthewowchar.com is live. You are looking at it.
- New: CLIPARCHIVE is online.
- Since 2025: managing Sophia Stel.
Current projects
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Sophia StelI manage the artist Sophia Stel through Different Gear Mgmt, the artist management company I founded in 2025.
My role: Manager. Founder of Different Gear Mgmt.
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The UVA live events company and creative agency. UV Presents books and promotes concerts in Vancouver.
Latest: Live From The Riviera, three days of electronic music on Granville Island, May 2026.
My role: Co-founder, with Karli Fahlman, in 2017.
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CLIPARCHIVEA working museum of clip art. It is a free-to-browse archive of vintage 1990s clip art rescued from old CD-ROMs: tens of thousands of clips online, millions catalogued.
My role: My project. I built it with agentic workflows.
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Paradise Cultural SocietyA non-profit that curates and co-presents music events in Vancouver. It ran a venue of the same name until 2025.
My role: Co-founder, since 2019. Head musical curator and resident DJ.
What I did before
From 2010 to 2025 I worked at Blueprint, Western Canada’s largest events promoter and hospitality company. My last job there was Senior Talent Buyer.
What I’m building
I don’t write code by hand. I design the systems, agents build them, and I review and ship the result. Some of what’s running right now:
| Name | What it does |
|---|---|
| PocketOps | A phone app that lets me run and steer my agentic workflows on a server from anywhere, including by voice. |
| CLIPARCHIVE | The clip art museum above. Agents rescued the files off old CD-ROMs, catalogued and described them, and built the site. |
| DG Tour Itin | A custom-built tour app for an artist’s world tour: schedule, flights, hotels, riders and stage plots on one phone link for the whole crew. It reads the tour inbox and updates itself. |
| UV Production Portal | Run sheets, advancing pages and post-show settlements for UV concerts. |
| Punk Brain | The operating system for a one-person company. Projects, meetings, decisions and deals live in one place, and my agents read it before they draft an email, plan a tour or chase an invoice. Also packaged as Punk Brain Starter for friends. |
| Domain-to-website | Research a name, buy the domain and build the site from one prompt on my phone. This site is the first one. |
Total staff: one person and a lot of agents.
Links I like
- DJ Express on SoundCloud
- DJ Express on Resident Advisor
- The Express Hour, my newsletter on Substack
School
BA Political Science, UBC.