Interview: Matmos and The Transient ‘Art Object’

Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt are Matmos, the San Francisco-based duo whose music is sound art in the truest sense—high-concept but wholly listenable. On last year’s The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, they assembled “sound portraits” of ten people they admire using objects from those individuals’ lives, and it’s perhaps their most compelling effort yet. As part of this year’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquim, they’ll be holding a free lecture, “The Re-Dematerialization of the Art Object” on February 12 from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. in 105 North Gate Hall. For more information, visit atc.berkeley.edu.

Daily Californian: What can we expect from “The Re-Dematerialization of the Art Object?”

Drew Daniel: It’ll start as a lecture and disintegrate quickly into a chat. I wanted to talk about two things that I see happening in the music world: a dematerialization at the point at which you’re making music and at the point where you’re consuming music. I mean that literally—instead of buying records and looking at the art, people are getting music that streams into their hard drive, they have it for a few months, and then throw it away. There’s nothing tactile about it. It happens at the creation side too, with things like acoustic modeling—the lecture is not a sort of panic-stricken thing.

Martin Schmidt: “The Dematerialization of the Art Object” was a book by Lucy Lippard, an art historian in the 1960s.

DD: It’s a fascinating subject. It’s hard to be in a position of an authority figure when you’re self-taught. I’m hoping we can talk with people about something they may disagree with us about. Most bands they invite to this series are technological innovators—we’re end-users of simple music software.

MS: We’re not technological innovators, but we tend more towards the art half than the technology half. I like to talk about the poetics of working with digital media than the technological choices you have to make. Paul de Marinas at Stanford would be on the other end of the scale—when I think about the fact that we get credit for doing that sort of thing, I feel great shame. There are amazing practitioners of this stuff who really know their science … I wish he was as popular as we were. He’s more interesting!

DC: What initiated your mutual interest in found sound amd field recordings?

DD: When I was a kid, I had a mono jambox, a little tape recorder, and the mic inside it was broken. When I recorded my own voice, it was so distorted—it changed me from a little child into a scary monster. I liked that you could use recording to change your identity—it’s the musique concrete equivalent of feeling like Sauron when you’re playing heavy metal.

DC: With Matmos, the principle of composition is of the utmost importance. What sets you apart from other artists in the electronic or sample-based realm?

MS: We’re strangely driven by conceptual restriction. We started doing it for fun—we were into this idea of “try to make a song where you don’t use the normal things that you would use to make songs.”

DD: It’s a “MacGyver”-like situation where you see what you can make out of what’s on hand. At that time in sampling culture, people were pigging out on James Brown breaks, and we started with something that wasn’t musically promising—a latex t-shirt, for instance.

MS: At this point, we’ve been doing this for so many years that it affects other parts of my life: “Can I clean the kitchen only using vinegar?” I think to myself, “Okay, I don’t have to wear all yellow all the time.” Actually, I’ve never worn all yellow in my life before.

DC: How do you decide that the more found-sound aspects of the music should be accompanied by more traditional instrumentation?

DD: It depends on the song: there are certain pieces where we decide, “Okay, let’s make this out of just one object.” As we’ve gotten older, we’ve gotten proggier and more pretentious. In the case of the new album, when you want to depict someone like Joe Meek, you want to use some of the kinds of instruments and playing that were important to him—that meant having a particular guitar tone. Other times, we’re pursuing an object as intensely as we can. In the case of making a song out of the skin of a rabbit, I tried to make 90% of the piece using just that rabbit, and then we brought in some environmental field recordings to put the rabbit in a space sonically.

MS: When the idea of the song is to be conceptually super-restrictive, we stick with that. While working on a song, we sometimes decide “this is not enough, we could use a synthesizer to back that up.” In the case of those portrait songs where there’s a string section, the conceptual seed of that record was to make portraits of people, and it seemed like James Bidgood wanted a lush string section…maybe that one is more of a portrait of one of his pieces of art.

DD: It’s a portrait of a portrait! It varies from album to album--when Martin’s in charge, the concept tends to reveal itself. When I’m in charge, I’m a kind of iron dictator, a conceptual tyrant.

DC: Especially on the last few albums, your work seems to have become more theme-based: how do your recordings tend to cohere into full-length albums?

MS: It’s different with different albums. We take turns directing the records: the ones that Drew directs, like the most recent one [The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast], start with an idea fully formed: “I want to make an album of portraits of people using objects from their lives.”

DD: I had the title “Germs Burn for Darby Crash” before we even made the piece.

MS: With our prior album, The Civil War, the initial notion was to make an album all out of piano without using the keyboard, but then I realized less than halfway through that we were just interested in acoustic instruments and dealing with them in a different way. The idea expanded to other traditional instruments, not just the piano.

DC: So it was more of an approach than a particular theme on The Civil War?

MS: Honestly, I think that one’s like most people’s records in that you make a bunch of songs and you make it look afterwards like it was all part of a grand idea. Drew’s records really are part of an idea. Those concepts, as it turned out, have been pursued purely from beginning to end.

DC: With your new record in particular, how did the idea of individual-inspired “sound portraits” come about? Did your residency at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2004 have anything to do with how the concept came about?

DD: Yeah, very much. The task of making a portrait of an individual each day, which is what we did in that residency, gave me the idea that “hey, this is a really fun way to compose: to look at someone and the shape of their life, and decide how much of that shape will determine the parameters of a piece of music.” It gives you so much to bounce off of, but you’re still so free to interpret. I really liked what was happening, so I thought we could apply that approach to people we admire.

DC: I’m guessing you guys are big Germs fans based on “Germs Burn for Darby Crash.” Could you speak a bit about how “Germs Burn for Derby Crash” came about in particular?

DD: I’ve always loved American hardcore and punk rock—it’s what got me into music, really, as much as it is 180 degrees from Matmos. It felt like a cool challenge to try to respond to that culture with our techniques. If you’re a big fan of the Germs, you get what’s called a “Germs burn” on your wrist, but it’s only really a “Germs burn” if a member of the Germs does it to you. Through some friends, we got to know Don Bolles, the drummer from the Germs, and he was such an excellent dude, so fun to hang out with and really charming. He agreed to burn my flesh with a cigarette and we recorded the sound of my cry of pain and the sizzling sound, and then manipulated that into a piece. The piece is not supposed to be a stand-in for Darby Crash, it’s just riffing on something that Darby liked to do—take LSD and sit in a completely dark tunnel and just feel this sort of darkness and hear the water splashing through the tunnel. Even though he was a punk rocker, he had this sort of psychedelic aesthetic as well.

DC: Do Matmos live performances take on an incredibly different form than the recording process?

MS: For some reason, our audiences are particularly bloodthirsty. We performed that acupuncture-based track from A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, which is based around an electronic acupuncture point detector. You scan around your skin with it and it buzzes when it hits an acupuncture point, and we’d blow up the visual on the screen, at which they’d shout, “do it! do it!” They’re never satisfied with anything less than sewing your eyelids shut.

DC: I know that Drew has the Soft Pink Truth project, but what are some of your other musical involvements?

MS: I’m in another band called Phase Chancellor. We each play one analog synthesizer and there are no effects, no mixing, it’s all improvised – it’s very stripped down. We make videos together, because Nate Boyce is a very capable video artist and I fancy myself the same. With Phase Chancellor and the Soft Pink Truth: both of those things exist to fill out our copious spare time…when we’re not being Matmos or doctors of English literature or art professors, that’s what we’re doing. The Soft Pink Truth started because Drew wanted to pursue more dance-oriented things than I was interested working on.

DD: It’s also because Matthew Herbert asked me about it. I have some new stuff I’ve put together based on YouTube.

DC: What was it like collaborating with Bjork on Vespertine and the subsequent tour?

MS: It changed our lives utterly! We stopped living our lives for a couple of years, and lived with a huge rock-star, and had access to a world of that kind of making music.

DD: It’s totally changed the audience we have and the amount of people that are curious about us. Suddenly we’re able to access all these other people: they’ll come check you out for that. Aesthetically, working with Bjork allowed us to work out of a particular mindset: we had always been content to make a free-associative ramble, and suddenly we had to come up with arrangements for 36 Bjork songs.

MS: I don’t think we would have made the kind of songs we made on The Rose Has Teeth… had we not worked with her. It never occurred to us that we could use a string arranger…

DD: Turning a small part into a full part, you know…

MS: …that it’s very possible and obtainable in a way. There are hundreds, thousands of classical musicians who are dying to play something other than the classical canon, and she is an icon for those very people, which is interesting to me---outside of Vespertine, her stuff is not all that musically complicated. She’s definitely some kind of musical genius, which is what those classical types appear to understand, maybe I’m still falling for it. It seems simple, but when you start taking it apart, the structure reveals itself to be much more complicated. So now we get all this attention from classical music people—I half credit/blame Bjork for that.

DD: When working with Rachel’s and working with the Kronos Quartet, I guess they see us as speaking to a different demographic. It’s not like they need us, but it was a real honor to work with them!

DC: What’s in the cards for Matmos this year?

DD: We’re working now with So Percussion. We have some pieces that we’ve written for them, and we’ll be playing with them at the Lincoln Center and the Walker Art Center next year. Most of what we’re doing is working on a new record. I’ve been finishing some remixes for Current 93, and we’ll play at this crazy festival with Diamanda Galas and Bonnie “Prince” Billy in Austria called the Danube Festival. Also, maybe I’m going to become a professor of literature?

MS: I’ll be teaching a class called “Advanced Video” at the SF Art Institute as “guest faculty” … I think we’re just going to watch a lot of videos.

Tags: