гей радио : gay radio

Matmos

Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, aided and abetted by many others. In their recordings and live performances over the last nine years, Matmos have used the sounds of: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, a bowed five string banjo, slowed down whistles and kisses, water hitting copper plates, the runout groove of a vinyl record, a $5.00 electric guitar, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, rat cages, tanks of helium, violas, human skulls, cellos, peck horns, tubas, cards shuffling, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, electrical interference generated by laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions and balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones on a dinner plate, Polish trains, insects, ukelele, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room, dogs barking, people reading aloud, life support systems and inflatable blankets, records chosen by the roll of dice, an acupuncture point detector conducting electrical current through human skin, rock salt crunching underfoot, solid gold coins spinning on bars of solid silver, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal.

Interview with Matmos (Drew Daniel) from Ultra E:Zine.

ULTRA: What is your earliest 'aural' ('music' or 'sound') recollection? As a child, were you fascinated by or interested in sound and/or music at all?

DREW: Oddly enough, my first memory of having a thought turns out to be my first memory of paying attention to sound, specifically the sound of my parent's voices. I remember at the age of three my parents were cooking in the kitchen and I had been told not to go in there while they were busy, the stove was dangerous, etc. I kept going in, and my father took me into my room to punish me for disobeying, and I remember him shouting "What is your REASON for going in there?" I sat there and thought to myself "Reason" sounds like "Raisin". Treating speech as sound rather than a message or communication has always been one of my favorite defense mechanisms. As for music, I remember "Peter And The Wolf" playing over and over on one of those repeating record players. That Wolf music got me every time.

ULTRA: Are you a collector (of sounds or anything else)? Are the samples you use in your music part of some private "sound database" or did you record them especially for the track?

DREW: It depends on the track. For most of the songs on Quasi-Objects, we started with an idea for a song, and purposely recorded only a certain sound source- just balloons, just body noises, just walkie-talkies etc. Many of the songs on the first CD are a pulling together of a giant mass of sounds, with some main sources being field recordings, samples of our favorite records, and our own "back catalogue" as musicians: some of the songs on there fold together the raw samples from four or five older songs that we had made, in some cases dating back to 4-track noise experiments in high school, or the bits and pieces of our first stabs at ravey techno from 1992 or so. We spent years making music before we decided to put anything out, and that gave us a large back catalogue of sample disks to draw from.

ULTRA: Why are you so specific about the type of instruments and sound material you use to construct your tracks (see listings in CD booklets)?

DREW: Hopefully, it helps anchor the songs in their material without dictating too much. There's a difference between being told what a song is made out of and being told what it 'means'. We try to do the former and not the latter. I have to say that for me, Coil's liner notes to Scatology were something of a model - little clues and hints and comments on the recording process which I found fascinating and suggestive. It runs the risk of creating a gimmick effect, so you have to be selective about the information. For example, we explain that "It seems" is made entirely out of human speech, but we don't tell the listener that the speaking voice is reading a medieval bestiary out loud, because that would dictate too much and doesn't work with the 'feel' of the song. It's going to be hard to word the liner notes for our next project as some of the sound sources will be quite extreme (teeth rattling inside a human skull, the sounds of a surgeon giving a woman a nose job, etc.) and I don't want it to sound too corny and goth. Many electronic musicians like to be mysterious about what their sounds are and how they work - we feel very much the opposite. Why not explain yourself?

ULTRA: Are you in any way afraid that stuff you recorded will slowly 'fade away' and therefore be not accessible anymore in the future due to the deterioration of the recording media (like video, CD-R, etc.)?

DREW: It's true that CDs are less tough and forgiving than vinyl, and it may be the case that in twenty years Matmos' music will be lost but it's hard to worry about this without sounding kind of narcissistic - I don't think the people of the future need my music with a special urgency that doesn't apply to others. Maybe your question means "Are you afraid of death?" I guess it won't fade away entirely, because there will always be antiquarians and retro types who only listen to 78s with cactus needles and so on, and hopefully some obsessive will hoard CDs a while longer. I suppose it's up to us to update and back up our music as file formats change. I do think about the inevitability of music sounding 'dated' and in what ways it can be either avoided or enjoyed. Some of my favorite music sounds incredibly dated - tacky psychedelic folk, earnest fifties vocal music, 80's electro for example.

ULTRA: If you would be asked to make the soundtrack to a documentary, what would you prefer it to be about?

DREW: It's different for each record.
The first CD: Either something very micro, like insects laying eggs, or else something very urban, like a documentary about the Tenderloin, the neighborhood in San Francisco where we lived when we made it.
Quasi-Objects: a biography of someone like Rube Goldberg or Ernie Kovacs. Or perhaps a school safety demonstration film.
The West: The crooked history of Los Angeles mass transportation systems, or maybe migrant worker life in California.