Matmos - The sound hunters

Drew Daniel and Martin C. Schmidt from San Francisco, better known as Matmos, represent one of the standout acts of the last decade's electronic scene. From the sound manipulation of “Matmos” (1997) to the more traditional forms found on the masterpiece “The Civil War” (2003), the American duo has forged a new aesthetic that, starting from experimentation, has seduced and influenced other artists and other genres: hence the collaborations with Bjork , Labradford , The Rachel’s .

In Italy to present their new album “The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast”, Matmos granted us this interview.

When it comes time to interview Matmos it's later than planned, so the duo has to split up for a bit: Drew will do the interview with me, while Martin will do his interview with another journalist in another room.

You had 365 days to release this record and you chose May 8th, which, as it happens, is... my birthday!

Drew: Yeah! (claps his hands, smiling). I hope it'll be a nice birthday present!

Of course it will be! I can imagine you were a little worried I wouldn't notice, but I did notice, and I appreciate it. So thank you.

Drew: You're welcome!

This is something I've never asked anyone: is there a particular reason why you choose a certain day to release your records?

Drew: Unfortunately it wasn't our choice: the answer is that it was an idea of the Belle & Sebastian. We wanted to release our record in April, and Belle & Sebastian decided to go back to recording for Matador, which suddenly had to dedicate itself entirely to their record, so ours got pushed back to May 8th. All because of Belle & Sebastian.

When you think of Matmos, the new frontiers of avant-garde music immediately come to mind. Your music has pushed the boundaries of the genre forward, updating them. You have a very complex style. How would you describe your music to someone who doesn't know it?

Drew: Very difficult. Since you don't want to waste your half hour on this question, I'll tell you that it's music we put together by playing objects. Every time we take a taxi and people see us with all our gear, they say: "So you're musicians. What kind of music do you make?" and we answer: "We compose music by playing objects, but with an underlying rhythm." At that point people exclaim: "Oh, like the musical 'Stomp'?" And we think: "Oh God, nooo!"

It's true that the same idea can be used in different ways and it's not clear what the result will be, but there's a substantial difference between what we do and what's done in the show "Stomp", and it lies in what you do with the materials.

Could you describe your compositional process to me? How do you move from the sampling and sound-hunting phase to the actual composition phase?

Drew: It's like sifting through rocks to find gold: you might have an idea of how to "play" an object that you think is important for the song, and it's when you start producing sound with that object that the object itself reveals its musical identity.

We wanted to write a song about Valerie Solanas, the feminist, and part of her utopian vision for a future world was that, through the use of artificial insemination, you could achieve a world without men. So we started from the concept of "artificial insemination": we thought about the reproductive system, about a cow's vagina and udders. We had no idea what sound might come out of it: maybe it would have just sounded like slabs of raw meat, but when Martin started playing, we got a sound similar to a saxophone and we developed a saxophone line. In the end the udders turned into a saxophone, but they could have turned into something else, they could have taken on other characteristics.

So now we have ten songs about ten specific people. How did you end up writing about them?

Drew: We were asked to do an installation in a museum and we set up a studio: it was a mobile photography studio, and we basically interviewed some of the people who came in about their lives, we had a conversation, like the one we're having now, and then we asked them to collaborate on writing a song, handing them the CD on the spot. We took seventeen photographs of these individuals, of these strangers. We were amused by the idea of using someone's existence as a possible structure for one of our pieces, and that gave us the idea for this record, but of course we didn't want to present random people: we wanted to talk about people who meant something to us. It's like being a DJ or a journalist or a teacher, and you're always there saying: "You need to know this person because they're really worth it!" In making this record we kept that same attitude.

How did you choose exactly those ten people?

Drew: We didn't have all ten at the start. The first person we absolutely wanted to talk about was Wittgenstein, and then we thought the whole thing was taking too cultural a turn, so we added a few pornographers, like Boyd McDonald and James Bidgood. We wanted there to be a certain balance between punk rock and philosophy, monarchs and prostitutes, we wanted a certain variety of people: it seemed much more human, more realistic, if we didn't focus on just one area.

So yours were very carefully chosen.

Drew: I think our goal was to... entertain. It was like compiling the guest list for your Fantastic Party. There are some websites where they ask who you'd like to meet, and people say they want to meet someone who likes cats, who doesn't smoke... and I always thought: "Well, I'd like to meet King Ludwig of Bavaria! I'd like to meet people it's impossible for me to meet." So maybe the imaginative aspect of this record is imagining meeting people we can't possibly meet.

What can you tell me about the title?

Drew: It comes from Wittgenstein, it's part of a philosophical inquiry: we have to figure out how it's possible that "The rose has teeth" – because the rose doesn't have teeth – so you imagine a relationship, a metaphorical relationship with a rose that has teeth only because it's the cows that have teeth and eat it, then excrete it onto the ground, and the rose feeds on the cows' manure and, being fertilized, becomes a plant. So: "The rose has teeth" are the cow's teeth.

You know, what I like about this sentence is that it describes everyday reality, it describes something anyone can grasp quickly: this circle of life. But it makes it feel like a collage: it's the creation of a new relationship, foreign to the cow and the rose and foreign to the reassuring image of a rose in its fertilizer, because you need both: without the fertilizer you don't have the rose either, and you also have to consider that the rose is the result of a long chain of events, like a story.

Our songs should be like that.

With this record you seem to be following the path started with "The Civil War": more instruments, less electronics.

Drew: You know, the character of the people we were writing about sometimes called for sumptuous music. That's not what I wanted to do: I wanted to make a much colder, more intense electronic record, it just didn't turn out that way. Maybe the next record will be played entirely on synthesizers, but for someone like James Bidgood… his film "Pink Narcissus" was incredibly lascivious and romantic, and for that song we really needed Antony to sing it, with a harp and strings. For us, it was very important that the song perfectly capture the character of the person we were telling the story of.

Let's talk about guests. So many of them appear on this record. How did the various contributions come about and how did you choose each of them?

Drew: … We knew we wanted to write a song about snails for Patricia Highsmith, and we started thinking about what shape snails have, and we realized the French horn has a similar shape. We met a friend, and his babysitter plays French horn, so we asked him to introduce us to her and see if she'd like to play on our record. A lot of the time it's simply about meeting people who play, and that certainly helps. Or take what happened with Kronos Quartet, with whom we made the song about Joe Meek that has only percussion, noises and guitars: David Harrington, the Kronos Quartet violinist, was at my house and asked me to play him the new song, and then he said he wanted to play on it: he offered himself.

So being a duo, rather than a proper band, helps you stay open to all kinds of collaborations.

Drew: We need it, we need these people to bring out our ideas. Maybe the next record won't have any guests at all, but when you want a particular sound, you have to find someone who can help you get there.

Let's talk about Antony and Bjork.

Drew: You know, there's this film James Bidgood made about his boyfriend, Bobby Kendall. It took him eight years to shoot this obsessive film about his one and only love, and it's very erotic and extremely personal.

Antony's vocal tone has a way of exposing itself emotionally that felt right for that song. It's not that we thought of Antony because he's fashionable or anything like that: it's what the song demanded. We wouldn't have asked him to sing on any other track on the record, he had to sing on that one.

With Bjork it was a bit different, because we had been recording people reading Wittgenstein for eight years, so every time we met someone who spoke a different language, we'd ask them to translate some sentences and we'd record them. Now we have Wittgenstein in Japanese, Lebanese, Icelandic, French… As many people as possible, because we've always tried to "work" on Wittgenstein and put a bit of his writing into our music.

In this case it was just a matter of including part of the archive we'd built up: it wasn't like: (loud and formal, imitating some kind of old-fashioned announcement) "Ladies and gentlemen: Bjork!". It's only three seconds, but given that her voice…

The door swings open; it's Martin: "We absolutely have to swap seats: that guy keeps asking for you, you, you, you, you: "I want to talk about Wittgenstein, I want to talk about …" It makes no sense at all!

Martin: Forgive me. Everything the guy was asking was super specific, like: "Things Drew has thought about," and I was sitting there like: "Well, Drew says that..." By the third time I said to myself: "This is ridiculous! I need to go get Drew." Anyway...

We were talking about Bjork.

Martin: She's a huge popstar and everyone wants to talk about her, which is fine by me because I love Bjork.

We were about to talk about Bjork and your collaboration with her on her album "Vespertine," how did your experimental approach meet her pop sensibility?

Martin: I think Bjork has a very serious experimental approach. She and her manager called us up and said: "You know, we're tired of imitating your ideas, so we've decided we want you." She has the same urge as us to support someone. When you talk to journalists all day, it's hard not to recommend the things you love. That's the basic idea behind our record: we're so fascinated by certain people that we want everyone to know them, and I think that's what she was doing with us.

Was it easy working with her?

Martin: Absolutely not. The thing that gave us the most trouble is that when you think about the frequency spectrum, from low to high, there are all the mid frequencies that make up the human voice. In most of our work there's no voice, so we had to fill that "space" ourselves. When you work with the human voice, especially when you're working with a great singer who has a huge range, all those "spaces" are taken. You really have to think about what you're going to do with the highs and what you're going to do with the lows, and about the things that shouldn't get in the way of the sound.

Your latest album, "The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast," is quieter and maybe more accessible compared to your previous records. Was that intentional?

Martin: Noooo! It definitely wasn't a conscious decision. I think it's catchier because we were trying to stay true to the people we were singing about.

Maybe writing songs about someone else, someone you really like but have never met, leads you to take a different approach to the song itself.

Martin?

Martin: ...Yeeeah...

Did you ever wonder whether the person you were writing the song about would have liked it?

Martin: Yeah, we kept asking ourselves that. ... If you take Wittgenstein, for example, I'm sure he would have hated the song about him: he was a Schubert fan!

I think Drew wanted to make a dance song for Larry Levan, he has a lot in common with him. Drew's really into house music, I'm not a fan, so he had to fill me in on that whole world.

I'd really love it if Valerie Solanas liked the song about her. We tried to stay true to how prickly she was, we wanted it to be a rude song. I hope that's how it comes across.

…I was a bit intimidated when I saw her name among the song titles, and I felt uneasy listening to the song you wrote about her, because she's someone who's always scared me…

Martin: From what people say, yes, she was someone who was intimidating.

For a while I lived as the only man in a community of committed lesbians, and I think that had a very profound impact on me! I came to respect the opinion that all men should be destroyed. I'm not sure she was wrong. If you look at the state the world is in, if you look at what men have done, I'm not sure they've done a good job.

How did you end up… Bear with me, but… How did you end up (we start laughing) … in a community of committed lesbians?

Martin: When one of my best friends – we were in high school together – left for college and I stayed home, I wasn't doing very well, and she'd send me these letters from college saying: “Are you enjoying the suburbs?” “Maybe you should come out here for a while.” She wrote me these one-line letters for a while, until I told myself: “She's right, I need to go be with her,” and that was the situation she was living in. I didn't even know she was a lesbian back in high school. She's a strong-willed person, who talked to the other women and convinced them to let me stay there. (smiles).

It was instructive and healthy for me. I think every man should do it!

Let's talk about the CD artwork. You made a portrait for every person you wrote a song about.

Martin: I work at an art school and I simply asked myself who would be right for this kind of project. The student who drew William S. Burroughs is an excellent painter and portraitist. I work in this sort of conceptual art department where a lot of the painters study there because they want to leave painting behind, since they can't wait to depict something that isn't an object, that isn't a thing, where you can have ideas instead. I gave him several William S. Burroughs books to read, I knew he could draw really well. Some of my lessons with him focused on making sure he didn't forget he knew how to draw. It was an opportunity, because the label had set aside a decent budget for the artwork, and this would be the first time he got paid to make art for something. That's the story behind that portrait.

That one (he's looking at the portrait of Darby Cash of the Germs) was made by someone who's part of an art community for people with mental health issues. It's a really interesting portrait because in the photo we gave him of Darby Cash, those aren't scars: they're cuts…

And he drew stitches on them: that's so tender!

Martin: Exactly, he's healing him!

Drew designed the Valerie Solanas t-shirt (the portrait for Valerie Solanas is a photograph of a t-shirt with her face drawn on it). There are basically no photographs of Valerie Solanas: that's the mugshot they took of her when she was arrested for shooting Andy Warhol. It's kind of a collaboration between the photographer and Drew.

Aside from music itself, electronic experimentation and the noises of the world, where else do you find inspiration?

Martin: A ton of conceptual art.

Do you constantly think about noises to put into records? Maybe while you're cooking and you hear that one particular little sound…

Martin: Of course! Absolutely! I became a musician basically because I fell in love with a drummer when I was sixteen or seventeen, and he, especially when he was younger, was drumming constantly. He would have played drums all day and done nothing else. He'd play by tapping on the air conditioner or in the car he was sitting in. I couldn't tell you if it was something conscious: it was just something he did. I basically started making music because I wanted to be near him. I took piano lessons in high school and I was always there going, "Can I play keyboards in your band?" I never actually played with him, and it's funny that now, the other way around, he's the one playing in mine. It's funny how life goes. Anyway, he taught me this ability to listen to what's happening around me and make music out of noises, and now we want to bring that same idea into pop music.

Drew slipped into the room during Martin's answer.

What do Matmos whistle in the shower?

Drew: Oh! So many songs… The other day I was singing Julie London's "Go Slow".

Martin: Come on, sing it now.

Drew sings it.

Martin: I also sing a lot of music from the '30s and '40s. I'm convinced that was the last era when pop music used truly great melodies. …No, that's not true: the Beatles wrote excellent melodies, but after them, things went downhill fast.

Last question: would you like to recommend someone else's record that you consider essential?

Drew: We really love the soundtrack Riz Ortolani wrote for the film "Cannibal Holocaust".

Italian horror?!

Martin: Yeah, have you seen it?

No, I don't watch horror movies because… (I blush) … they scare me…

Martin: Buy the soundtrack, that way you won't have to watch the movie. The most incredible thing is that it's just three songs…

Drew: … and you'd never say that it's a horror film.

Martin: Holger Czukay, the bassist of Can, released a series of solo albums between the late '70s and early '80s, and I'm convinced they're fucking brilliant. I think the best one is "On the Way to The Peak Of Normal".

Ride the wave of great music

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