MATMOS PLAY THE MUSIC GALLERY (197 JOHN) JULY 21. $20 FROM ROTATE THIS, SOUNDSCAPES, TICKETMASTER. 8PM.
Best known for their collaborations with Björk, Baltimore duo Matmos (a.k.a. Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt) have spent the past decade animating myriad fetishistic objects like a pair of campy witch doctors, turning the resulting samples into conceptual dance music. A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure made beats out of liposuction; in 2006 The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast’s tribute to Patricia Highsmith featured oozing snails, and the track dedicated to William S. Burroughs included a wild gunshot.
Their new album Supreme Balloon takes this shtick in a new direction — the only rule was “no microphones allowed.” Conjuring up a trippy 16-bit world from vintage synths and gearhead lust objects, the pair display serious pop juju, reaching to their playthings’ compositional depths rather than drawing out overlooked musical qualities. EYE WEEKLY braved spotty phone reception to speak with Daniel and Schmidt on tour, near their old home San Francisco.
I just heard an interview where Drew said he had to learn what chords are for this album — not what they are, but how to use them.
Martin Schmidt: Drew is a genius in many ways, but he has not bent his genius to learning the Western notation system. In fact I think he keeps himself a little bit ignorant on purpose.
In your liner notes for the album it says that Drew used a videogame controller to control chord progressions on one of the songs.
Drew Daniel: Yeah, I use a game controller…. It’s ironic because I don’t play videogames at all. Of the people in the band — Martin loves to play certain videogames. He gets really obsessed with them and spends a lot of time online playing Halo with J Lesser and Kelley Polar … this weird clique of international electronic musicians that meet in virtual space and kill each other.
Out of all the rare equipment, which was your favourite to work with?
DD: For sheer period-precise, ridiculous drips and draps and bleeps and blaps, the ARP 2600 is pretty hard to beat. It’s definitely not something that you just walk up to and hey presto, out comes music. It’s a pretty recalcitrant piece of gear. In terms of the stuff that I like to hear Martin play the most, he’s so good with his Roland SH-101. And for the tour, we’ve had two of the grey models over the years and finally one has just no longer decided to stay in tune, it’s constantly throwing temper tantrums. So Martin bought a red one on eBay. We take it out of the box and we’re like “YEAH, nobody can fuck with us now! We’re always gonna stay in tune!” We turn it on: [droning noises]. Of course it’s instantly going out of tune. Martin has a good triple-fingered whacking technique that he uses when we’re starting “Supreme Balloon” and out comes this horrible sour note. You feel weird if you’re trying to create this celestial experience and your synthesizer just wants to spank your mom.
How are you guys transferring this to the live show? Are [you] playing some older songs as well?
MS: I must admit that this show is a little more of a placid, psychedelic sit-down affair than the last tour was. The concentration is on psychedelia and zoning out…. I just hope people smoke a lot of hashish before coming, or LSD might be appropriate.
I want to ask about the sequencing of the album — there are five short pop songs, and then you have this huge 24-minute behemoth.
DD: [The album] was modelled on LP side divisions…I think a certain set of people who like Matmos want to hear funky, shuffling snare and hi-hat patterns, and we like to construct those too, but … you gotta get all the nervous tension out of the way before you hit someone with a really long, heavy trip. Preschool teachers make all the kids shake the wiggles out before they sit down to do a lesson, and that’s kind of the way you have to approach it when you’re sequencing an album.