Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt
Cut Chemists
»
 |
So is the case with the rest of the “classics” the Bay Area collaboration of Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt has penned. On their latest LP, A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, Matmos turn to the sounds of the operating room for a palate. The result is a bouncy record that captivates with beats as well as concept.
I was lucky enough to talk with Matmos on a recent afternoon in which they discussed, among other things, their love for Black Sabbath.
NATN: Give me a brief history of Matmos.
M.C. Schmidt: We’ve been doing it for almost nine years now. The first time I saw Drew he was go-go dancing in his underwear at a bar. And the first time he saw me I was playing at an OTO Festival -- the Ordo Templi Orientalis. It’s an Aleister Crowley cult. It was at a thing called the Feast of Venus. That said, I was playing at it, but I’m an atheist and I think Aleister Crowley is a load of shite. We started to make collages together on sound edit. Drew had never used a computer before to work with music, and it was kinda my pick-up line to him to say "Hey, have you ever used a fancy studio?" And he fell for it hook, line and sinker and we started making music together.
Drew Daniel: We’ve been a couple for nine years. Early on, we were making pure noise cut-up stuff and trying to get on RRR records or something like that. We were just routinely rejected and we also tried to make techno -- like proper dancefloor techno -- and we were routinely rejected by that as well. So we started to combine the form, like rhythmic templates but played by noise as a sound source. We just sort of plugged away on that for about four years and decided to...
MCS: Having been routinely rejected by everyone, we decided to put out our own CD and that went surprisingly well.
DD: It was discovered pretty much by The Wire. The Wire wrote about us, and things seemed to pick up speed from there. It was a big surprise to us.
MCS: It is an ongoing surprise that anyone is interested.
DD: I sort of feel like at any moment I’m gonna be denounced and it’s all gonna get taken away. We’re just hobo amateur hobbyists who collect strange noises and cut them into place. We put out a second record, Quasi Objects, which was a more thorough, one-sound-source-per-song record, where we used latex clothing, balloons, whoopie cushions, walkie talkies, banjos...basically, whatever was lying around the house.
MCS: Then we put out our third record. It’s called The West. We sort of applied those same techniques but this time to sort of traditional folk instruments. So it’s violin and acoustic guitar and drums and organ.
DD: We invited our friends who have real musical talent to play along. My friend from high school, Dave Pajo, played guitar on that record, as did Martin’s friend from high school who’s the drummer for the For Carnation and the Radar Brothers and Mark Lightcap, who’s an amazing guitarist. He played a lot of Hawaiian-style lap steel and slide guitar. He’s from the band Acetone. So we kind of brought in people who know their way around an instrument but everything they played, we chopped up in our computers. People really liked it. It was kind of a big surprise to us. I thought people would regard it as a conservative thing to go back to rock.
MCS: We assumed that people who listen to electronic music want to only listen to electronic music. And it really turned out that people’s tastes are much broader than I ever assumed. Which is so awesome. That a lot of the people who were buying our records were also buying Papa M records. And vice versa.
DD: It was sort of scary how popular it became. Large labels would approach us and say "We’ll sign you if you’ll make another record like The West." Luckily Matador did not have that attitude. They said "We like all your stuff, we don’t care what you do." Sort of like a reaction, like the pendulum swinging the other way, because The West had been rooted in sort of fantasy Americana and guitars and referencing folk and indie rock and country forms we wanted to do a real backlash record with this new one and so there’s kind of an almost house-y or poppy element at times to this record. It’s the most conceptually focused thing we’ve ever done because we really did propose, "Let’s make a record out of medical technology." And then we went out and did the recording. Previously, things just gradually piled up and then we called it an album, but in this case there was an explicit conceptual plan and focus and then we went around trying to pursue and collect as many sounds as we could that would fit that. So there’s human skulls, liposuction, nose jobs, acupuncture, rat cages, anything we thought would resonate with the idea “What are the tools of medicine?”
MCS: We started out with people we knew who were having operations. Our friend Monica was having that laser eye surgery that everyone is getting lately and she said "Hell yeah." So we went down and the doctor was like "Nooooo. You can tape your microphones to that box over there." And the box turned out to be some kind of electromagnet for operating the laser. At any rate it ended up just being hellish static. Fortunately, she had complications with her operation and had to go back again but this time the surgeon was more trusting and allowed us to lay the microphone in her lap. It was the song that’s made out of half of that hellish distortion and half of that more clear recording of her dialogue with the doctor. In other cases we got the surgeon to agree and the patient was unconscious and had no idea they were being recorded.
NATN: So did the doctor tell them afterwards?
MCS: Why, no.
NATN: So there are some people out there that don’t know they’re on this album?
MCS: Yes. That’s true. Though I suspect strongly that one person’s operation sounds much like another. I don’t think it will be revealing anything too much about any of these people to have been recorded. We would be completely open about the whole thing if we didn’t live in a country where people sued other people for, like, leaving the window open. It’s an insanely litigious society.
NATN: Is the album composed entirely of stuff you guys got from the operating room?
MCS: No. The song "California Rhinoplasty" is entirely out of surgery with the exception of nose flute, which is probably fairly obvious what sound it is. Other one’s like the liposuction song, a lot of it is liposuction surgery but there’s guitar and drums as well. And clarinet. I play a straw in a bowl of water as well. The rat cage is entirely made out of rat cage.
DD: The laser eye surgery is entirely laser eye surgery. It kind of depended on how good the recording was where the sounds were going. We don’t want to be 100% purist and strict about it.
MCS: It’s not science.
DD: If a song is going in one direction and you can push it further in that direction by adding a real instrument we’ll go ahead and do that. We don’t want things to be off limits. That’s what I don’t like about experimental music, if under the guise of freedom there’s actually all these unwritten rules of what styles you can have or whether or not you can have a steady rhythm or whether you have to stick to one original plan or not. I think what we do sometimes works as pop music and that’s fine with me. On the other hand sometimes we were able to take a single source and push it as far as we want it to go. Those songs were left as they were.
NATN: How concerned are you that all your samples be “authentic” rather than sounds you could produce from a casio you bought at K-Mart?
MCS: I love synthesizers, but I don’t think they’re as rich a sound source as the real world. We’re not purists.
DD: That said, we try to be as rooted in the real world as we can and as based in field recording as possible but everything is then put into a computer or put into a sampler and diced and sliced and chopped. So it’s heavily mediated. It’s meant to be a kind of hybrid music, so there’s chunks of raw sound, (and) you know it was based on a field recording but then that is divided up into parts and pieces.
NATN: What is the effect of geography on your music. You guys went so far as to name an album The West. Is California something that influences you guys?
MCS: Well certainly I’ve lived there my entire life and we’ve lived there pretty much the whole tenure of our relationship. So there’s no question that it has an influence on us. But I’m being, kind of, absurdly literal. (With that album, it was like) "Oh, this stuff all sounds kinda Westerny! Let’s call it The West. I don’t have any good theoretical explanations for that.
NATN: Then I think we should stop digging.
MCS: But that’s not true for everything we do. There are certain drives, specifically, in California that definitely I was imagining when we were constructing that record. There’s that song "Sun on Five" that is about a particular stretch of highway and since I’ve been to Los Angeles I’ve always wanted to make a song about it. It’s this road to L.A.
DD: When I was working on a record with The Rachel's - we were asked to remix and chop up and reassemble parts of their song "Full On Night" - and when I first heard that song, it became a kind of portable Louisville for me. I was away from Louisville but when I listened to that record it just brought me back, growing up in Louisville, because the train sounds are so important to that song. I lived on Peterson Avenue right near the train tracks in Louisville and I heard them every night, going to sleep. So when we were asked to work on that song, there was a very strong geographic pull back to Louisville. Luckily, I was able to go there and record with The Rachel's in their house. For me that record, Full On Night, was tied to a particular place. I think with the new album, there is a feeling of California culture being satirized to some extent in some of the songs, but it’s definitely not as specific. All of the cosmetic surgeries were recorded in a single clinic in Southern California and I think the kinda gym culture in Southern California, the idea of perfectability and the sort of standards for what counts as looking good around L.A. are definitely quite particular and are being mildly mocked in the song "California Rhinoplasty."
NATN: I think in the electronic music community it tends be a very male-dominated genre. I may be over-generalizing, but it also seems to be an overtly heterosexual arena. I wonder about the reception of you guys in that community being a gay duo?
MCS: I don’t know if people are on their best behavior around us or what, but it’s pretty much a non-issue. Nobody seems to have any problem with it at all.
DD: It only crops up when people who are fans come up to us after the show-
MCS: We’re going out of our way to find something-
DD: Yeah. This is the thing that comes to mind. It’s kind of funny. It’s mostly guys. And they typically want to know about your software and want to know how you’re music works and it’s kinda shop talk, lifting up the hood and how does it work? The standard first line is, "Me and my girlfriend love your music."
MCS: Whether she’s there or not. It seems important to them that they indicate to us, "I’m talking to you about music stuff."
DD: And "I’m straight." It’s cute.
NATN: Who was it that went so far as to release the conversation you had with your parents where you came out as a 7”?
DD: That was me. We were approached by Lucky Kitchen, who are a label where all their work is based in field recordings and the theme was "family." My guess was that a lot of the submissions would be sort of sentimental and just about the joy of family. I love my family but I wanted to create something in audio that conveyed how awkward being in a family can be if you’re queer. So I happened to have a recording I made of myself coming out to my family.
MCS: (sarcastically) Which he just "happened" to have made.
DD: It was a very awkward thing to put it out, and certainly very narcissistic too. But since it was going be a limited edition of 100, I kinda thought "well, fine."
NATN: What did your parents think?
DD: They don’t know. That’s what’s so perverse about the moment is that it’s this “I’m finally going to be true and honest with you” moment and at the same time I’m actively creating a secret. I sort of like that about it.
NATN: How do you feel about the issue of invading your parents’ privacy with the recording?
DD: Have you heard the recording?
NATN: No.
DD: My voice is very loud and you can’t really hear what they’re saying. They’re just mostly saying "Yes" and "Uh huh." So it’s my voice kind of shaking, very frightened sounding. And I didn’t really feel like I put anything on there that exposed them. I think you have to hear it. I definitely set myself up (for questions like this) by putting it out. I’m not going to disown it, that it is a slightly creepy thing for me to have done. About queerness, I don’t know if our queerness is that relevant to the music. On the other hand, I think some musical acts are couples and you think about their "coupleness" when you listen to the music. I’m thinking about Royal Trux in particular. Like, they’ve managed to make their "coupleness" part of how you receive the music. I think John and Yoko certainly went further with that than anyone else. And I think that’s very interesting. I don’t think our music participates in that so much. I wish it did but I don’t think it really winds up conveying that.
MCS: I’d just like to say that I’m scratching my head with that. I’m not really sure that I’m going along with any of that.
NATN: It’s harder to convey that with electronic music than what John and Yoko did.
MCS: Not singing, it’s puts you into a whole different bracket.
NATN: I think it’s safe to say that there is a Matmos sound. I wonder how concerned you are with keeping a certain sound while simultaneously finding new sounds? First I should ask you if you think there is a certain sound you guys have developed that is concurrent throughout all of your releases?
Both: Yes.
NATN: So how do you guys utilize that sound while simultaneously not falling into stagnancy?
DD: I think the sound creeps in, in the studio once we’re going to work on what we’ve gone out and gathered. I think we genuinely try to go out and find new sounds. And with the next project we do, hopefully we’ll take that further. It’s really more Martin’s baby than mine. We are going to release a live record as well based on improvisations that we do, improvisations on the radio or in clubs.
NATN: I’ve heard you’re live shows are pretty much different from show to show.
MCS: Because we do a lot of improv within them.
DD: It’s really more because of Martin than me. I’m really the sequence-oriented person but Martin’s more into improv.
MCS: I feel as if you’re going to put on a show, there should be a reason that you’re all together in the same room. Playing files off of a laptop is not enough to justify paying $15 and standing in a room. I come from a performance art background, so I kind of feel like there should be a show to a show, or that the environment be ideal for listening to something. I really have a huge beef with the way music is presented live. As electronic musicians, we’re stuck with this rock format and standing up in a bar is just not the way to listen to dynamic music. Bars are made for drinking, talking and trying to pick up on people, or to socialize with your friends. They’re shitty places to play music. It’s all evolved out of really loud electric guitar and drum kit. If you don’t do that then automatically it doesn’t fit. I saw Tortoise last night at Irving Plaza and it just sounded horrible. This whole big room with huge speakers and people stand up and they’re jammed into this…man it sucks! We try to shy away from (the bars) as much as we can.
DD: We’re kind of lucking out with this Bjork tour.
NATN: When does that get under way?
DD: August. We’re actually playing our first public show with her next week in a church.
MCS: We’re very lucky in that she feels kind of the same way and has decided to do this whole tour in much more, on-her-scale, intimate spaces. It’s gonna be like opera houses and theaters. Like this thing, there’s only seating for 150 people.
DD: And it’s in a chapel. So it’s spaces where there isn’t a bar, where there’s seats. Where you can be focused on listening and texture. You can be very loud or you can whisper.
NATN: You guys are going to be opening up for her as well as playing with her?
DD: Yeah we’re opening for her and we’re in her band.
MCS: There’s a harpist. And there’s a full orchestra and a full choir. The band is four people and then there’s 100 other people.
NATN: So you guys are going to do some pretty intensive rehearsing before the tour?
DD: She doesn’t like to overly rehearse. We have already been rehearsing with Zeena Parkins, the harpist, for several months now. It’s just gonna get more and more intense till the tour starts. So, yeah we have to rehearse. But Bjork likes to really be fresh when she sings. She doesn’t like to figure out and establish how the song is done because it’s always different (when) she sings it.
MCS: We can’t get a set list out of her. She won’t say what songs we’re playing any given night or -- more confusingly -- what order we’re playing them.
NATN: Will you be basically doing the same thing you do in your shows?
MCS: (Laughs) Except someone else will be making the decisions. Honestly, it’s a lot more sequenced than what we do. Because they’re songs, they’re pretty structured.
NATN: On A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, were you worried about falling into the trap of going more for kitsch than content? For letting a concept stand on its own without function?
DD: Yes. Things had to be medical to make it onto the record, but that wasn’t a sufficient condition for being put out. They also had to work as sounds. Hopefully, it works either way. But it is a risk. I think the next project that we do, it’s Martin’s idea, it’s a piano-based record and it will be a total about-face.
NATN: How so? Is it as much piano-based as this one was medical sound-based?
MCS: Yes!
NATN: I’ve got some really hard-hitting questions for you now. Where does your band name come from?
MCS: It comes from the movie Barbarella. The Matmos. When we first started out, we thought we were gonna be a little more phazy, breaksy, techno kind of dance stuff. But I think that was because we didn’t really know each other and that was the sort of safe ground that we both understood. So then that was our name and we stuck with it.
NATN: What are some of the things you take influence from outside of music?
MCS: I’ll let quick-draw answer that first.
DD: It sounds lame if you have an art historical list of important great people. But I genuinely was influenced by collage in a visual medium. So Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst collages and just being a punk-rock kid with scissors making a fanzine, and the visual language of fanzines in the ‘80s. The way you could instantly gather together the archive that was around you and then critically respond to it. And that all you needed were scissors and glue and a photocopier. I’d say if you transpose it to cutting and pasting and samplers, and the archive of the world around you with sound, that was really what inspired me. It was like a practice.
NATN: What about you, Martin?
MCS: The way we’ve been living for the last year or so has been music, music, music, music. So I’m having a hard time thinking about…I play a lot of video games. (laughs all around) But I don’t think they really inform this stuff much.
NATN: Are you guys fans of classic rock? Other genres?
MCS: When I pick out a record myself, which is fairly rare with Drew around, I’m a big fan of big band music from the ‘40s. And I also like listening to field recordings of ethnic music, like African music and so on. Have you ever been to that American Memory website?
NATN: No.
MCS: It’s incredible! But it’s all American stuff. They just have thousands of mp3’s of…You know that collection of…
NATN: The Harry Smith collection?
DD: Yeah the Harry Smith…
MCS: It’s that kind of stuff. It’s fucking amazing. If you like that stuff. Thousands of scratchy old recordings of guys with a single banjo or…
DD: Fife and drum bands. There’s everything there. We just got this great documentary called Sacred Steel about live guitar playing in churches. It’s really good. It’s a lot of that kind of music that we listen to. It kind of scrubs you clean after hearing too many trendy, boutiquey, glitz records.
MCS: Personally I don’t listen to a lot of electronic music. It’s the truth. Of the electronic music I like, it’s the pretty hardcore experimental stuff, generally from the late ‘60s to early ‘70s.
DD: We do like classic rock, though. We paid full price to go see the Sabbath reunion tour. It was fun.
MCS: It was awesome.
NATN: Have you guys ever walked into a club and heard a Matmos song?
MCS: Not in a club, no. We’ve turned on the radio and heard it.
DD: We were having an argument and to break the bad mood we turned on the radio and it was one of our songs.
MCS: That took us right out of the argument. Pretty fucking flattering.
JOHN KNIGHT |