Interview: Matmos Get Ready to Go Telepathic

Artist bios can sometimes make for dull, formulaic reading, as one generic adjective after the next is trotted out in a bid to elaborate upon a band's 'unique sound'. To say that such a problem doesn't apply in the case of Baltimore-via-San Fran electronic duo Matmos would be something of an understatement. Over the course of a willfully unconventional eighteen-year career, the 'pop-concrete' sonic manipulators have (amongst other things) sampled liposuction surgery, taught seminars on sound art at Harvard University and San Francisco's Art Institute, and delved into the acoustic capabilities of bovine uteruses.

In the run-up to the group's forthcoming UK & Irish tour, Fiona Diffley caught up with Drew Daniel, one half of the envelope-pushing pair, as he took time out from working on the group's new material to discuss collaborating with carpenters, "para-psychological experiments", and how the work of an historian is not all that far removed from that of an electronic music-maker.

Hi, Drew. Thanks a lot for taking the time to speak to us. First off, you had a very busy 2010 between recording and performing live, closing out the year with a run providing live musical accompaniment to a performance piece called (theLID. The project is described as exploring “the possibilities of synaesthetic perception and the production of sensation”. Can you tell us how you came to be involved with it in the first place, and how did your role fit in to the evolution of the piece and its performance onstage?

We met the choreographer of (theLID, Ayman Harper, on the street one evening in Berlin. He was riding his bicycle past us after a show, and we thought he was cute(!), and he recognized us and said that he often danced to our music while warming up. This was the start of a beautiful friendship. The piece itself was bashed into shape over the space of a wretched heatwave in Frankfurt, Germany the following summer, and it involved many layers of improvisation, formation, editing, and chopping back. The final shape is much more to do with Ayman's vision - he is, ultimately, the creator of the work - but we sure learned a lot about dance, and about being in a team, after those five weeks of rehearsal and creation were over!

With your approach to creating music, a cross-disciplinary collaboration such as (theLID seems like a natural fit for you. Could you maybe see yourselves participating in similar ventures in the future, or perhaps pushing your own boundaries as a band even further so as to incorporate other disciplines? Do any disciplines in particular appeal to you?

Hmmm... I think I'd like to collaborate with a carpenter or industrial designer or sculptor on the fabrication of some sound objects that would be both instruments and furniture/usable objects some day; I'm not sure yet exactly what form this would take, but I have some ideas. I would especially love to design a desk or chair that was both functional and playable as an instrument.

When it comes to choosing live collaborative projects, what is it you look for? Do you tend to be more strongly drawn towards artists with whom you see yourselves as having certain parallels or those who are, to some extent, creatively removed from what you are doing, thus creating a challenge to reach a point of convergence?

Good question. I think there has to be enough overlap in order for a conversation to take place, but also enough difference for a dynamic to emerge. It's a strange gamble, and one that doesn't always go in the directions you might have predicted.

You recently recorded a Daytrotter session with fellow Baltimore resident Dan Deacon, which sounded like a lot of fun. Did that connection come about as a result of you guys living in the same town? If so, are there any other Baltimore artists you’d like to work with in the future?

Baltimore has a dense ecosystem of talented, insane artistic people, and we're very much inspired/challenged/kept on our toes by the level of playing and creating that goes on here. Dan is a great player and a truly fearless performer, and it's fun to get thrown into the deep end with him. We've just recorded some elements for Ed Schrader's new album which he is working on, and Martin (Schmidt, the other core member of Matmos) regularly improvises with a range of players associated with The Red Room Collective. There are lots of people who have played on our new album so far - Jason Willett, John Berndt and Carly Ptak, to name just three - and an even longer list of people who have done "psychic sessions" with us for the new record (there are too many to list here, but they include DJ DogDick, Ed Schrader and Dan Breen).

Much of your music comprises field recordings you’ve made yourselves. In the process of collecting these over the years, you’ve undertaken a huge amount of experimentation and faced up to some personal challenges in order to capture some of these unique sounds (Drew, I’m referring specifically to a substantial part of 2001's A Chance to Cut Is A Chance to Cure, on which you had to overcome a case of squeamishness, as well as 'Germs Burn for Darby Crash' from '06's The Rose Has Teeth in The Mouth of A Beast LP). For you, which of these undertakings have produced the most satisfying outcomes?

You know, it's kind of hard to choose after eighteen years of creating music together. One memory that certainly stands out in its intensity and satisfaction was the recording of the snails interrupting the path of a laser that was pointed at a light-sensitive theremin during sessions for The Rose Has Teeth.... That was a real mystery to us, and we had no idea if it would work; we didn't know whether the snails would be interested in the laser in the first place, or if the results would 'gel'. We sat in the dark with our mouths open just staring at these creatures playing electronic music in front of us... It was astonishing. Human beings can be fun too, though! There have been so many joyful moments of collaboration with our friends over the years: people like Mark Lightcap, J Lesser, Nate Boyce, Zeena Parkins and the So Percussion guys have been so patient and generous with their time and talent, both in the studio and on the road, over the years... I can't really choose just one moment.

From what I’ve read and from video excerpts I’ve seen, your pursuit of sound strikes me as a very visually interesting process. Has the recording of your albums ever been extensively documented on video; and if so, have you any plans to make this footage available?

It's highly uneven. For confidentiality reasons, we didn't document the surgery recordings (on A Chance to Cut... really. Sometimes the presence of a camera can intimidate people, or make them 'perform' in a bad way (a-la reality TV), rather than with their ears being the first and most important component. But some day we should probably gather together the unseen footage of, for instance, our piano destruction action in the salt flats of California. No one has seen that yet, and it's pretty insane!

One of the main challenges that faces electronic musicians is the reproduction of their recorded material in a live setting. I suppose this challenge must be even greater for you, given that many of the instruments and objects you have used in the studio aren’t often practical or readily available. Given such restrictions, how do you approach a live performance of album tracks?

It has to be anchored in the transmission of risk - there's no point in playing back a solid, completed, finished sound file and just trying to look busy. You have to almost overstate the way that you are making choices on the fly so that the audience understands the sense in which what you are doing is 'live' - ideally not through corny showmanship or exaggerated gestures at a mixer, but by clearly tying what people are hearing to what they are seeing you do. It can certainly be a bit of a challenge. Sometimes video can be a good way of closing the distance and involving people - particularly when we use live camerawork; but there are also other ways to address this problem.

Your upcoming tour dates will see you playing alongside your good friend and collaborator J Lesser once more. How exactly will Jay contribute, and what kind of performance can we expect from you on this tour?

Jay will be playing a modular synthesizer that he's built, a real beast that is wildly unpredictable and (we hope) exciting rather than heartbreaking in its independent ways. He will also be playing guitar. I don't think we can manage to sweet-talk him into singing, that'd be a bit of a long-shot! Jay has been the 'third eye' for Matmos for a lot longer than anyone else - his roots in the band go back to 1998 or so - so it's really fun for us to still be able to convince him to sneak out on tour with us. I'm really looking forward to having him in the band again, although I hope he doesn't cut himself on any video cameras this time (don't ask!).

One of the things you’re renowned for is your use of unifying themes in your records. In the case The Rose Has Teeth..., you took this idea beyond the music and the 'audio portraits' of the subjects to encompass individual pieces of artwork relating to each person. I love that you did this - the dual facet makes each portrait feel even more personal. What exactly motivated you to include this extra layer?

Glad you liked it! I, for one, love the fact that 'album' as a term can also mean family photo album, and since queerness is so often excluded or tilted away from the notion of 'the family', I thought it would make for a compelling way to open out what an album might be if our collection of audio portraits was also a visual gathering of actual portraits. I'm glad that the styles of representation inside are so incongruous and mutually distinct - it draws out people's differences from each other.

One of the recurring themes we see across a number of your albums is the arena of history and the archaic, and specifically the meeting of the past (e.g. last year's quodlibet; the historical figures of The Rose Has Teeth...; the medieval and 19th-century reference points on 2003's The Civil War) and the present (e.g. your use of avant-garde recording methods and techniques) to create something new. What have been the inspirations behind these dialogues? And is it something you think you’ll continue to explore in the future?

Yes, I think the relationship between electronic music and futurism/'the futuristic' has its place, but it's also something that is frequently overstated and easy to get wrong. Even the classic examples of supposedly futuristic sounds - like the Barron score to 'Forbidden Planet', for instance - are actually presented within the narrative as stand-ins for the so-called 'ancient music' of the extinct alien race that predates the film's main action. The past is so much more perverse than people realise, and electronic music-making, if you think about it, is often about the archiving of transient bygone moments (through sampling, storage and playback); in that sense, it is rather like the practice of a historian: you take a broad field, slice out the really interesting parts and reassemble them into a coherent shape. Sounds like composition to me.

We’ve looked at some of the themes and ideas that you've successfully managed to realise on record, but have you ever set out with a concept in mind only to subsequently end up having to abandon it? I remember the press release for your most recent studio LP, 2008's Supreme Balloon, used the term 'creative restriction' where I would probably have said 'theme'... Have you ever found that you’ve restricted  yourselves too much on a particular project?

What became The Civil War was originally going to be a 'piano-only' album, but in the process of pursuing that end we soon realised that it just wasn't going to generate something compelling if pursued strictly. It opened up and became a very different - and, we'd like to think, better - record as a result of being aware of when the conceptual isn't leading to the musical.

To what degree have your academic backgrounds influenced the band’s musical direction? And has the reverse been true to any extent?

I think it both helps and hurts. Lately I've been so busy being an academic that I've had to become very careful about the number of concerts I can play, as well as when and where we can work on the music. On the other hand, I think this also means that we are independent of trends and the relentless cycle of recording and touring year-after-year, which can make some bands burn out and get sick of each other and sick of playing music. We're still doing this after eighteen years, and I attribute our longevity to the fact that we've never sought to water-down what we do. I don't necessarily see a direct relationship between electronic music and Renaissance literature (my area of expertise), but I will say that I read early modern texts as 'assemblages' in ways that could be compared to the way that we structure our songs. The appropriation, cropping, editing and construction of the new out of fragments of the found and the borrowed is basic to both our sampling and sequencing and the genre of early-modern texts called centos, which interest me greatly.

And finally, what are your plans for a follow-up to Supreme Balloon? What is likely to be at the root of it, and when can we expect to hear it?

The new album will be called The Marriage of True Minds and its primary theme is telepathy. We'll be playing several pieces from this project during out forthcoming tour, and it will involve live reenactments of various para-psychological experiments. It should hopefully be odd and enlightening in equal measure!

Matmos kick off their UK & Irish tour this coming Saturday night (May 14) at Glasgow's Old Fruitmarket, before moving on to play Dublin's Button Factory (May 16) and London's Auto Italia venue (May 19) in the company of J Lesser and like-minded Californian composer John Wiese. Hit up the band's website for more info.