If I told you Matmos made audio cut-up, experimental, electronic music that closely parallels conceptual art, you'd probably write them off as some snobby, avant garde, artsy-fartsy, black turtleneck and a goatee noise group. If I informed you that their latest CD on Matador records, entitled A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, was constructed mostly from manipulated field recordings of cosmetic surgeries, you'd probably pass it off as a morbid gimmick that sounds cute on paper, but probably wears thin after repeated listenings. I could spend the rest of this page trying to convince you that despite their art school angle, the duo that make up Matmos (Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel) are super nice and have managed to turn the sound of liposuctioned fat into a playful, foot-tappin' ditty. But I know what's really going to make you sit up and take notice of these guys is the fact that everyone's favorite elfin diva, Bjork, has hand picked these two to be the opening act on her upcoming world tour, and is using them as a vital part of her backing band (consisting of Matmos, Bjork, a harpist, and a 60- piece orchestra). These guys are rad- I know it, and Bjork knows it. So sit back and prepare to receive the gospel of Matmos as told to me, Chachi Jones.
What was your normal job? I mean, you're big time now, but what did you used to do?
Martin: Well, what I realize about this is — [working with Bjork] is a temporary thing. I'll be back to my real job in a year, so I really can't get used to this swanky lifestyle. But no, I work at the San Francisco Art Institute. I show people how to edit on the Avid, how to use video cameras, how to use lighting equipment, microphones and how to make a good recording. Pretty much all the basics of media oriented art.
You guys are not only opening for Bjork on her upcoming tour, but you'll also be part of her backing band, correct?
Martin: Yep. For the last three weeks now we've basically been sitting in a little rented studio and going over every single song and saying which parts should go to the "back line" technician — which is a new term for me. He's kind of like the great and terrible OZ. He's the guy who runs the computer that REALLY runs the show. So he's off stage, and we get to decide, like hypothetically, if on "Army Of Me" his computer will run the hi-hat lines and the bass drum, and on our computer we'll have the snares and all these weird noises and the bassline will actually run on my synthesizer — but the MIDI will be on his computer, but it will be feeding to my synthesizer so I can tweak it while its playing.
Which gives you the freedom to just completely tweak the hell out of it without ruining the song.
Martin: Yeah, exactly, while still never removing the "spine" of the song. Because it will be running on this sort of master computer, supposedly flawlessly all the time. So get this, on top of all this — everything is doubled. There's two computers that run the whole show. Where there's an Emulator [sampler] — there's two Emulators. Where there's a vintage keys — there's two vintage keys. He's got a switch that will switch over to all the back-ups seamlessly if anything ever goes wrong.
Oh my god!
Martin: Drew and I are using samplers from 1989 where we're loading diskettes. And they're like "This won't be acceptable." So we have to have hard drives, and the hard drives have to have back-up. It's all really just so there aren't errors.
So who else will be joining you and Bjork on stage?
Martin: There's Zeena Parkins, she's a harpist, and a full orchestra. [both of us laughing]
Do you have to pinch yourself everyday when you wake up?
Martin: Kind of, yeah. It is really unbelievable. Right now we're at the point where it's less unbelievable and more like — terrifying. You know, this orchestra has about sixty life-long trained classical musicians in it, and man, I barely know how to play guitar — BARELY.
What does your performance setup look like for your opening set?
Martin: Drew uses two Roland W30 samplers circa 1989. He also has a laptop on which he pretty much plays back sound files, but it's stuff you might as well not play, like tapes of voices or weird sound effects. Also there's an Emulator E6400. We barely use that in the live set, it's basically a giant sampler. For this set it just has one set of sounds in it which is 'bowed rat cage.' We'll also be playing a real rat cage. I will play banjo. I will also play acoustic guitar, which I will be playing through a Big Briar 'Mooger Fooger', which is brand new — we got all this new equipment now.
Your post-Bjork equipment.
Martin: Right. But we didn't get anything crazy-outrageous. I will also play my new Korg MS2000. I will probably also play my old Roland SH101 which has been my main pal for about 15 years now. We do another song with an acupuncture point detector. And Drew samples that while I'm playing it. He has the MIDI of the song already, but he makes the samples live...
And then just plugs them in.
Martin: Yeah, he plugs them into the MIDI, so it's like a new song every time. So the song builds sample by sample.
That's a cool way to do it. I never thought about that.
Martin: Yeah, it's a little risky. Sometimes it works beautifully, sometimes not so beautifully.
But that's the trick isn't it, for electronic musicians, to keep things interesting for both you and the audience.
Martin: Yeah, a lot of our contemporaries are satisfied to just stand on stage with a laptop. Which, I don't know, when I go pay $10 to watch a show I don't want to stand there and watch someone at a glorified typewriter. I think some of those people make brilliant music, but it doesn't plug into the 'live rock' format very well.
It doesn't matter if you're recording with a 4-track and a clip-on lapel mic, the crucial element is having a great song.
Martin: For the first three records we made, we used a mic — and I don't even know where I got it-but it wasn't even a SM 57, it was a 57 clone. Most of our sound editing was done in a program now owned by Macromedia called Sound Edit 16. It is a fucking amazing tool, it gives you control over volume over time, it gives control over pitch, and it gives you control over pitch over time. It's all there in this one little program. You've got echo, reverb, delay, EQ, and you can learn the entire damn program in half an hour. And it lets you really just concentrate on what your recording's of. It's only drawback is that it doesn't let you multi-track in the traditional sense — it doesn't let you listen to track one while recording track two. Anyway, we use that a lot, a lot, a lot, and now we do have a kinda' fancy setup, we use Digital Performer, and we have a Mark of the Unicorn 2408 which gives you 8 ins and 8 outs. So we use Sound Edit, the 2408, Digital Performer, the keyboard, the two old Roland samplers, the new Emulator sampler, and I have a Korg Mono/Poly as well.
The Mono/Poly rocks, man.
Martin: Yes it does. And then we have the AKG 414 mic, and that's probably our entire setup.
Is it true you guys did the soundtrack to a porno video?
Martin: Yes, that is true. We've done the soundtrack to at least five porno videos.
No shit? Indulge me, because I've never considered the crossover between electronic music and porno videos.
Martin: Well, you know there's a lot of electronic music in porno videos, but most of it is not very good. It's possible that the electronic music that we made for the porno films is not very good. I have to admit that we did sort of indulge in stuff, like — wow, now I can play guitar solos, y'know, which is just something we don't allow ourselves to do normally. Or like, I get to play cheesy wah-wah scratch guitar, because if you make porno you have to have that [makes porno wah-wah guitar sound, then laughs]. It's something I've always wanted to do actually. I'm a big fan of porno quite honestly. People mostly turn the sound down, and usually it's because the music is so bad.
So you took it upon yourselves to improve the quality.
Martin: Oh yeah, yeah [sarcastically], it had nothing to do with the fact that it PAID — which is something our music generally doesn't do. No, I have a friend who did lighting for these films. And so he talked to them, and he brought them a tape and they were like, "Well this is too fucking weird. Can they do anything not so weird?" and we said, "Hell yeah." There were so many strange and interesting instructions for this music, like, "The music shouldn't be too interesting", because they don't want it to distract from the point of the film — which is jerking off.
Oh! [in astonishment] That's what you're supposed to do?
Martin: Yeah! The plots are so dull. But, yeah that's how we ended up doing that.
Did you at all try to time the musical events to the on screen action?
Martin: You know, for the first ones we did. We watched the films and wrote down when the exciting parts were. I mean, we really gave them way more than they wanted, or deserved. Then we realized by about the third one that they really don't care what this stuff sounds like, and then we started getting a lot looser. You receive an instruction like, "We need 100 minutes of music in a week." Which is where it's really handy that electronic music based on looping.
Just cut and paste, right?
Martin: Yeah, but we did some live stuff too. Like I played bass on a few songs, and guitar. It was just fun.
[Phone handed over to Drew]
So what's your fascination with found sounds, or your use of odd recorded sounds?
Drew: That's been a practice of ours from the beginning. Just to notice something around you, and have it at hand. It kinda gives you a starting place. You know, all the "spec sheet" hype about gear these days involves "No limitations. You can do anything with this new package of plug-ins!" But it's really just like this studio as this self-contained bubble floating in a sea of synthesis, and I don't really like that at all. I like trying to bring something referential to the real world into the music. Sometimes that just means using something right in front of you in your desk drawer, and sometimes that means going on a trip somewhere to document something around you that matters or that gives you a set of sounds that you couldn't come up with yourself. I think a lot of it is just happy chance that somebody coughed right after the door squeaked in such a way that a rhythmic phrase was established that you could probably fake at home — but you wouldn't bother. It's snags like that, you know, just little interruptions or sequences of events that you can't fake, and that's what a microphone lets you bring into your own music. With that said, it's not like we're really out to make pristine field recordings or anything like that.
How much manipulating and re-synthesis of the sounds are you doing?
Drew: In the songs, there's a combination of the original raw recording and then a lot of filtering and a lot of editing. The most important tools for us are cut and paste, in that it's just the framing and the slicing into tinier and tinier fragments of the original events that makes something articulate out of something that might be just a really dense recording. I mean, especially when you record surgery, you're not in the position to do close mic'ing of an individual object, which we tended to do in the past, because you're in a real operation and they can't just shut off the life support so that you can just record the bone rasps — you just have to take it all as a total package, and that was a very noisy environment. But we used these tiny microphones to get a variety of close up sounds. But that still gave us a very 'room' sounding recording. So we had to use filters pretty extensively to break apart the field recording of a given operation into its constituent parts. And then you can turn the clank of the instrument falling into the tray of iodine — if you edit it tightly enough and filter it — you can give it the spark of a proper hi-hat. You can kind of reform these sounds into musical components. A lot of the string-like sounds on the album were made by filtering the hum of a life-support blanket. They actually lay this weird blanket over the patient that's constantly having air pumped through it. It sort of looks like a raft that you'd float on a pool in, but it's always leaking and it's always getting pumped with new air. A lot of the string-like sounds are actually just filters swooping and rising around on the life support blanket. We tried to be as thoroughly based on the field recordings as possible. On the song "California Rhinoplasty" Mark plays a little bit of nose flute, but aside from that every single sound is made from surgery.
When did you guys originally come up with the concept for the album?
Drew: We've been working on this for about two years. Some songs went pretty quickly, the ones that we could take home, like the song based on the human skull or the song based on the rat cage. But it took a long time to get permission to do the field recordings, and then we'd have to fly to LA or other parts of California and go in, put on the scrub suit, record the surgery. Sometimes we had to do it multiple times, like my friend Monica, we recorded her eye surgery. The first time we recorded it, the surgeon didn't really trust me, he didn't really want me too close to the area of the operation. So they made me tape the microphone to this laser, the laser doing the surgery, and there was this horrible interference. It was such a powerful machine, the result on the DAT was this [makes white noise sound], it didn't sound like anything. It sounded like a Merzbow record. It was cool, y'know, but it wasn't what I was going for. I was trying to get the discussion between the patient and the surgeon. But she wound up having complications and had to go back in for more. So this time I laid the mic in her lap and I got this great dialog. The album was all a real challenge because, well just getting permission was difficult, but it was also an artistic challenge because we wanted to make music that felt was very happy and silly and light, y'know? We really didn't want this Marilyn Manson-type gorefest bullshit. I wanted to make something that was very playful and silly, but that it would gradually creep up on you what it was made of.
I realized that within electronic music, the artists that really stand-out to me are the ones who are playful with this genre that doesn't really beg to be played with, y'know?
Drew: Yeah, I mean the rhetoric around electronic music is this sort of Gary Numan — I mean I like Gary Numan — but it's this stereotypical [in a robot voice] "It is cold on the synthesizer planet, where I press the button." Nobody lives like that, y'know? I think that's a very artificial idea about futuristic-ness, that's a very '70s cliche, and I think we can all get past that. It definitely not what what we're about.
I should probably ask this, since I am representing Tape Op, what kind of field recording device were you using?
Drew: We use an AKG 414. We used to use whatever we could borrow, which was usually just some shitty SM 57 — which is a great workhorse, and very useful in some contexts — but when you want to capture a really close, very delicate sound the AKG 414 has been excellent. It basically allowed us to record the skull song, because the skull is so quiet. We used a binaural Sennheiser for one field recording, which was really a wonderful, head-opening experience.
You guys are just so conceptual about what you're doing.
Drew: It's keeping it fun for ourselves, y'know. It's a good day out. It gets you out of the studio, you're not just sitting there tweaking the hi- hats for one more day. It's just like — let's go on a fun little picnic and make some sounds, y'know? I'm trying to think of some more mic'ing related situations that are relevant. It's weird, I kind of feel like a charlatan, because I don't think we're really all that technically sophisticated. We use samplers from '89 that are 12-bit samplers, and we use Sound Edit [software] constantly, which is an incredibly basic program. For me, a lot of it is maybe sticking to simpler tools to try and find out as much as you can about what you can do with them, rather than rushing out to Guitar Center for the latest X,Y,or Z.
But you guys are using a software sequencer, right?
Drew: Yeah, Digital Performer is the main song writing tool for us. It's been kind of weird working on all this Bjork stuff because everyone else uses Logic or Pro Tools. But it's okay, because [Digital Performer] has its own advantages, among them being our familiarity with it, so we're not just sitting there reading the manual. But now that I've been working with Logic on the new Bjork CD, I definitely see its advantages. It's a superior program in a lot of ways. Actually, one of the best mic experiences I ever had was when Martin and I went with Bjork to AES.
You guys were Bjork's date to AES?!?
Drew: Yeah, and what we did was walk around to all the mic booths and just tried out different mics with her for a couple hours. Going around to all these different mics and putting on headphones and listening to the sounds we were making into the mics. We would all take turns listening to the little noises we each made into the mics and checking out which ones we liked. So we were in the studio with Bjork the other day and we had to do a scratch vocal because she had re-tempoed the song and we needed a new lead vocal to test against the sequence we were working on, and sure enough — she was using an SM 58.
You're kidding.
Drew: You know, this is a rental studio, it's Bjork — she can have any fucking mic she wanted, and it was that one. And it's partially the physicality of it, y'know? You can swing it around, you know what it weighs. And that's what she uses on a lot of the album. It's not about having the gold-plated "Terminator" mic. It's about a tool that you know, that's familiar and that makes sense to you, that feels good in your hand. I really liked that about working with her.
Do you have any production tricks that find useful?
Drew: I think — when in doubt, take every other thing out.
How so?
Drew: Like, whether it's a hi-hat line or selecting and muting tracks. It's always a good idea to find out how much you can do without. That's especially my note to myself, because in a software package where you can just add track, after track, after track... you're gonna do that — and it's kinda because you can. I mean I like to make music that's very baroque, and very cluttered and full of crazy details that you only notice on the tenth time you listen, that's my goal. That said, at any given moment to figure out if you can get away with just, maybe four pieces of information that would be interesting, or that have enough space around them that you can savor them. And this is not my idea, it's something that AMM said — an early improv jazz/noise group that's been around since the '60s, they had an early motto that "Every noise has a note." I think that is a principle that you can apply to everything around you — that there is musical information hiding in all sorts of things around you. If you trust it, and work with it, after awhile you can hear that music — you don't have to get hung-up on [in best salesman's voice] "That big, fat, warm sound!" So many people chase that, and I think, maybe it's just a safety blanket.
