This post has teeth in the mouth of a beast (an interview with Matmos)

I swear, stuff actually gets done during these week-long disappearances. It's only rarely that I get wasted and pass out underneath a bridge. Last weekend, for example, I interviewed "pop-concrete" duo Matmos for EYE WEEKLY. You can find an introduction to their music in the article or at the pair's official website, but they've been amongst my favourite bands since releasing the witty and moving Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast in 2006 and I was bit nervous going in. Luckily, they're both mordant wits and total sweethearts. They're also playing at the Music Gallery on Monday night, so I command all Toronto readers to go there and buy Supreme Balloon (you could also buy Drew Daniel's new book). Our conversation went on for much, much longer than could possibly be included in that EYE WEEKLY piece (like, to the tune of 4500 words) so I'm posting the entire unabridged interview here for fellow Matmos obsessives and/or synthesizer fetishists. Posting about comics-related nerdiness will resume shortly...

***

CR: You’re on tour right now, right?

M. C. (MARTIN) SCHMIDT: We are. At the moment we’re driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We’ve been on tour since mid-May.

You recently moved from San Francisco to Baltimore, right? How’s Baltimore been treating you?

MS: I like Baltimore. Baltimore is poor and mostly black, so it’s very different from San Francisco, which is rich and, well, not so black.

I remember reading that one of the only significant minority populations in San Francisco – aside from the Asian one, obviously – is Armenian, for some reason.

MS: Wow, I had no idea of that.

I unfortunately haven’t been to the U.S. very much…my only real experience with Baltimore is from The Wire.

MS: Yeah, it seems like it’s fairly accurate, though not being a drug dealer, a policeman, a judge or a dockworker I don’t have too much personal – I don’t mix in those worlds much. But the landscape is dead-on, and there’s a lot of desperately poor people and they seem to buy and sell a lot of drugs and kill each other regularly. It’s quite sad - I don’t mean to sound like Sarcastic Fuckhead…I mean, honestly there’s a lot of very sad desperation that goes on ‘round there. From my moneyed white perspective it’s a sweet place to live because things are really, really cheap. We have a huge house whereas before we lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco.

Being from Canada, I think people up here don’t have an idea of what happens in the inner cities sometimes…

MS: You know, I always thought that about Canada until we played in Vancouver some years ago, and they were going on about “oh, this club’s in a bad neighbourhood,” and I was sort of chuckling like “ha ha, bad neighbourhood, as if.” And then…it was really nasty! That neighbourhood in Vancouver is bad…So, I don’t know. You got your problems.

Yeah, in Toronto we seem to push the really desperately poor people out to the outskirts of the city. It’s like they’re even more invisible, which is obviously terrible…I want to talk about something less depressing.

MS: All right. Let’s talk about music.

One of the interesting things about the new album is that there’s no samplers--

MS: But there are. I don’t mean to sound like Correcting Correct Guy—

No, go ahead.

MS: The only rule for this record was that there were no microphones.

Right.

MS: We used samplers – in fact, we used our whole usual bag of tricks, except that we weren’t allowed to take anything that made sounds in the air. So everything’s synthesized or generated by things other than real things…God, that was eloquent. I’m being clowned by my vanmates right now.

I just listened to another interview where Drew said he had to learn what chords are for this album – not what they are, but how to use them.

MS: It’s true. 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.

I think that sort of adds to the concept of the album in a way, because the idea of setting yourself a challenge and obviously the sound of it is reminiscent of video games.

MS: Wow. What video games in particular do you mean?

Well, I’m pretty young, I grew up playing them before I actually listened to music seriously—

MS: You mean, like Dig Dug and Mario Bros. or Halo and Grand Theft Auto?

I grew up around the time the Super NES and Sega Genesis came out, so it actually sounded like…the stuff they used over in Japan was synthesizers, basically.

MS: Yeah. I mean, it’s a similar set of restrictions, and that’s our schtick, always…[static]…I think it’s a similar thing with videogames, they had to cram in as much music as they could. I think the programmers at Namco possibly did a better job than we did.

I was reading your voluminous liner notes/backstory for the album and Drew apparently used a video game controller to control chord progressions on one of the songs…

MS: It’s true! Do you want to talk to Drew about that?

Yeah, sure.

[the phone is passed over]

DREW DANIEL: Hi there.

Hi.

DD: Can you hear me?

Yeah.

DD: Yeah, I use a game controller…[static]…It’s ironic because I don’t play video games at all. Of the people in the band – Martin loves to play certain video games. 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.

CR: [laughs] That’s amazing. That’s hilarious.

DD: It’s kind of funny…you can’t really imagine them all jamming together, but Kelley Polar’s quite a mean shot from what I understand. Yeah, I never play video games but I did use game controllers to come up with the chord progressions that I used for “Polychords”. I constructed a sort of – I guess I thought about how we started to write songs for The Civil War – having an autoharp was such a handy way to grow songs that were quote unquote real music because you can just sit there and come up with chord changes really quickly. I wanted to apply that same model to the early stages of Supreme Balloon, so I needed an autoharp. I [typed in] all the frequencies for the 88 keys of a standard piano and then figured out with a book I bought in a music shop which notes are held down to play which piano chords. And then I sat down with this game controller and just typed away with the chord progressions until I found something that I liked. While looking around for pop songs that use those same chords – apparently “Polychords” bears a certain weird resemblance to R.E.M.’s “Fall on Me”? I guess it’s sort of inevitable once you start playing around with chords, that there’s gonna be some other people that maybe have used B and A and C and A minor before, you know? It’s not the most original thing in the world ever. Maybe that says something about the labour-intensive nature of things, that I would use game controllers and laboriously reconstruct note by note in order to get at something that Joe Schmoe guitarist could probably just pick up a guitar and wham, there you go.

Mm-hmm.

DD: But, I mean, the good thing is that when you’re typing in all those frequencies inevitably every single one is slightly off, because I’m not doing it in the most precise manner, and all of those little mistakes add up to a tuning that is a little off and weird. So I like the results that happen when you sort of badly approximate something that’s real music. You tend to get a more interesting result sometimes than if you’re bang on it.

Could you guys tell me more about the equipment you used on the album? I’ve been reading the liner notes and there’s a lot of stuff I don’t recognize, these crazy antique machines…

It’s a mixture of things that if you were an assiduous prowler of junk shops 20 years ago you could get your hands on. Plenty of Korg MS-20s and Suzuki Omnichords…but things like the Coupigny you can only get if you do a lot of sweet-talking ‘cause there’s only one in the world and it’s inside a studio in Radio France. Its engineer built the Coupigny in 1961 and it’s one of a kind. It was used on, I believe, a lot of the GRM [Groupe de Recherches Musicales] records that sort of alternate between a musique-concrete tape-editing approach and electronic source material…Parmegiani’s Magnetic Fields uses it. More recently this woman from the Ukraine, Zavoloka, has also used the Coupigny on one of her albums, so I guess there’s a bit of a Coupigny renaissance going on right now.

Which was your favourite to work with?

DD: I think 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. I think 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 teacher noises from “Charlie Brown”]. 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.

[laughs]

DD: I’m going to give the phone back to Martin on that note.

MS: Hello again.

How are you guys transferring this to the live show? The last time you were in Toronto…I unfortunately couldn’t make it, but I understand that you shaved one of my friends’ heads and sampled that?

MS: Ah, that’s one of your friends, eh?

Yeah, Jonny.

MS: Oh, it was Jonny, right. I was thinking the guy that I spanked.

Maybe. I’m not sure who that one was.

MS: It wasn’t Jonny!

Are you guys 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 that one was. The concentration is on psychedelia and zoning out.

I saw Silver Apples play at the same venue fairly recently…[fruitless attempts to describe Simeon Coxe’s theremin device]

MS: I just hope people smoke a lot of hashish before coming…or LSD might be appropriate…if you watch the dot in the centre of the video the entire time I guarantee a transcendental experience.

[phone cuts out]

MS: How far did I get in that, anyway? You got the gist of it. I hope people are on drugs! Or that they’re really good at paying attention.

I’ll put out the word. “Bring shrooms…”

MS: Don’t drive. Cars kill. That’s the best advice I was ever given while taking psychedelic drugs. “Cars kill, Martin.” What I really mean is that it’s a more contemplative thing than the last one, not so wacky maybe. But a church seems like an appropriate place to do what we’re doing. I’m excited.

On another sort of local or nationalist theme…why is there a snippet of “O Canada” in “Exciter Lamp”?

MS: Well, it’s awkward for me to say because I kind of have to say it off the record. [mind-blowing secrets regarding the song’s precise connection to NFB animator Norman McLaren, who inspired it, were revealed here]. Do you know his work?

He was an animator, right?

MS: Yeah. I think originally he was from Scotland, but he did all his work in Canada, NFB-sponsored stuff. He developed the technique of painting on the optical track of film…

With that tribute to him, it’s like an echo or reverberation or whatever of the theme from your last album, the idea of cultural heroes.

MS: Yeah, a little bit. And I think he was a homo, too.

Actually – yeah, according to Wikipedia – I’m looking at it, that’s what it says.

MS: Excellent.

Wow, he was with his partner for 50 years.

MS: And it was never really mentioned, sadly. People just figured it out.

There’s another thing I wanted to mention about the last album and your earlier work in general, in relation to this one…I’m trying to phrase this in a way that isn’t stupid…

MS: Just go with it.

It seems like a lot of your work has been making electronic music physical. With the last album it was almost fetishistic, in multiple senses of the word…

MS: Yeah, definitely. With our previous records, we’ve been asked a lot about being gay and whether the music that we made was queer in some way. And really it wasn’t at all, and it kind of had nothing to do with anything we were doing and yet we got persistently hounded with these questions. People really want to make music this sort of personal expression thing, that has to do with your personal life and so on, but our songs were about objects before. So when we decided to make this portraits record we decided to just go all the way and “okay, we’ll do portraits of all these queer heroes of ours and get this out of the way,” and in so doing hopefully turn people onto the art of all those people that we did portraits of…Necessarily, when you’re trying to make an audio portrait of people we figured that it would be good to use objects from their lives. And, you know, homosexuality is largely about sexuality – then the objects that we end up using have to do with sex some of the time. We’re not dry academic art-makers, we do consider ourselves pop to a certain extent…you do stuff with sex and people look around and pay attention more than they might otherwise.

I think it’s also sort of fetishistic in an old-school sense – like, maybe not for everyone, but I’m sure that when some people listen to the songs it seems like these objects have a mystical quality.

MS: I would say that’d be in the eye of the beholder! What specific sounds do you mean?

I was thinking of the cigarette burns especially. It sounded like a cult initiation or something.

MS: There’s a story there. We just took that from the world again. The fans of the Germs did that, as a mark of initiation in the club of fans of the Germs. It was called a Germs burn and you could only get one from a member of the Germs. We’re big fans of the Germs and Darby Crash, so we thought that’d be a good thing to do. We found out where Don Bolles [the Germs’ drummer] lived, got in touch with him and explained our whole thing and he was more than happy to burn Drew with a cigarette. And we all became friends as well. We did it live a couple times, where he burned Drew again and we miked and amplified it live. He’s quite a performer, Don Bolles.

Even if someone doesn’t have some weird animist belief system or whatever, I think it works in a metaphorical sense. You’re bringing out qualities in these items that people haven’t really thought of yet.

MS: Good! Yeah, I think that’s part of the function of art, and certainly of ours, is to make people pay more attention to the things they take for granted in everyday life. I think the sonic nature of objects gets overlooked. I think there’s maybe too much attention paid to so-called musical instruments and not enough attention paid to the musical qualities of everything else. It’s sort of a defense mechanism, too. The world is a noisy place, and by taking it – well, to put it flatly, by controlling the noise of the world, I can deal with the world better.

I think a lot of people have this perception of experimental music or experimental art as being really cold and abstract and mirthless, and by being sort of playful and campy you refute that.

MS: It’s experimental music in the sense that we work with unusual objects and so on but I think the thing that makes it maybe more appealing is that we don’t just present the results of the experiment. I think that what makes true experimental music - if you do the experiment and it comes out bad, it’s still the result. And quite honestly, if we do an experiment and it comes out badly we throw it out. We only present the stuff that is good, for lack of a better term.

It’s like you’re using those methods for pop music…

MS: Yeah.

It reminds me of Stephin Merritt using these very formalist, ironic ideas, but basically putting them in the form of beautiful love songs.

MS: I like being putting in the same camp as him. I think his work is fantastic.

I was looking at another interview or something with him where he was – I think I actually read it in a 33 1/3 book [he didn’t], but when people tell him that they played “The Book of Love” at their weddings or something he’s horrified [an actual source for this statement is now eluding me, so I hope Merritt really did say something to that effect].

MS: [laughs] I had a woman in Ireland come up to me on this tour – I shouldn’t say that I was horrified because I was kind of gently moved and flattered, but she came up to me with such an intense look and said: “I listened to The Civil War all through my pregnancy. It’s the most amazing album. It was the only thing that would calm me down. And when my child was born those were the only songs that would make him stop crying, and we played your songs as the dance music at our wedding.” I think she meant a traditional Irish sort of wedding, and I was kind of blown away and moved by that. You really don’t think these things when you sit in your wretched little apartment making music, that it will move in the world the way it sometimes does. And it’s really an intense thing.

...So are you delighted when somebody actually dances to your songs?

MS: Sure. I mean, we make the stuff for pleasure – though certainly different people have different ideas of what pleasure is. Some people have pretty perverse ideas of pleasure and I’m down with that. I certainly do! It surprises me that someone could use our stuff for…I don’t want to say anything nasty and cynical, I think it’s lovely. I’m flattered, honestly. It’s fucking awesome that someone used our stuff for an occasion that brought them joy. I have my own opinions about Merritt and weddings, none of which are good, but it’s none of my business to tell people what they should like…

I wanted to ask about this again, because…Drew was telling me before that you play Halo? I don’t, but my brother does….I don’t do a lot of the online stuff...what kind of stuff do you play in general?

MS: You know, I’m not a huge video game player…part of my reason for playing Halo so much is the thing where you wear a headset and can talk to the people you play with...it’s a way to talk to J [Lesser], because he lives in Portland. And the game is fun too, but I think the connectivity aspect of it is enjoyable. I live in Baltimore now and I don’t actually have very many friends there, and it’s nice to talk to my buddies. I’m not a very good video game player. J’s killed me again and again and again and again. I worry that it bores him – in fact, I don’t worry, I know that it bores him after a point. But I think he comes for the conversation too.

I played them a huge amount when I was younger and then after going to university I’ve sort of tailed off a bit…

MS: The game part of video games is not all that fascinating to me. I’ve just been waiting the last 30 years watching video games and I knew that one day they would evolve to a point where they would become a virtual world that you can walk in and explore. It’s an awesome thing. I mean, it’s a new – I don’t mean to sound so fucking utopian and cosmic or whatever but it genuinely is a new, unprecedented artform. The idea that there’s a world you can walk into that has mountains and buildings and trees and you can go into a building and there’s different rooms…It’s an enveloping, experiential artform that has no precedent in the world. I don’t think a fuss is made about it in the art world. In fact it reminds me of how out-of-touch the art world is with the pace of entertainment technology. Have you read this book God Jr.?

No, what’s it about?

MS: Well, Drew would be better off talking about it, but it’s a super-interesting take on video games. Here, let him – he’s got a good rap about it.

DD: I just taught a semester with an introduction to literary study and I kind of have the gambit that the novel is a dying form and the video game is the form that’s rivaling a lot of its pleasures, a sequentially unfolding space that’s been authored to entertain. So there is a certain amount of overlap. And Dennis Cooper’s written this incredible novel God Jr., which is about a father mourning the death of his son by endlessly replaying his son’s favourite video game. And his son obsessed about a sort of uninteresting side detail of one of the landscapes in one of the levels of the game. And the father smokes a lot of weed and starts to dissolve the barrier between waking life and the video game and kind of works through his mourning for his son by clearing level after level of this game in order to figure out if the part that interested his son actually contains some special easter egg or if it’s just a boring shack on the edge of the forest…

People seem to be using the whole medium in conceptual art more and more.

DD: Are you thinking of somebody like Cory Arcangel?

Yeah, or the Paper Rad people.

DD: And it seems like it’s a touchstone for hipster graphic design, but I wonder if conceptualizing how narrative itself might work – I wonder if that’s something that’s gonna need a breakthrough in the gaming world itself to break the grip of certain basic scenarios on how people use these spaces and why. Maybe it’ll take a generation of people nursed on video games but also informed by ways of making art that are experimental with narrative itself. I’m looking forward to it.

Speaking of books, you wrote your 33 1/3 book – was it before you were working on this album or did it happen at the same time?

DD: There was a certain overlap, yeah. And at times I definitely would pump the members of Throbbing Gristle for information about their signal chains and then hurry to the pawn shop, try to find pedals and approximate their signal chains. But I really held off on trying to do TG pastiche for this album even though the kind of celestial world of arpeggiating and endless synth runs in something like “Walkabout” isn’t terribly distant from the organizing principle of the song “Supreme Balloon.” But I don’t think it’s a case of directly biting TG so much as sharing a love of some of the same technology. It’s weird, y’know, there’s a lot that emerged from talking with TG that didn’t make it into the book, especially their fragmented relationship to genre - just down the road from where they lived was a dub reggae nightclub that had a really loud soundsystem, and the more I thought about how TG would show up with these custom-built giant bass amps and play these bassline-heavy, heavily processed forms of music…at a certain level of abstraction the TG approach and the dub approach are actually quite close. And I think with us as well in Matmos, the way that we sort of learn from the genre it often doesn’t sound like that genre, but in fact we’ve stolen some DNA and tried to grow songs out of that.

I want to ask about the sequencing of the album – there’s sort of five pop songs, at the length of a pop song as well, and then you have this huge 24-minute behemoth…and then one more after that…although I think there’s a different tracklist depending on the edition…

DD: The CD is really the original form of the album and it was modeled on LP side divisions…You have shorter pieces as a gateway drug and then once people have been tenderized and worked all the rhythmic wiggles out of their system, then you hit ‘em with the really heavy stuff. Maybe we wimped out, maybe we should’ve put “Supreme Balloon” first, but I’m pleased with the way that it goes. I think a certain set of people that 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.

And then I guess “Cloudhopper” is the come-down or whatever.

DD: Yeah, and weirdly “Cloudhopper” was originally a floating melodic part that rode on top of an insanely manic and harsh Latin noise track that we made, that was, like, Latino rhythms and J Lesser’s beats and this guy Nate Boyce who’s our buddy – kind of O.G. noise dude who does great video graphics with a mixture of digital and analog processing gear, and he’s really good with this too. So we made this hellaciously harsh track and then it had this sort of beautiful floating layer of icing on top, and then when we were figuring out what would make this album click, and how we wanna send everyone off, we decided to just go with pure icing and remove all the harshness. I think for some people that might be a problem, but when you’re 37, or in Martin’s case 44, you kind of have less to prove in the macho “who can be the noisiest person in the room” sweepstakes. I have less to prove on that score. I mean, when we improvise on the radio we kinda tear it up and it gets very harsh and obnoxious. So I feel that I have those textures on tap if they’re needed, but in the case of this album that wasn’t really where we wanted to go.

Yeah. People sometimes seem to think that’s the only dynamic in noise music, “how loud can you make it?” You can smother people to death too.

DD: Yeah, I think it’s a valid form, and I’ve had a great time seeing a Masonna show or Merzbow, but Masonna plays for eight minutes and then he walks offstage and it’s totally punk and you just get it immediately. Whereas I’ve experienced hour-and-a-half-long shows where after 15 minutes you kinda hit a plateau where you’re not listening anymore. The dirty little secret about noise is that it’s ambient music. A lot of...Double Leopards records that are incredibly harsh if they’re cranked to the max become totally soothing if you just play them at a mellow level.

What was the inspiration for the title track? It sounds more like…a European art-porn film from the 60s or 70s…

DD: It has sort of two different origins. One is that when we were in Rome rehearsing to play “In C” with Terry Riley there was this world music shop across the street that sold a lot of Indian and Indonesian instruments and I went in there and got seduced by this tabla drum machine – from Radel, “Taal Mala” – and started to work with those patterns because the shape of the pattern is different from any that I would beat with and it’s good to cut loose your normal habit of working. And the other origin was sitting with all the synthesizers in the room chained together through MIDI and really getting into the Klaus Schulze era of endless staircases of arpeggiating patterns, going again and again and again and again and dee da la dee da la dee da la dee da la…you know. When we took those two halves and layered them on top of each other it just felt right, intuitively. It allowed Martin to go to a skill set that had been pretty much underused in Matmos for the last 12 years, but one that he has considerable chops in from all those years of smoking pot and listening to Vangelis. So it was all ready, we just needed to relax and stop taking ourselves so seriously.

Do you guys have any plans aside from the tour now?

DD: Oh yeah, there’s a lot to do. We are supposed to make a studio version of our cover of Robert Ashley’s “The Backyard,” and we are going to be remixing two of the string quartets of this amazing young composer, Jefferson Friedman, who’s based in New York City, who’s written some astonishing music…We have a commission from the Princeton Laptop Orchestra to create something for this, like, large laptop ensemble in Princeton next year. I’ve started figuring out what the next Matmos album will be. And then when we’re not doing that I have to give a talk on queer minstrelry, that is, the phenomenon of people pretending to be gay. I’m doing a talk on that at a conference in American studies, I’m doing a talk on suicide and martyrdom in Renaissance literature in December, and then I need to adapt my manuscript of my dissertation on melancholy in 16^th-century painting and literature into a book…so yeah, there’s a very great deal to be done. Oh, and before that we have to go to cooking school in Italy for 10 days. There isn’t a lot of hanging around and watching old Remington Steele episodes in our future.