The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast May 9, 2006
The new album from Matmos finds the dynamic duo taking a holiday from conceptual responsibility, skipping the outré sampling antics in favor of a lighthearted "cosmic pop" record made entirely out of synthesizers. Leave it to Matmos to invent a hard and fast rule that they have to follow even when they're just having fun: the creative restriction this time around is that Supreme Balloon is an ALL synthesizer album and no microphones were used at any point. That's right, no household objects played in a percussive manner, no snails or blood or amplified semen, no acoustic instruments, no voices of famous people for five seconds, not even any half-way cheating with Vocoders, just synthesizers of all shapes, sizes, eras and nationalities being snipped, folded and reshuffled by an arsenal of samplers and computers into colorful sound-origami. Gear fetishists take note: the exotic and antiquated synths used on the record heavily spotlight the classic 60s/70s/80s consumer electronic rigs of Arp, Korg, Roland, Waldorf and Moog, and feature modular systems from Electro-Comp, Doepfer and Akai (hell, even a stylophone and a Suzuki Omnichord show up); these were recorded at home in San Francisco, California and in the SnowGhost studio at Whitefish, Montana. But there are also completely unique, one-of-a-kind modular curios present, such as the "Coupigny" modular synthesizer housed in the INA/GRM studios at Radio France in Paris and used extensively by some of the titans of musique-concrete. Guest players invited to the party include living treasure of American jazz Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra (he plays the E.V.I. or Electronic Voice Instrument, a breath controlled oscillator, on "Mister Mouth"), Bay Area troublemakers Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly), East Coast electroacoustic sages Jay Lesser and Keith Fullerton Whitman, and classically trained pianist Sarah Cahill. Though it was recorded all over the world over the last two years, the whole shebang was finished in Baltimore, Maryland (the band's new home, at least as long as Drew Daniel is a professor in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University), and comes encased in some truly gorgeous watercolor artwork by Robert Syrett. To break it down: the album drops with a bumpin' front end of four rhythmic workouts (perky, stomping, toe-tapping, and shuffling, respectively) that coach Perrey & Kingsley and 8-bit video game music and kitsch Latin Moogsploitation into some freaky positions. Then things take a classy European vacation in which the baroque composer Francois Couperin's "Les Folies Francaises" is given the Wendy Carlos treatment. Then the band turn a corner into unexpected, ambitious new territory and things swell to a truly ridiculous/heroic climax. The jewel in the crown is the album's title track, a 24 minute monster synth jam that builds from a lone Roland SH-101 wobbling your sub-woofers into a celestial, psychedelic epic whose spiraling arpeggios recall the sidelong LP-era mind-journeys of Cluster, Mother Mallard and Vangelis. Riding an insistent tabla pattern courtesy of a "Taal Mala" drum machine from India, warm, bubbling layers of analogue synthesis, and the chattering and chirping of MAX patches shaking hands with boutique EFX pedals, it's a long strange trip indeed. Things cool down with an ambient air kiss and it's over. We know you're probably shaking your head and thinking to yourself, "an electronic band makes an all-electronic album? These guys must be CRAZY." And you'd be right. Consider this revenge for all those Queen records whose liner notes said "And nobody played the synthesizer!", and a sweet surprise from a truly unpredictable American band. Matmos are Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt.   www.brainashed.com.matmos   www.matadorrecords.com/matmos
		The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast May 9, 2006
“These digital-age surrealists have birthed a musical hybrid all their own” –Alternative Press The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast is the new record by San Francisco duo Matmos. It is a series of "sound portraits" of a pantheon of people that they admire. A musical attempt at biography, it’s loose in some places and very literal in others; taken as a suite of stylistically disparate songs, you get a kind of fractured family album, a historical pageant. It's at once Matmos’s most melodic and most conceptual record. 1. Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein (conceptual musique concrete) 2. Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan (mutant disco) 3. Tract for Valerie Solanas (booty bass) 4. Public Sex for Boyd McDonald (porn funk) 5. Semen Song for James Bidgood (weepy elegy) 6. Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith (jazz noir) 7. Germs Burn for Darby Crash (power electronics) 8. Solo Buttons for Joe Meek (surf twang) 9. Rag for William S. Burroughs (Arabic ragtime psychedelia) 10. Banquet for King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Wagnerian slapstick) (full credits of each song available on request) Matmos read their biographies and re-enacted events from their lives, making songs out of the sounds of the re-enactments. They gathered objects that were important to these people, made noises with them, and built melodies out of the noises. Sometimes the songs are just a tight focus on one detail (the Wittgenstein song is just an exploded view of a single paragraph from his text "Philosophical Investigations") and sometimes they revisit one event from their life (the King Ludwig II song re-enacts the incident in which he ordered dinner to be served to his favorite horse inside his castle's Hall of Mirrors with disastrous results). Sometimes they depict their subject abstractly: the Darby Crash song is dark electronics made out of the sound of Drew Daniel crying out in pain getting burned by the Germs’ Don Bolles, combined with the noise of M.C. Schmidt shaving his head. The Patricia Highsmith song was made as a collaboration with her favorite animal, the snail (they aimed a laser at a light sensitive theremin, and then got snails to crawl across the path of the laser, triggering changes in the theremin's pitch). Voices are more prominent on this record; there are guest vocals and cameo speeches by Antony, Kalonica McQuesten, Laetitia Sonami, Maja Ratjke, Bjork, and others. The album features Matmos’s most extremist and gutsy sound design (the sound of semen, burning flesh, and the embalmed reproductive tract of a cow are all featured) but rubbed up against the most lyrical, heart-on-sleeve music they've ever written (check out Antony's voice on "Semen Song for James Bidgood" or the Kronos Quartet's funereal strings on "Solo Buttons for Joe Meek"). French horns, tuba, strings, harp, darbuka, voice, guitar, drums and synths are chopped into tricky rhythmic patterns and melodic motifs. It's a funkier, funnier affair than their last album, The Civil War (a hallucinatory blend of medieval English folk and 19th century Americana), but also a darker one. 'The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast' is accompanied by ten specially commissioned works of portraiture by such visual artists as Dan Clowes, Jason Mecier, and Michael Bernard Loggins, that depict the subjects of each song. Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. They make music out of the sounds of objects, animals, people, and actions. They have collaborated with Rachel's, So Percussion, Jay Lesser, Alter Ego, People Like Us, Kronos Quartet and Bjork. They have shared stages with Slint and Wolf Eyes, remixed Foetus and Erase Errata (and many others), taught seminars on sound art at Harvard University and the San Francisco Art Institute, and DJed at proms for homeless teenagers. They have had pieces in the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, did a 17-day live performance at the Yerba Buena Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, and have scored the soundtracks for five gay porn films, one pinball machine, and one NASCAR television commercial. Discography, info, news, tour dates, and more available at Matmos’s web site: http://brainwashed.com/matmos.
		The Civil War September 23, 2003

'The Civil War' is the new album by San Francisco electronic duo Matmos. A hallucinatory double exposure of medieval English folk and 19th century Americana, The Civil War finds Matmos experimenting with a dramatically different palette from their critically acclaimed exploration of medical technology 'A Chance to Cut Is A Chance to Cure'. Though there's nary a scalpel in sight, their humorous cut-up sensibility and willingness to take risks remains intact. In a time when most electronic artists seem desperate to ape the sounds of 1983 as closely as possible, Matmos have tried to make the 2003 version of the 1990 version of the 1968 version of the 1860 version of the 1590s. Across the nine tracks on 'The Civil War', production styles and instrumentation keep telescoping backwards and projecting forwards, producing weirdly anachronistic dialogues: medieval jigs and reels joust against country and western twang, and pastoral acoustic folk gets pistolwhipped by crisp digital editing techniques.

A guerilla assault on rock, folk, and country maneuvers, 'The Civil War' keeps lines of communication open across genres and periods. If the opener "Regicide"'s keening hurdy gurdy recalls the Incredible String Band's psychedelic medievalism,the ambling piano line of "For the Trees" sounds like a distant cousin of honky tonk pianist Floyd Cramer's swooning instrumentals. Songs mutate and reverse direction: "Y.T.T.E" starts with tumbling big band drums that recall Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life", gatecrashes a Boredoms drumcircle, lilts into Chet Atkins twang, and finally scuttles to a close in minimalist soundfile manipulation. Deceptively "pretty" on the surface, it's music that struggles against itself and occasionally collapses, breaking down into amorphous skeins of noise, dissolving into raw field recordings of cicadas in the trees and Fourth of July fireworks, and, in "Pelt and Holler", unexpectedly jump-cutting to total silence. While much of this album's focus on untreated and close mic-ed acoustic instruments suggest a pickin' session on a Southern porch, the mellowness is peppered with peaks of scaldingly bright and extreme sonics. On this recording M. C. Schmidt and guest member Keith Fullterton Whitman (aka Hrvatski) had the opportunity to use one of the original Serge modular synthesizers built by Ivan Tcherepnin; its piercing squeals ricochet across the military drumrolls of "Reconstruction".

As their compositional appetite grew more ambitious and expansive, Matmos decided to bring in more musically gifted reinforcements from across America. Among others, Steve Goodfriend and Jim Putnam of Radar Bros. sit in on drums and guitar respectively, Jay Lesser plucked the dobro, Tim Barnes offered drum source samples, improv guitar manipulator Keenan Lawler ventured into the sewer pipes of Louisville, Kentucky for a subterranean steel guitar recording, fellow Louisville alumnus David Grubbs contributed piano, with a little coaxing Blevin Blectum added violin, and, providing the lion's share of guest contributions, Mark Lightcap (formerly of Acetone, now playing with Hope Sandoval) played tuba, peck horn, banjo, and heaps of electric and acoustic guitar. That said, Matmos' trademark ear for highly unorthodox sample sources endures: "Pelt and Holler" is made almost entirely out of the sound of a rabbit pelt, while "The Struggle Against Unreality Begins" features the sound of the blood in M. C. Schmidt's carotid artery.

Balancing baroquely detailed production against passages of stark single-instrument simplicity, Matmos have pushed themselves in an unexpected, and surprisingly tuneful, new direction. Part Canterbury tale and part Southern Gothic, 'The Civil War' eludes easy categories but rewards careful listening, responding to present tensions with historical imagination and sly wit.

Matmos is M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. They have toured with Lesser, Labradford, The Rachels and Bjork, shared stages with Terry Riley and Wire, remixed The Melvins and Otomo Yoshihide (and most recently Erase Errata), and are still working on an ongoing collaborative project with The Kronos Quartet. They have taught seminars on sound art at Harvard University and DJed at proms for homeless teenagers. They have had pieces in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and have scored the soundtracks for five gay porn films. They are currently on tour with Bjork, and in November they are scheduled to present their first installation at the Yerba Buena Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco.

This is Matmos’ fifth studio album.

Complete discography at: http://brainwashed.com/matmos/discog/index.html

More fun at:

http://www.matadorrecords.com/matmos and http://brainwashed.com/matmos

A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure March 13, 2001

Following the critical success of their last full-length The West, San Francisco-based electronic duo Matmos push their rhythmic collage tendencies even further on their Matador debut, sidestepping that record’s pastoral orientation in favor of an electro cut-up concept album that samples recordings of plastic surgery and medical technology.

After gaining the trust and cooperation of surgeons and patients, the band was allowed to record in operating rooms and clinics. Back in the studio, Matmos performed surgery of their own upon the sounds they had gathered, building rhythms from the clanks, rasps and snips of the scalpel, kick drums from the sound of bones being broken, and rich drones from the buzz of human skin conducting electricity through acupuncture points.

Matmos members M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel (both doctors’ sons) felt that a “dark” record would be too easy to make out of such Grand Guignol content. Instead, they make surprisingly approachable, quasi-pop music by combining these extremist sound sources with drums and guitars played by some of the crew from The West (Steve Goodfriend of Radar Bros./For Carnation, Mark Lightcap of Acetone). The result is challenging sound art that you can tap your toes to.

“Lipostudio (And So On...)” pairs the shuffling, squelching sound of human fat being sucked during liposuction surgery with squalls of clarinet played by Stephen Thrower (currently of Cyclobe, formerly of Coil), only to shift mid-song into a stripped-down, melodic quasi-rock song that drifts “West”-ward, complete with guest voices from a galaxy of the US electronic scene’s glitchiest (Kid 606, Lesser, Blectum, Hrvatski). No puns about “fat” beats, please.

After a lengthy opening blast of electrical interference, “L.A.S.I.K.” turns into click-happy electro scored for the sounds of laser eye surgery, complete with encouragement from the doctor and drugged murmurs from the patient, a willing participant and friend of the band.

Turning an audiologist testing deaf children into an unlikely house diva, “Spondee” makes directly for the dancefloor (complete with horns, steady 4/4 kicks and a ConFunkShun-esque handclap) only to ooze into lazy twang and end with sinus-scouring full frequency sweeps and a murky lecture on the anatomy of the cochlea.

The tranquil melodic ambience of “For Felix” massages you couchward, then swerves into jittery improv played entirely upon the bowed and plucked bars of a rat cage, memorializing the bands deceased pet while evoking the broader context of laboratory animal research.

With its distorted fog of theremin-esque tone clouds and vaudeville skiffle action, “Memento Mori” would be totally scary funk even if it wasn’t fashioned out of a human skull.

The album closes with the epic “California Rhinoplasty” in which a nose flute slinks across intricate layers of nose job samples and warm tonal waves are generated by the electric hum of muscle tissue being cauterized.

As a theme (did someone say concept album here?) “medical technology” proves to be loose enough to include a wide variety of sounds, while nonetheless tying together this unusual suite of songs into a unified meditation on science, the body, mortality and other dancefloor-friendly topics. A Chance to Cut is A Chance to Cure shows the band at the height of their powers, making ambitious and distinctly new music from an unexpected source.

Matmos has remixed Bjork, Kid 606, and Otomo Yoshihide, toured with Lesser, Labradford and Rachel’s, and is currently working with Bjork, Matthew Herbert and the Kronos Quartet on collaborative projects.

There’s a lot of lip service paid these days to various electronic-based music being “experimental” — but Matmos’ musical practice genuinely deserves this much abused term. Using samplers, analogue keyboards, field recordings and guitars, Matmos make atmospheric, idiosyncratic electronica. In addition to incorporating chance operations into their sequencing enviroment, many songs are based upon a working methodology of “conceptual restriction” — songs are built entirely out of samples from a single sound source: field recordings, contact microphones on hair, even the sound of an amplified synapse from crayfish nerve tissue. Sometimes these samples and recordings are built up into elaborate rhythmic sequences verging on (but tweaking) the by-now familiar subgenres of trip hop, drum and bass and electro; sometimes these sound sources are kept beat-free, and sculpted into frighteningly noisy atmospheres, or shot through with eerie silent pauses and gaps.

Based in San Francisco, Matmos is Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt. The band members biographies reflect their brainy, decentered approach to electronica - daniel is currently getting his PhD; Schmidt helps manage the conceptual art department of the San Francisco Art Institute. Daniel is a veteran of the indie rock scene in Louisville, Kentucky, and has collaborated on film soundtracks and, oddly enough, hip hop projects with Jeff Mueller (of June of ’44) and Jason Noble (Rachel’s). In addition to radio DJing, drew has DJed in jungle and trip hop clubs in england and San Francisco and has been making experimental electronic music since high school. M.C. Schmidt has been making experimental electronic music for many years, as the leader of avant-garde drone outfit X/I and industrial occultists Iaocore, in which he did time with current members of Amber Asylum and Tipsy.