In this, the final installment of the Matmos interview, Martin and Drew talk about what makes an action art, and about working with Bjork.
Hope you all have enjoyed it!
For refreshers, goto Part 1 and Part 2
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AS- It seems to me, and this is just my take on it, that the Matmos live show has some performance art characteristics. Would you agree with this? What is performance art to Matmos?
Martin- When we first started doing this, when we first started making music, and then someone liked our songs…well if you make music in your bedroom, and you talk to someone at a bar and you say “Oh yea I make music.” Among their first questions is always going to be “Well when and where are you going to play?” Because this business of playing music live is part of making music, in people’s minds. If you’re going to sell CDs you have to play music live, or generally that’s considered a good thing to do. We were faced with the question of what would we do live, because so much of what we do is about hunching in front of a computer, and editing stuff. Or at the most exciting playing a keyboard…not the most fascinating thing to watch live.
Drew- Because we don’t really have musical chops, we don’t have performance chops in the way that real musicians do. We’re self-taught.
Martin- We can’t juggle. Watching someone play guitar really well is like watching a great trick. It’s like “Wow. That person can do all those things,” and you see it live. Neither of us are musicians at all. Fortunately we had this built in shtick of we make the music out of the objects. So, it seemed fairly obvious to us that what we should do is make the sound of the object live.
Drew- Play the processes that generated the composition. So that it is like a cooking show where you’ve got the cooked thing as a sort of structural spine to play against, but you’re also re-enacted the whole process that made the piece in the first place.
Martin- And so it becomes performance art, which is to say there is someone doing something on stage besides playing a musical instrument.
Drew- That whole “Why is it art” thing is an old strategy. Warhol shoots a film of someone sleeping, or someone kissing, or someone eating, and why is it art? Well, it’s the act of putting a frame around it. And it’s the same of any real action. If you give someone a haircut at home, you’re giving them a haircut. If you do it under lights on a stage, in front of an audience who are being asked to look at it through this proscenium arch that sets it aside, it becomes art. And maybe it activates people’s way of listening to it and trying to hear it as music, that’s our goal—to process the sound of a real action. So, I’m dialing in, and filtering the sound of Martin shaving someone’s head. It’s real action, but it’s also an art action, because it’s being turned into sound.
Martin- And for me that piece is about, I’ll try to keep it brief-- the reason I used that was because when I was a punk rocker, and that song is supposed to be a portrait of Darby Crash, a hugely important part of being a punk rocker was cutting your hair. In the 70s long hair was the thing, and punk was a sort of revolution against that. And so, getting you hair cut requires a lot of eeerrrrrrrr…like holding this thing up against your head, which buzzes, and activates your head like this giant microphone. The process of someone buzzing your head…I’m performing that live, but by amplifying that sound, and enveloping it, it reminds you when someone is doing it to you. And hopefully triggering, and re-triggering that whole experience, and referring to the history and actually enacting the experience…I don’t know with that sound system.
Drew- Well there was a lot of low end in it. You don’t get the buzz, but you get the boom.
Martin- It’s a good shtick. It beats the fuck out of someone checking their email live, on stage. Which is what so much electronic music…I was always shocked that people actually, even some of my friends, musicians I really enjoy, actually had the fucking balls to go out there and stand on stage with a lab top and do nothing.
Drew- But some people you sense from the way they seem to be listening and changing what they’re doing, a lab top performance can be responsive live…
Martin- There’s some conceptual art right there. “I believe your doing something…”
Drew- But I’ve seen good and I’ve seen bad. I mean I’ve seen lab top shows were I was quit satisfied, and lab top shows were I was quit frustrated. It all comes down to how was the sound system, how responsive and flowing did the performance seem to be? But yea, you are taking it a little bit on faith that their process is real, and they aren’t just pressing play. With us that is less of an issue, because we are showing people gesturally what we do. But we are going to have to face it again when we start to play the all-electronic material. But for us…
Martin- It’s also why I show videos.
Drew- Yea, to shut people up.
Martin- Yea, well there are pieces when I am not doing any shtick.
Drew- Well you’re playing synthesizers, and I’m playing sequencers. That’s the other thing. People get this mistaken notion if you use sequencers, therefore it is not live. But the way we reproduce a song is to have all these options, and to decide on the fly which ones come in when, and for how long, and how do we manipulate them.
Martin- To a certain degree. But we are trying to reproduce the song that…
Drew- Yea. It’s sort of a halfway point between structure and improv…It’s not improv, it’s not free music. Which we can do, but I’m not very good at it. Martin is much better.
Martin- I disagree. I think that is your primary problem, is that you don’t believe that you are…
Drew- I just can’t avoid wanting to cheat, and prepare a bunch of stuff ahead of time, that I know sounds cool. Which is to not to be truly in the moment. But it’s cultural too. I mean think about the way church organists are always expected to improvise the way that they embroider a pawn, like a melody. It’s the same with ragas in Indian music. There is a very clear progression, and a very clear scale, but there is also so much freedom inside it. So I think a lot of these issues about what’s free, and what’s formal are oversimplified anyway.
AS- You probably knew this was going to come up, but talk about some of people Matmos has worked with.
Drew- We’ve been at it so long it really runs the gambit.
AS- Hit on some of the big names.
Martin- What, you mean Bjork? She’s pretty much the only one…well I guess the Kronos Quartet, and Terry Riley…
Drew- And Antony…
Martin- Very different with each of them.
Drew- It’s always a challenge to not show up and kind of spray paint your style onto somebody else. There have been some occasions when I really felt like we were trying to make something 50/50. But in every case it’s different about how that pans out. The work for Bjork was very much…she had written songs and we were doing sound design to kind of take them further in the direction they were already going. Which was really fun, and really scary. With a commission from the Kronos we were totally free to make whatever we wanted for them, but then we also had to realize “Well it needs to be in a kind of conventional tuning,” so that they can keep playing their string instruments and not have to pick up a different set.
Martin- Yea, it’s funny with things like that, you bring your limitations. Even if someone said “Do whatever you want,” it’s really difficult to help going “Well, of course they are the Kronos Quartet, so they’ll want something like this. Insert assumption here.” It’s hard not to do that.
Drew- Even like when we wanted Antony to sing on our song, but it’s a little bit lazy of us to send him the song and say, “Just do anything you want.” Because so much of the skill of being a singer is phrasing and intonation that you put to words, but he’s not going to feel comfortable just writing whatever lyrics to our song. So we wound up writing a kind of skeletal frame of lyrics for him to bounce off of, but then we basically chopped him up, and sort of de-languagify it, like removed the meaning and just kept the sound. Every time it is always new about how pushy you get, or they get, and about whether the chemistry is working. With Bjork, I feel in a way the real collaboration was starting when we were all together and were talking about how to arrange these older songs. In a certain way Verspertine was pretty fully formed by the time we were working on it. She was very open to having us add…
Martin- There is a live CD of shows we did. I think it’s probably pretty fucking obscure, really. She released fifty fucking things in the last two years of old stuff and its one of those.
Drew- It’s in the live box set.
Martin- That’s probably the most Bjork and Matmos together of things. It’s the recording of the way we orchestrated a bunch of her songs. And we really did re-orchestrate them in a major way.
Drew- And that was down to her being very flexible. She was like “Go for it. Change it up.” That’s why she wanted us involved in the band, to make it valid, and not make it just a by-numbers here are these songs from these albums that you already know. So many people on her level are just doing a kind of delivery system, or a retro-package. She’s somebody who can’t help but keep it changing.
Martin- I would have to say that the live recording would be even more genuinely a collaboration than even the live show, because her live engineer didn’t like what we did, and was mixing us out, and mixing in the dullest parts of the prerecord…which has always offended me.
Drew- Often people will play something at our studio. They’ll come over and think we’re all going to jam, but it’s much, much close to a photo shoot. They sit and make individual sounds. We take them, and months later a record comes out where these sounds they made very much on the fly, in isolation, have taken on a form…
Martin- Have been woven into this song.
Drew- In a certain way we are kind of bullies, in that we take a tiny amount of material from people and then we grow a huge thing, but it often isn’t there playing. Or it’s a very selective and imperialistic take over of there playing.
Coincidentally, Martin’s phone rings, and its long time Matmos collaborator J Lesser. This seemed like an appropriate time to end the interview, so we did. --Bez
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Matmos Interview Part 3 of 3 (w/ Drew, Martin)
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Matmos Interview Part 2 of 3 (w/ Drew, Martin)
I had originally intended to post this interview in two halves, but I am now opting to post it in thirds. So, here is the second segment.
At this point in the interview my mini disc recorder failed, and the rest was taped on a cassette over a recording of Martin destroying his father's speakers...just thought you'd like to know.
For a refresher course, see Part 1 of 3.
--Bez
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AS-How did Matmos form?
Drew- Well, we became a couple and a band in the same sort of process. I had seen Martin’s band at a punk rock warehouse on Gilman Street, and he had seen me perform solo doing noisy cut-ups of lounge music with a sampler.
Martin- No. You were doing techno.
Drew- It was all lounge samples. We met in a gay bar where I was a go-go dancer. Martin was putting money in my g-string. This was at Club Uranus. Pretty soon he was teaching me how to edit sound on a computer, which was very rare to do at that point. I was going out with somebody else then, but our partnership kicked off and the other relationship died out in the space of about a year. Pretty soon I was moving in with Martin. We were living in the Tenderloin, a really rough part of San Francisco. But in a lot of ways it was cheap and beautiful and weird. We just spent hours making endless repetitive looping music that was sometimes trying to fit in with techno, and sometimes just trying to see what our software could do. I was learning a lot. Martin really taught me how to sequence, and how to edit audio. I had just fucked around with tape recorders and samplers.
Martin- Well he was super, super good with his keyboard sampler. I had one for years, but I had never dedicated the time and the obsession to the one thing. Like when I met him, when he was 19, he was a fucking master of this one sampler. I wonder about the specific machine, it was a Roland W30. The sampler I had gotten was a Sonic Mirage, which literally had its readout in hexadecimal. So, everything was expressed in two digits. So the recording levels, and every other thing that you knew about what you were doing…who had to read hexadecimal to do anything with it. Which was hard for never-strong-in-math Martin.
Drew- Yea, I benefited from newer consumer electronics. The Roland W30… MC Hammer used it, a lot of the people that did jungle used it. At that time I was listening to a lot of drum and bass, and early techno, and acid techno. My background is really noise and electronic music and industrial music. But the sort of language was changing to rapidly in music at that time. That was really cool for me. Now we kind of laugh at rave and techno and certain cheesy 90’s things like Burning Man.
Martin- Everyone laughed at what came just previous.
Drew- It’s an era that when we look back at it we think of big, bad floppy hats and cheesy chart techno.
Martin- The Chemical Brothers, ecstasy.
Drew- But if you went to a gabber party, like I djed at one called Technical Support in England. We went to one together that was with that industrial strength dj Lenny D. You heard stuff that was so crunched out, and distorted, and fast, and strange, that to me in really felt like a new way for noise music to develop. Like it wasn’t about any of the older musical values what so ever. It really seemed pretty amazing…formally fucked up, and full of implications.
So, the unfortunate thing that happened evolutionarily is that IDM turned into this brackish delta of people drawing on, but de-saturating and whimpifying something that had a kind of integrity. Part of that was about “is this for the dance floor or not?” and a lot of doubletalk about whether people were making records for one setting or another. I don’t think that home listening or rave listening are inherently good or bad. It’s about how you work inside your form. But a lot of what was cool and fucked up was happening at raves and parties. It’s not that case that listening to something at home necessarily makes it deeper, more complex, or more formally brave….But nobody even cares about IDM now.
Martin- It was a seriously unfortunate moniker. We proposed again, and again in the 90s that we change it from Intelligent Dance Music, and start calling it Super Music. How many nicknames for music include praise in the title? You know it’s not called Profound Blues; it’s just called Blues. It’s not called Fabulous Rock Music.
Drew- Maybe it should be Fabulous Rock Music for bands like Roxy Music, Queen, T. Rex.
Martin- But not Deep Purple, or Black Oak Arkansas
Drew- No. They are not fabulous.
AS-What is the compositional process like for Matmos now, and how does it compare to the past?
Martin- When we started out, like Drew was saying, we wanted to make noise music. Then Drew introduced me to this stuff called techno, and, I’m going to short handed it, rave. He had a great interest in making stuff that worked for the dance floor. We tried making both separately, and kind of failed…I don’t know, we liked it.
Drew- But nobody else did.
Martin- And we kind of came to the conclusion that no one gives a shit about what we do, but we enjoy doing it. So, we did it for our own pleasure. We started combining the two, and making really noisy…what we considered dance music combining the idea of taking really weird recordings and cutting them up to be rhythmic.
Drew- So there would still be bass lines and beats, but they would be made out of the raw material that could be noise music.
Martin- And what do you know? That is still what we do. That went well.
Drew- I think the way that the compositional process has changed is that just over time you get more self-conscience and more paranoid about not repeating yourself, and you also develop a deeper relationship with your gear and what it can do. Software changes, the environment you’re responding to changes. So, for us it is now freer in certain ways, because I feel that I have a little more under my belt now when I’m trying to think about the form of a song. But it’s constraining in other ways, because the more times you have made a record, the greater the suspense about whether you still have something to express that’s worth taking up people’s time and money.
Martin- I don’t know. I just don’t think about it
Drew- You’re freer in some way. And that’s not something you see going into it. We never thought that anyone would care. We pressed ourselves. We put out our records… we made a thousand, and we thought that they would just sit in boxes in our basement and that would be that. And instead there was this weird charmed life that kind of snuck up on us. We didn’t see it coming, and that is still kind of hard to believe. We would sit and listen to Terry Riley, and the idea then, that 10 years later we would play in an ensemble with him. And actually not just meet him but sit and make music together a little bit, was just unthinkable. And it is still shocking.
I guess Martin is right though, because in a certain sense nothing has changed, because you still start from a blank slate and try to figure out what you have to say. It doesn’t get any easier to make interesting music; it does get easier to make something, you know what I mean?
Martin- No…but I don’t want to give you a hard time.
Drew- After eight albums I know how to take a field recording and chop it up, lay it out on the keyboard…
Martin- Oh, you mean you know how to do what you’ve done before, exactly.
Drew- Yea. I know how to repeat myself, and that gets easier. But what you don’t learn is how to make a good song, because that is infinite and endless. And that task of making something worth someone’s time is never a given.
Martin- You ever bowl?
AS- Yes. I have, but around here we do duckpin bowling.
Martin- I’m sorry for you. In bowling, at least in my experience—there was a time in my life when I bowled a lot. When you bowl six games in a row, by the sixth game it’s still very difficult to throw a strike, but it gets easier and easier to pick up spares. Because picking up spares is about throwing the ball into this place. Like I can always put the ball into the upper-right hand corner of the thing.
But a strike requires this perfect placement, not just placement, speed, torque. It has to have spin and be coming in from this…it’s a whole different thing from picking up spares. Picking up spares is a dumb activity. I think that is a good analogy for it. By your sixth record is easier because you’ve practiced and done all the stuff, it’s easier to pick up spares. But throwing a strike is still the real art form. Boy, sports analogies, that’s what we need more of.
Drew- But there is a poet that was saying that to really write a great poem is a little like getting struck by lightening. You can practice by standing out in the rain in a big empty field, but you won’t necessarily get that lightening.
AS- Do you know what poet that was?
Drew- I don’t want to misattribute. I’ll look it up, but I thought it was Randall Jarrell.
Martin- Oh, you like that better than my bowling analogy?
AS- That was the best bowling analogy I have ever heard, and I’m sure it will go down in history as the best bowling reference ever.
Drew- I think it was Randall Jarrell, but let me check so that I don’t get it wrong. That kind of luck you can’t script, and you just sort of hope to be receptive to…
Martin- Which, incidentally, I’m not saying, “We throw strikes.” I’m not saying “And we figured it out.”
Drew- It’s the difference between having technique and inspiration. For us that is even harder to quantify because I don’t really feel like our music is expressive, in the way that I don’t view Matmos as the way I manifest my emotions. That is totally different from a singer/song writer model in a certain way. For us we propose a concept, and then we come up with a list of objects, we acquire those objects, we try to see what sounds they make, and then we try to see what songs remerge from those sounds.
But at no point is it like “Oh, I’m angry, so I’m going to make an angry song,” or “I’m feeling really positive, so I’m going to make a positive song.” It isn’t emotional in that way, it’s about what the sound it doing. So it’s not about inspiration, in that direct manner. Though you can have work flows when the material feels very responsive, and you’re getting the result you’re really happy with. I mean people hear Blood on the Track and they’re like “It’s the divorce album,” and they hear the divorce through the lyrics. Obviously that is an allusion because it is still art, it’s still been edited. But usually with Matmos…our baggage is different. It’s not that we don’t have baggage, but our baggage is often some anachronistic weird historical scheme, or some biographical list of some famous people’s lives, or…
Martin- It’s not about loneliness.
Drew- It’s not emo. But hopefully it’s not this dry white cube of abstraction either, because it is always referential…tied to objects. And that’s what’s scary about the new album. The new album is us finally even giving up on that, and just starting from a total blank slate of electronics and seeing what emerges. For a long time I think that if people wanted to, you know, kick the tires of what Matmos is doing, they could say “Oh well you’re really just putting together this list of signifiers, and the music is secondary. It’s really about ideas, and you’re coasting on the fact you sound interesting as a press kit.”
Martin- Which is important.
Drew- Or “There is blood and semen. Ha ha!” You know, that like your going at it in this scatological, IDM fart joke level. Which, if it’s funny why not.
Martin- Alright, enough. Let’s get to the next one.
AS- For Matmos is the emphasis placed on the process, or on the end sound?
Martin- What do you mean by “process”?
AS- The source of the sound, and process creating the sound.
Martin- I like that we have, at least historically, have had listeners….well when you face the reality, some of them are going to know and some of them aren’t. Some of them are going to be the kind of people that investigate. I have always enjoyed the fact that we tried to provide more information for those that want more information.
Drew- But it’s not mandatory.
Martin- But hopefully it’s not necessary to enjoy it. Someone listening to the radio and one of our songs comes on, hopefully they can still derive some pleasure from it, and maybe some of the meaning…or maybe content would be a better word than meaning. But the person who purchases the cd can read the liner notes, the person who purchased the cd reads the liner notes and looks us up online, and can get even more, and so on and so on. Whereas I kind of feel there is a dead end…well the dead end comes sooner with a lot of music. We’re so librarian-y, also teacher-y…teacheresque?
Drew- Pedagogical?
Martin- Well that makes it seem…
Drew- Pedantic?
Martin- I like that what we do connects to a bunch of things, and those things connect to other things. And some of those things are curated by us, and some of them, of course, are going to accidental things. People frequently come up to us and say “Oh the --- connects to the ----.” I’m like “ No, that actually wasn’t my intent, or our intent, but if it leads you off in the directions that’s fine.”
Drew- We get pigeonholed as control freaks who want people to have studied a syllabus to get an album. That’s definitely not the intention. I want to produce curiosity about the sounds. I would hope that if you hear the song, it would make you listen and sort of cock your head to try to figure out what those sounds are. Hopefully the imaginative response goes beyond my little wish list. Hopefully it’s richer than that. It’s not like it’s a game of guess-what’s-in-my-pocket. Is the meaning of the cake the recipe that made it, or is the meaning of the cake the set of feelings that you have when you eat it?
Martin- it’s a primary joy in life, that sort of that process of educating your self. I like connecting things to other things. I like…you remember, I guess this isn’t a popular thing anymore. In the 80s they buried this bejeweled rabbit somewhere in England. And they published this book of collages, or paintings that were clues to where the rabbit was buried. It became this international mystery, where you had interpret this Old Celtic language and art in order to find clues that led to other clues, and so on. And that had a very concrete objective—you get the $10,000 rabbit at the end. But I like the sort of treasure hunt aspect.
Drew- And it’s more about the desire and the wondering, than about the thing at the end of the process. I had that book as a kid and I thought it was great, and I never really needed to find the rabbit. There are certainly details in our music that we don’t include because we don’t think they are significant, or we don’t feel like shutting down what a piece means. I mean it’s so long ago that it’s fine to talk about, but on our first album there was a piece that had recordings of trains. We identified it in the liners notes as “Polish trains,” but they were actually the trains that went to Auschwitz. I felt that if we included that detail…
Martin- Then it makes it all about Auschwitz.
Drew- Yea, and in a way it’s just too on the nose. It’s just too limited. I like the esotericism of knowing more than the listener at certain points
Continue to Part 3 of 3 or go back to Part 1
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Matmos Interview (w/ Drew Daniel, Martin Schmidt)
AS- What are you impressions of Martin- It’s forbidding because of its reputation, and it’s large and sprawling, and not very well laid out. But I’m speaking as a Californian. To echo Martin, there is a longer history here, architecturally. There is so much brick, which you never see in California because of earthquakes. So you are just aware of this lumbering gothic mass of buildings, so many abandoned. Obviously you can’t cross Baltimore without seeing a lot of poverty, and predatory environments, and struggling people. That is certainly different from San Francisco, which is very much under going a Manhattanization. Martin- Yeah, at the moment San Francisco is on fire. I lived there for 22 years and it wasn’t always like that, but it was never as low as Baltimore is now. Drew- I love Baltimore. I’ve sort of been frustrated and confused by its physical layout. We came back from a show in California in two in the morning, in the pouring rain, and thought that Franklin was a two-way street driving the wrong way straight into traffic. This cop pulled out of nowhere. Martin- And this was just in a bad neighborhood. Drew- Yea it was gnarly. I thought “man we’re so fucked.” The guy took one look at our California plates, and the equipment in the car. The cop was like "what the hell is wrong with you guys? What are you doing?" But I feel like in that moment Baltimore reached out and saved us. Baltimore is totally different from San Francisco is so complete a manner, that it feels really fresh to be here. I feel like I’m in a city with so much more history. Racially it’s a completely different experience. In San Francisco we lived in a Latino neighborhood, and our default setting was that everyone around you was Salvadorian or Mexican. And then I was always on the Berkley campus, which is largely Asian. To come here, it is just a totally different mixture. That feels very cool. I think the biggest change overall is just that money affects what is possible, and how people think in ways you don’t really realize when you are in one stable situation all the time. So, in San Francisco, because of the software industries, there is a lot of creativity, but also this insanely high rent that affects everything. Then you come to Baltimore, a city that’s been on this bad downward spiral for thirty years, and rent is so low that all these people can live by making really fucked-up music and they don’t sweat the rent at all. Martin- I don’t know. I think they are all sweating the rent. It’s just not the same as San Francisco in that respect. I’m sure people are working their asses off here, and people are working their asses off there, but they are certainly getting a better deal on real estate here. Drew- I didn’t expect the scene to be so noisy and harsh here…that’s been cool. I thought San Francisco was like the place where the freaks are. That’s true in the sense that it has an old bohemian history, and it’s always had a big queer community. And yet coming to Baltimore, and going out and hearing what people are doing musically, it seems much more ferocious here, formally. Maybe it’s because everyone is playing through guitar amps, and there is no PA and everything sounds really crunched out. It’s been humbling to see just how high the standards are, especially the improvised music in Baltimore. I can’t think of an equivalent to High Zero in San Francisco. There is an improvisational scene around venues like 21 Gram that happens all the time, but there isn’t this feeling of everyone coming together, and people coming from around the world to focus on stuff that is so formally out there. I think that is cool. AS- You mentioned High Zero, and you previously preformed at Red Room. Is it a conscientious effort of Matmos to bolster the experimental music scene in Baltimore? Drew- I don’t think they need us. Martin- And we’re not famous to the point where we’re going to help anybody. Drew- I’m just grateful they are accepting us. Martin- Yea exactly. I’m really, really, really relieved that people haven’t been snooty to us. In fact, they have been super kind and welcoming. We don’t make improvised music. We make music that frequently goes eu-eu-eu-eu, eu-eu-eu-eu. Drew- And that is a problem for some people, but not here. Martin- We sent a live album we made with J Lesser that was mostly improvised stuff recorded on the radio to the London Musicians Collective, this improv organization in London, to review. They literally sent it back. Which was impressive in its own right, that they bothered to send it back postage paid, with a note that said something like “this music doesn’t impress us at all. This is not improvised music.” For a while we thought we were neither fish nor flesh. We’re not improv, and we’re not proper electronic music, because we’re not dj’s right? Drew- We’re not rocking jams, obviously. Martin- We fit poorly into any of these categories. But we have certainly done shockingly well with it, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve always been surprised that this thing has done as well as it has. Drew- Honestly my sense of the Baltimore scene, before I lived here, was based on knowing about Dan Deacon and Spank Rock, where it is always about cold-rocking the party. So, when we moved here I though “god we’re just not going to fit in at all,” because that is not really what we do. Martin- I think that Floristree show the other night was excellent proof of it. We do not bring the jams…just a thought. Drew- But that has been fine, because that is not what people expect anyway. We don’t condescend or worry that people won’t understand that. I feel that, no, they absolutely do get it. The number of people that are doing stuff that is kind of funky, yet about texture, noise and sound, rather than pop music per se…that seems to be the mode a lot of interesting Baltimore music is based around. Like a Rubbed Raw show kind of sounds like 2 Live Crew, but it also sounds like White House, sounds like noise. Leprechaun Catering, or Snacks have electronic rhythms, but it isn’t slavishly so, and it’s pretty loud…certainly wild and wooly. That’s the way people do it here. I guess in a way, we’re oriented slightly differently, but people have been very understanding. AS- What was your first exposure to music, your first experience making music, and what were some watershed musical moments? Martin- I didn’t really listen to music in the way that I realize now, the way most people did, until I was 16. I did not listen to popular music when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15…at all. I was kind of just unaware of it. Drew- You played the piano. Martin- I mean there was music on the radio. But, honestly music was just not part of my life. My father listened to opera. I probably saw 50 operas with my father by the time I was 15. I didn’t love any of them. I didn’t hate them…it wasn’t torture. It was just kind of a weird thing. My father was like “Yup. We’re gonna go see Il travatore this weekend,” you know, and off we went. I think in the long run it affected me a lot, in that it I feel that spectacle is part of music. I think I have an increased tolerance, or enjoyment of long form music, in that I was not raised with a four-minute song format. Yea, I think that is something interesting I haven’t talked about much before. Drew- I mean the thing that I remember about an encounter with, at the time wasn’t making music, but when I think back to it now, it kind of was. As a child I got a tape recorder that had a defective microphone. I would record my voice, but instead of it sounding normal, it was incredibly distorted…kind of like a monster growling. I think that experience was really important to me. Obviously, like a lot of people, it was a time in life when you don’t feel powerful, and the idea that sound could make you powerful by changing you was something intuitive…I guess in a way that sometimes in dreams you have powers or abilities that you don’t have in waking life…my broken tape recorder kind of felt like that to me. But I was really into monsters as a little kid. I loved to draw monsters… Martin- Now you make sound monsters…But when I was 16, I got sick of being beat up. I saw, clearly, that music was the thing that everyone was super into that stopped you from getting beat up. Like, if you became one of the people who were smoking. If you became a heavy metal guy, or I went to high school in central California so there guys into low riders and low rider music, which I realize now is much more detail than just that. But as a nerdy, white 14-year-old I was like “oh the scary Latino people listen to that, and the scary black people listen to that, and the scary long-haired white people listen to that.” Drew- I kind of lucked out, I guess, in that I had a sort of hipster stepfather who owned this movie theater in Louisville, Kentucky that showed European art cinema and silent films. He was showing in the late 70s films about punk rock. So I kind of had a hip set of parents that already knew about weird music. That definitely set me off on the course of knowing about that stuff at a pretty young age, because there was a hardcore scene in Kentucky, which I learned about in eighth grade. There was a funny year when half the class was really into Prince, and half the class was into Black Flag. I guess that dates me to 84, 85…so long ago. Martin- When I think of that time…I was out of college…well, I was never in college really. But I was well into my twenties by the time Drew was just getting into Black Flag or Prince. Drew- He saw Black Flag before Henry was the singer. Martin- He is still to me, in my mind, the new figure. Drew- Yea, we’re old. Martin- I understand that Henry guy is ok. As far as watershed musical moments, I met this woman; well she was a girl then, when I was 17. She was like “No, no, no, no”…this is like 1981…”No. Your long hair shit is over. There is this new thing, it’s from England, and it’s called punk rock. You’re a punk rocker. If your gonna hang out with me, you’ve got to cut off your nasty hair and listen to Crash, and the Circle Jerks, and the Sex Pistols, (which were a little old even then). Yes, Kansas, Boston…other bands named after American cities, just don’t cut it anymore.” And I was like “Yes Ma’am, cool girl.” I started taking drugs, and lots of them. Music became something to do while you were on drugs, for me. And really core to my entire experience of making music is listening to it while on drugs. I haven’t taken drugs for 15 years, maybe longer, but it is still absolutely like “would this be interesting if I was tripping an acid?” That is absolutely part and parcel of what I think about when I work on the video work, and when we’re making the music. Drew- Yea. I was straight edge all through high school because the hardcore punk scene in Martin- I really kind of regarded it as, socially, a short cut to an expanded consciousness. So that the increased awareness of the world that is necessary to appreciate everything from minimalism to bird songs to whatever can be come to through Zen or by taking lsd, with the right intentions. Drew- So often on lsd you are arrested by a completely banal phenomena, but your state makes you more receptive to it, and treat is aesthetically, in a way that when your not in that mind frame, your more prone to filter it out. That can lead to the same kind of perception that certainly our work tries to bring out anyway. To hear the musicality of an everyday object, that’s what musique concrete does. You take an everyday object and you try to find the latent musicality that’s already inside of the sound it makes. Well LSD’s effect on you as you ride home on the train and hear the train rhythm as a pitch, and as chord, as a rhythmic pattern, as a manifold. You know, it’s already implicit there, so it kind of makes sense that hallucinogenic consciousness and musique concrete go together. They are ways of transposing on set of information into another kind of information. Martin- I think John Cage’s revelation, whether it came from mushrooms or Zen Buddhism…he was certainly into both, heavily. I think they feed into each other a lot, I’m guessing, he never actually, as far as I know, never said, “yea I take a lot of psychedelic mushrooms. Drew- He was into foraging for mushrooms. Martin- It was hard not to read that as a drug-addled youth as “John Cage is into mushrooms, man.” Continue to Part 2 or Part 3 of 3
A couple Tuesdays ago, I got a chance to talk with Martin and Drew of Matmos. While the weather outside was icy enough to force Maryland polls to stay open for an extra hour and a half, I met the two at their row house by the Hopkins campus. We sat down at their dining room table, and Drew lit candles.
The interview is divide into halves. In the first half Matmos talk about their new hometown, their childhoods, and tripping face.
This is the first interview in a semi-regular series profiling Baltimore music makers
--Bez
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Drew- When I came here I was given a four-hour tour of the city by a Hopkins professor who teaches a class about Baltimore. He took me to Sandtown, and to the loading docks where the old dead industries used to be, and to all these different neighborhoods. It was kind of overwhelming.
They were all their music. That is kind of how they were thought about, too. I decided if were to stopped getting beat up I need to grow my hair long and start listening to heavy metal music. And I did. Oh and smoking. I programmatically embarked on a course of growing my hair long, smoking Marlboro cigarettes, and I was like “I’m going to find out about this rock music thing.” I believe that is what’s called being a poser. But when you’re 15 or 16 you can engage in a pose so sincerely that you are it. So in a year I wasn’t a poser anymore, I was a fucking Hessian, or whatever they call them now.
