| (mutek) |
MATMOS: SURGICAL BEATS
By tobias v
Imagine
this: a theatre packed to the gills, Matmos up front, a giant
film screen behind them. A hush descends upon the black-jacketed masses
as MC Schmidt runs a metal rod over his skin, picking up
“chi” electrical impulses that produce loud electrical zing
sounds. Drew Daniel mixes it in live with beats to form
“Ur Tchun Tan Tse Qi,” an experimental house track from their new
album, A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure. Meanwhile, microsound
artist Richard Chartier films the action close-up, blowing up
Schmidt’s skin to sickening proportions on the screen. Then the rat
cage: a contact mic is attached, and the sounds are beautiful plucks and
vibrations. With bravado, Schmidt pulls out a violin bow and the souls
of dead rats wail from the metal bars. Matmos are serious looking;
Schmidt is deadpan, and Daniel only sneaks a smile when his back is
turned. Everyone is standing to get a good look, nodding to each other
with silly grins. Like Herbert, the performance is marred by technical
problems including feedback on some intricate slide-guitar work by
Schmidt, but they work through it and the “live” aspect—somewhat
of a novelty for “electronic” music—heightens the experience. I
talked to Matmos over the phone from the NYC Matador office. Despite
numerous phone problems and a lost sheet of questions on my part, Matmos
politely continued to answer my belligerent pestering.
I started off by mentioning Kid
606’s latest comment in DiSCORDER bashing minimal techno as
the “lowest common denominator” of electronic music (“What about
trance?!?” I thought). Matmos responded along the lines of “people
in glass houses…”, and we went on to discuss the state of minimal
techno and IDM today.
Drew: Too often, with IDM
production I hear now-a-days, it’s a plateau. There is no development,
no movement. There aren’t little themes or subsets. There’s
basically beats and noises for 6 minutes, then you’re done. That sense
of moving through the time of a song like moving through someone’s
house, going from one room to another, where there’s some continuity
and a personality—there are all parts used for different
things—I’m more interested in song shapes that have that kind of
movement…Scott Heron’s tracks I really like…
So with that in mind, we moved
onto the new album: A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure. All of
the sounds are from various surgical apparatus, live surgeries, rat
cages, acupuncture machines…certainly this is not minimal techno.
Discorder:
Why surgery?
Drew: It’s personal. My father and stepmother are both
plastic surgeons. So there’s an element of speaking with something
that has been around me my whole life—but exploring it through music,
trying to turn it into sound, which is something that I can control and
use. There’s something aggressive in it, a cartoon version of what
your parents do for a living.
Discorder: Are you fans of David
Cronenburg?
Drew: I am, Martin is not. (Martin, distant: He’s a hack!) I
really like Crash and Videodrome. I was really annoyed with the
adaptation of Naked Lunch, because the way he handled Burrough’s
sexuality seemed really confused to me.
Discorder: What about Dead Ringers?
Drew: I haven’t seen it, Martin has, and he regards it as a
very sexist film (Martin: HAaaAATED IT!) I think there are a lot of
people using the sort of fetishism of medical technology as scary in
very simplistic ways—look at Marilyn Manson’s work…I think it’s
just kind of cheap. People are already afraid of medicine, so you
aren’t really doing anything transformative or interesting by making
art that says “Wow! Medicine is scary.” For us, the challenge was to
use [medical] material but to make it move in other directions.
At this point, I pick up on the
fact that incessant sirens have been going off for the duration of the
interview. I wonder: are they playing samples? Or is this “just
another day in New York City,” as Daniel claims? I try to chuckle, and
Daniel says: “You can remix us, and make us say interesting things.”
So I did. THE SIRENS INCREASED. THINGS GOT LOUDER. They tried to end the
interview, then all of a sudden, the sirens stopped. Then, we got into
Herbert and his new album.
Drew: We gave Herbert the sound of
Martin’s jugular vein for his new album because it has this bodily
theme, and I’m working on a remix of “the audience” right now.
He’s a very good friend at this point. Martin and I were big fans of
his work as Dr. Rockitt.
Now I began thinking: Herbert
has his new musical “Dogma” style manifesto, stating that, like the
film manifesto, all sounds must be original, live, etc. So I opened it
up to theory.
Discorder: I am curious, you guys are
very articulate about all of this…is there some sort of theory behind
the body focus?
Drew: There was no theory before the record was made. But I am
a graduate student, I studied Philosophy, and now I am getting my PhD in
Renaissance Literature. Martin works at the San Francisco Art Institute
in their Performance and Conceptual Art Department. So we’re both from
an academic context but I don’t think we’re wearing that hat when
we’re making Matmos tracks. But often we are wearing that hat when we
are explaining Matmos tracks…There is a methodology, a working
approach, and the theory is something that I can go into, but I don’t
like to do it for the listener because it seems to look like special
pleading, like you are forcing your art to mean certain things. And it
often looks like something is supposed to be some sort of crux or
justification for the work, and I don’t like that relationship. I
guess the theory for us goes into the discussion of what the liner notes
will be. We’re making decisions about how much information people will
need, and how that information will change what they hear. But there
isn’t an explicit position that we’re taking.
Discorder: Do you see yourself as a part of a tradition of
artists, going back the past 20 years, who are taking up the body as a
site of art, a site of protest?
Drew: Yeah, and for me, a lot of the art I find interesting is
the extreme body-art of the ‘70s. People like Gina Paine, or the
Vienna Actionists test social limits of what is acceptable, and the
property of the body, ownership of the body with what they did to
themselves and also to the nature of the institutions of which the art
is consumed, by bringing very personal and intimate bodily experiences
and events into a gallery museum. I think our milieu is quite different
from theirs in that we make records that are portable, that aren’t
tied to any particular institutional space. We aren’t insisting on our
bodies in the ways that [for example] pop stars do. Pop star product is
in a weird way closer to ‘70s performance art as it insists on
Jennifer Lopez’s breasts, and on her body and on her face. The
facelessness of our music, it’s literal, on the picture of ourselves
on the new record our faces are concealed. We’re using sound rather
than image, that’s the big cut-off, that we aren’t relying on the
experience of recognition you have when you see a performance of someone
doing something extreme to their body. Instead, you are hearing it as
sound and I think that changes it quite a bit…how your imagination
completes it.
Now, having seen the
performance, I question this. MC Schmidt seems to be the submissive one,
subjected to the various physical processes during their live, and very
visual, performance at Mutek. His face and skin were blown up on the
screen; and many recent publications have been running a photo of the
duo with surgery marks on their faces. Contrary to the music, the visual
aspect of Matmos is as enthralling, if not more so. Despite their
attempts to escape the visual element of the body, they have only ended
up reinforcing it. How to listen to this album, then? Daniel says that
the optimal listening condition is that of his father: he plays it in
his operating room. Daniel’s father is a cosmetic surgeon.
Matmos: “We love your station.”
[Note: They love CiTR
101.9FM Vancouver] |
