| Over the past nine years, Matmos (M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel) have become the darlings of sound sampling pop intelligentsia by playing live with Bjork on her Vespertine tour, composing for the Kronos Quartet, and an upcoming synthesizer album with special guests like Terry Riley and Carston Nicolai. Mixing electronic dance music, noise fetish, and conceptual ideas into their albums, Matmos have been able to eat their cake and have it too, winning over dance floor fans and audiophile snobs the world over. The influences on their albums from quasi-objects, The Civil War, and their latest, A Rose Has Teeth in the Eyes Of A Beast, have varied from accidental occurrences with sounds to inspiration from film and literature. | 
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Betty Nguyen on Matmos
Over the past nine years, Matmos (M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel) have become the darlings of sound sampling pop intelligentsia by playing live with Bjork on her Vespertine tour, composing for the Kronos Quartet, and an upcoming synthesizer album with special guests like Terry Riley and Carston Nicolai. Mixing electronic dance music, noise fetish, and conceptual ideas into their albums, Matmos have been able to eat their cake and have it too, winning over dance floor fans and audiophile snobs the world over.
The influences on their albums from quasi-objects, The Civil War, and their latest, A Rose Has Teeth in the Eyes Of A Beast, have varied from accidental occurrences with sounds to inspiration from film and literature. "We begin our process with a very immediate encounter with an object that is already in our house for some other reason,” explains Daniel. “You have to take a gamble. Sometimes the recording doesn’t pan out, and it becomes a stillborn sound. Other times, unlikely objects turn out to be amazing. Usually there’s a period that’s part of our process that’s more like a photo session, where we’re just trying to capture an object from every angle acoustically.”
Matmos’ inspirations vary from birthday party balloons (quasi-objects) to fellow artists (Martin Schmidt for The Civil War). When Daniel was writing his dissertation on melancholy, his research on French country-dances and the “hurdy gurdy” of the 16th century became part of The Civil War’s landscape. To realize sounds for the album, they attended a vintage instrument auction at Sotheby’s with collaborator harpist Zeena Parkins. Responding to the idea that The Civil War was their most musical album to date, Daniel once said, "A chimp could have written a chord progression with an autoharp. It was our most song-like album because those instruments demanded that.”
Like Clement Greenberg’s idea of Modernism, where the artist uses the frame, canvas, and paint to expose the art on itself, Matmos allows the audience to experience new discoveries in a form of live action. For example at the Exploratorium Museum, they mic-ed and looped the action of opening a can of Red Bull, drinking it, and crumpling it. At an underground show at the Compound, the team recorded the sounds of slapping Daniel’s bare ass, then looped it over a video feed projected on several screens overhead. "We’ve pinballed between conceptual orientation and haphazard chance in order to develop albums,” says Daniel. “We don’t want to sound like pretentious assholes that claim to be collage artists. But when we do play venues like Lincoln Center, where serious musical chops are assumed, we do look at each other and say, ‘I can’t believe we’re playing here!’”
Luckily, the avant-garde music community nurtures and encourages this type of idiot savant experimentation—like learning exotic instruments on stage or looping the sound of rabbit fur on a microphone.
Daniel sees it all in a realist perspective: "We don’t try to create fantasy. We start with things that are already there, and just by looking and listening really closely you can bring something out that is already implicit in them." The forthcoming album is made completely of synthesizers, and they hope their move to Baltimore will provide a new context, and a new set of ears.
