matmos live/image: pe
Mr. Steven Lavender took the chance for us to speak to Drew Daniel/Martin Schmidt of Matmos, Berlin, June 2008.
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Martin Schmidt: You know, I have a horrible cold so don t stick your hand in your mouth after you've shook it.
Steven Lavender: So, I've seen you once before at a show in London a few years back. It was at The Scala, it was a Matmos and then Soft Pink Truth set.
MS: That was a cool show. I really enjoyed it. It was with Leafcutter John and many others,and we had drums and guitar it was a way more rock Matmos set (laughs).
Drew Daniel: It changes a lot based on what songs we want to play and then we also think about who’s free, who do we want to bring with us and what are they good at, and especially with a city like London or also Paris, if you play there a lot you have to keep changing what you are doing because it s much too easy, especially with electronic music to kind of keep it pretty failsafe.
MS: Oh! It’s the same thing I heard last time!
DD: Yeah I mean especially if somebody’s doing cutup stuff because then how do you make that live at all? The music’s about the editing. That’ s a tricky one. We re still figuring it out…
SL: I just wondered when you re performing electronic music how much you like to bring a performative aspect to it.
MS: Yeah! I mean its something we struggle with a lot, we feel lucky that we have the shtick that we do with the sampling weird things so at least like its like “Look! A thing, a rat cage or there's that sound coming from a thing!”
SL: Yeah, the physicality of it.
MS: Yeah, whereas the poor suckers w/ their laptops.
DD: Well that’s the hard part. How do you show that there s a process? But then I sometimes worry that we've perhaps overdone it on the “Look I've made a sound, and now I've sampled it”. The thing is, if you do it too much, is that can become a shtick that you can repeating too. So we’re trying to avoid that on this tour and show other ways that things are being clearly done in the moment, decisions are being made on the fly.
I mean one thing in a way that’s very retro but that I like a lot is to have us all chained together Midi wise so in terms of the clock we can play together, but everyone can build their own wave forms and own responses on the fly, and therefore it can go quite wrong. I mean the other night in Dublin, Martin had set up a perfectly beautiful loop on the SH101 but because it s an analogue synthesizer, its very temperamental and in the last song, you had to start smacking it as it had gone wildly out of tune and it s not a digital synth it doesn’t just recall it s presets.
MS: It s not a real good example, it s a bad thing.
DD: No I like errors like that!
MS: You may have liked it!
DD: Jay thought it was hilarious, I kind of liked it too. Martin started smacking this thing, trying to get it to go back where we wanted it and that lack of control is actually why it s live.
SL: Yeah I just wanted to know, when you play, how much of that is what you've recorded and are presenting and how you like to divulge. If there are mistakes, how much you like to accept them and make them part of the performance.
MS: I'm not a “player”, I mean I can t play the same thing twice practically unless its pretty childishly simple, like we will play the song Supreme Balloon which is the long one from our new record and I don’t have anything that’s sequenced. Every sound I comes out when I press the key, but I’m not a good keyboard player!
I mean it’s fortunate it’s a drone piece so I play literally up and down the F-Scale and I’m okay with that, that I can do it and, you know I don’t know how interesting it is to watch someone play the fucking keyboard, you know let alone...
DD: I mean I think if people can sense that we’re responding in the moment and it’s as thick or as thin as it needs to be to work in that space that its very much tailor made for them there. I mean, I have so much more content at my hands than I use and I base it on, how good is the sound system, how responsive is it, how much can it take.
I’m not just going in there with a cut up made of compressed pop records that’s always going to sound huge no matter what, because you have to think about the reality of where you are, and I’ve seen people that play sets that are designed to be at the peak of a rave and do that even if it’s 10 kids in a basement and they don’t care, and we re the opposite of that. To me, that’s more real. We like to involve a lot more improvisational structure of the pieces on this tour. I'm not playing any songs where there’s a cut sequence that’s running. It’s every loop that I decide on the fly when do I turn it on, how long do I let it go, what do I do to it, all these decisions abut the arrangement and the momentum that’s live too. Its all being done based on how we re all feeling.
SL: I didn’t realise that you’d recently moved to Baltimore and that you re teaching there?
I wanted to ask how much of a difference if any that s made to your music seeing as you like Matmos to be collaboratory and improvisational.
MS: I m not sure that we re lived there long enough for it to soak in.
SL: How long has it been?
MS: Eight months. I mean we wrote the record in San Francisco but didn’t mix it until we were in Baltimore, so its still a San Francisco record.
DD: It’s got a way more, well frankly hippie-ish aesthetic, that is a West Coast aesthetic that doesn’t necessarily suit Baltimore, I mean Baltimore is amazing.
MS: I mean when we got to Baltimore, we realised that it was done. Because we thought, “Fuck! We’re moving in the middle of making a record”. Then we listen to all the recordings and were like “Oh, we re not actually in the middle at all, we’re at the end.”
DD: I mean the piece Supreme Balloon was made in Baltimore. The core ideas had been made in Rome, when we were in this ensemble with Terry Riley and we were spending a lot of time with him and that kind of rubbed off as a bench post of working with long form melodic stuff it certainly is a homage.
There’s a great Sam Fuller quote that ‘homage’ is French for rip off ( laughter).
It s kind of what we have going on with Terry on that piece a little bit we had him play for real on one song too. You got to own up to it.
SL: Well I mean when you re working with people, its bound to rub off on you, that’s the nature of collaborating…
DD: Sure. I mean the Baltimore thing that exciting for the future is that there’s so many instrument builders and noise people doing very intense DIY work with circuit bending and that’s not something we really have a lot of experience with. I did one little workshop in circuit bending that actually Twig (from Nautical Almanac) gave at the Art Institute where Martin works.
MS: You know those Baltimore guys?
SL: Yeah I’ve played at the Bank (Performance space where Max from Nautical Almanac/ Rubbed Raw and Caleb Johnston live).
MS : Oh nice!
DD: Yeah, so we've been going to shows at the Bank.
MS: They were pretty suspicious about us at first…
DD: I I think we seemed a bit bourgeois.
MS: You know… pussified (laughs) -- But I think we passed their test.
DD: Yeah its intense, I mean there s a such an insider, prickly, fuck you, Baltimore noise scene thing its not California style, its not PC. Like even in the last email I got from the Bank to promote the show there it said “NO FAGGOTS”, because they love that, they think that’s being funny, whereas in SF that would be like “Okay - Fuck you.” whereas I think for them it doesn’t even show up for them, so I think that's one of the differences to leave San Francisco where like queerness is omnipresent and a given and you have a very different ghetto mentality and to come to Baltimore where you have a different ghetto mentality (laughs) they each have their own provincialisms.
MS: I think a lot of it is youth. I mean it s a shame with social progress sort of things is that it never lasts and that each generation has to be told again “No its not okay to call me a faggot”, you know “and why”, and once they put it together they think “Oh, It could be me, and the whole “No, this is why its not okay for you to do that, they' re like ‘Oh yeah”.
DD: But it's in the nature of obnoxious youth to do the most obnoxious things, that’s the fun of getting a rise out of people and maybe that’s just an index that we re old y know Martin's 43 and I'm 37 I mean we're reflective people.
MS: I don’t want you to call me a faggot until you have a cock in your mouth (laughs).
DD: Y’ know when it’s a cheap shot.
DD: It s weird, because they don t need a lecture about feminism, because as a noise scene its really inclusive there’s lots of women making noise, putting on noise shows, that’s never even raised as an issue, its just a demographic difference, y know. Maryland is not California.
MS: It certainly isn’t! (laughs)
DD: It s refreshing that there’s no money, so rent is low, people take a lot more risks and don t have to have a day job that zaps them in order to get by, I mean oddly I moved to Baltimore for a job that very demanding and very serious department where I work in (English Professor) and that’s putting a certain amount of pressure of when we can do this.
SL: I mean it must also be nice to have that feeling.
MS: Yeah, starting over.
SL: I guess my last question I wanted to ask, is to what extent you like to address the identity of homosexuality in your work, I know one previous album was dedicated to queer artists…
MS: Well that was a thing where we got asked about it. Okay, so I didn’t NOT want to talk about it. So then a certain kind of journalist will want to talk about it, and I don’t want to not talk about it, so we’ll talk about it and then that turns into a “thing”. I mean you know that’s the shame of minority discourse, you know? It’s used to put you in a box. Just by not being in the closet somehow comes across to people as really pushing it, so how do you not?
DD: Well its weird, I mean our music is also not personal in a way.
MS: Yeah - It has fucking nothing to do with what we did until we made that record and like fine, lets overdo it, let’s overcompensate.
DD: We’re still weird about it because Judas Priest, I mean is that queer music, just because queer people make it? Maybe the closet does funny things to affect and how people express themselves, so it’s always going to be an interesting conversation to talk about. I guess the point I’d make for most of Matmos’ work when it’s with objects and conceptually oriented is that I don’t really feel that it’s personally expressive. It’s not like I have this emotion and I write songs to express that emotion, I have a concept that leads to an object and an object makes noises and I cut up those noises and I feel that the content is coming from the poetics of the object, and those are cultural. Those aren’t personal, those aren’t my views those aren’t my opinions or feelings.
MS: I mean, there are decisions and in the garden of forking paths, there are reasons why we take. But its not to be like, (in high voice) “GAY FREEDOM”!!! (laughs).
SL: Well I just thought it was interesting as, I can t remember all the people you chose, but referencing Darby Crash and Larry Levan, I mean these were still marginalised people. That was especially the case with Darby Crash. Like we were talking about earlier, he was closeted and it wasn't necessarily who he was, he just happened to be that, and I guess when I found you did that album I was a bit surprised because of your past work and how it was never overtly expressed. But the way you picked the subject matter, you were choosing these people who were always bubbling under, and I guess it’s similar in a way to how someone like Coil operate.
DD: I`d say queer more than gay in a way because that’s a useful way to say not just the sort of orientation but the aesthetics of it and, to me, people could respond to that album and think about it as a record about queer history not queer life in the present. So many of those people s lives ended in suicide, or ended with madness or alcoholism, all kind of crash and burn scenarios that have a lot more to do with homophobia and a certain 20th century pre 50s arc than queerness as such. Queerness now has the opposite problem like it has the problem of being an insignificant market, lifestyle demographic just one more chip of the pie that advertisers want, so you know its no longer the case that sits this terrifying subversive thing, quite the opposite, you know. It depends on where you live that’s true. I mean you see footage of teenage people accused of queerness getting executed in Iran and of course its fucked up, and its also being used to legitimise U.S foreign policy. Like “We need to school these people in our ideas of democracy”. So it’s never neutral.
MS: Jesus Christ! Did you see any of that footage of George Bush and his wife who I've never seen them do stuff together last night? He was speaking to the British Parliament, saying “It’s really, It’s for women that we’re doing this in Afghanistan, It’s for women to educate their daughters.”
DD: But you’re not doing it in Saudi Arabia!
MS: It’s just so hypocritical.
DD: I mean, the right has been brilliant about appropriating leftist rhetoric. Now, even Christian activists consider that they’re an oppressed minority which needs protection, and they exploiting a civil rights model on behalf of Christianity which is totally weird.
SL: I have one more question and I guess it s more for you Drew, I wanted to talk about the Soft Pink Truth because I guess its going back to your dancing days, being more performative and more pop.
DD: Sure. I got into that dishonestly you know because Matthew Herbert asked me to make house music and I kind of trusted him and his ears and he liked them and then I started to do covers.
MS: Well it came out of rejecting that!
DD: Once you start doing covers its like eating potato chips and then you do another and then you do another and they just don’t work live unless you do a vocal and its fun to sing Crass and Angry Samoans and Coil, but then it is a slippery slope because then you’re a front man and then it’s about that, its not so much about tweaking the sound.
SL: I guess Matmos is more about being relatively anonymous and concentrating on the sound.
DD: Matmos is about structure, its about forming and dissolving. To me, that’s the point rather than the big anthem the art is about the way it falls apart.
MS: Also Drew makes way more music than I am interested in making, like, he is way more interested in doing that than I am and he started making dance music, and I wasn’t particularly interested in performing that live.
I mean, partially, I know that dance music can eat your band, if that’s what you do and that’s all anyone ever wants you to do, and you can do that till the fucking cows come home, and the world of dance music will chew you up and spit you out, and you re done and no one wants to hear your shit anymore and I have no interest in going in that direction playing live.
DD: Getting colonised by it.
MS: There’s that song.
DD: Oh, “Freaking You”. It was a Matmos song but it was more a Soft Pink Truth song, because it was made out of R and B.
MS: I'm not a good enough keyboard player to keep up with samples of Sylvester! I cant do that shit and he s got a way of ignoring pitch that I cant ignore!
DD: Yeah - Its pretty dissonant.
MS: I mean, The Soft Pink Truth is insanely dissonant and he doesn’t hesitate to go: “Well they’re rhythmically aligned so I'll just put them on top of each other!”
DD: They sound right to me, I just never had any training to teach me any better, so I just go with what sounds good to me, and I guess I like dissonance (laughs).
matmos/berlin-june08, image: pe
