Matmos

Todd Burns

OK, please welcome Matmos. Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt. I thought it would be best to start our discussion with a song, this is called “Lipostudio… and So On,” and if you look up on the screen there, you can see a very dark rendition of the video that they often play when they play it in concert.

(music: Matmos – “Lipostudio… And So On”)

Todd Burns

So what was that sound that we just heard?

Drew Daniel

This is a record that we made in 2000 called A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure and it was a record based on a theme of medical technology. We tend to make work, which we regard as conceptual, in the sense that we make a conceptual commitment to an idea, then we think about all the possible actions and events or objects, which express or manifest that idea in a way which could be made sonic. Then we have to do the research of getting into situations where we can acquire the recordings of those actions or events or objects. Then we take it home to our studio and build it into music. So one of the things we were thinking about in terms of the ways that medical technology makes sound, of course, that is recording the sound of surgery itself. And so we went to plastic surgery clinics. For that track, that was also a recording made in Southern California of liposuction and we recorded these procedures. What you’re hearing in that breakdown, which is why Martin was like, “Wait for this part,” is not the sound of our friend Stephen playing clarinet or somebody playing drums. You heard lots of “real” instruments, but also the solo in that breakdown is a surgeon, who knew what I wanted was something musically expressive, and so he selected a slightly larger cannula, which is the sucking needle that they use in liposuction.

Martin Schmidt

You know, the thing that I used to call the crevice device on vacuum cleaners, to get into corners? It is sort of like that.

Drew Daniel

And he shoves it into the wound area [video on projector screen] and starts playing the incision in this woman’s body. She is unconscious at the time. It’s very disturbing at the time, actually, because they do the incisions all at once around the area and they all start to bleed. And so you’re sitting there in this room, it’s a sterile environment and you can’t compromise it and touch anything, and you are just moving a microphone around as carefully as you can and trying to gather these sounds. But what I didn’t expect is that the medical technicians would really get into being musicians and started to kind of ham it up.

Todd Burns

So they did ham it up?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, like, “You want me to suck louder? Let’s do this!”

Martin Schmidt

“Suck louder,” how many of us have said that?

Drew Daniel

The nurse technician got kind of emo and she would fling down the scalpel on the tray and it would make noise.

Martin Schmidt

You actually had to tell them to settle down.

Drew Daniel

They had to chill down a little bit and I just needed the sounds of what was happening in the room. It was an incredible experience for us to work on that record and kind of personally tricky because I am a total lightweight. I mean, I passed out giving blood. I’m not butch about blood and suffering at all. Knowing that I was there to capture sound was a way of avoiding thinking about the ethical problems with what we were doing.

Todd Burns

On this particular track, I remember reading an interview where you said that you had people playing instruments as well, doing things, and they would play things as though you were trying to make people think, “Oh, well that’s the liposuction part.”

Martin Schmidt

Definitely. It ends up being a trio between the surgeon, the saxophonist and me playing a straw in a bowl of water. And I told the saxophonist and I was thinking myself, “I want to be the sound of the liposuction more than...” There is hopefully this crossfade of what’s what here?

Drew Daniel

Where you can’t tell the difference between human fat and a saxophone and water. Because sonically, when you know there is liposuction noises and the clarinet player makes a squelchy sound, you’re going to hear that squelch as if it was human fat. And hopefully, if you can manipulate the human fat noises, you can manipulate the things that sound more saxophone-like. It is like those Arcimboldo portraits, have you ever seen those? Those baroque paintings of a face that is made out of a load of rotting vegetables or oysters, it is like seeing two things at once, seeing saxophone and human fat as versions of each other. I think that’s our goal. If you do that, then it is working.

Todd Burns

So it’s important in your work, to bridge that gap between making sound the issue, rather than, “This is the saxophone and you can hear the solo. You can hear this thing. You can hear that thing.” It’s all just material for what you can create?

Drew Daniel

I think a song can do some powerful work to level down the difference between what is valuable and what isn’t. What is a real musical instrument and what isn’t? What takes talent and what is random? I like the way that you can level down the differences between those through the kind of control that production gives you. But it might be an illusion. It has been weird to have people listen to that record and have them say, “I liked it until I found out what it was and I didn’t want to hear it any more.” And I kind of love the idea that you can love something sonically, but then you can be so disgusted by what’s contained inside it that you just can’t enjoy it any more. To me, that is more interesting than even a record that somebody wants to hear a million times. As a record, that is a version of a Pasolini movie, like Salò, which you see once and every time you think of it, it makes you think, “I never want to see that again.”

Todd Burns

We will talk a bit more about the concepts, but I guess, I want to go back now, how did you get to the place where you are creating this music? Drew grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there was quite a big punk scene there growing up. Was it mostly hardcore music at the beginning for you?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, I got incredibly into punk rock and hardcore and going to shows. I wasn’t musical. I had no training of any kind, no musical ability whatsoever. But I did a magazine and would cut up images and make standard punk rock collages and I was reading a lot of [William S.] Burroughs when I was 16 and reading his descriptions of using tape decks to cut up sound. He had cutouts of sound as ways to change environments or to change personality, so I got a bunch of tape decks and I started to make tape loop collages. I didn’t have a four-track, so I would get five tape decks playing sounds and recorded on a sixth and that would be my multi-tracking and you just layer that. I just made hours and hours of endless garbage.

Martin Schmidt

Cute parallel lives because I did that exact same thing. I had a friend who was dyslexic and when I was in college – I am seven years older than Drew, so I was in college while he was in high school and sadly I was doing the same things in college that he was doing in high school. But anyway, the university would give him free, cheesy black plastic tape recorders and so I was like, “Can you get another one? And another one? And another one?” And he got six of them and that is how I would do multi-tracking as well. Record and then playback on one. All with Sparkletts plastic water bottles that make sort of awesome congas. You know like the water cooler at the office? In fact, there is one in the room.

Todd Burns

Were you also into rock music?

Martin Schmidt

Not like Drew, no. I was an extremely late music listener. I didn’t really even understand why people were interested in pop music until I got really tired of getting beat up. Then I realized, like – this is the late ’70s, mind you – “If I smoke Marlboro cigarettes and grow my hair long and listen to heavy metal music, people will stop beating me up.” And I cynically did those things. I bought a pack of cigarettes, I stopped cutting my hair. At the time you could smoke in school.

Martin Schmidt

Awesome.

Martin Schmidt

And I started hanging around the smoking section. What do you know? I never got beat up again. People are so lame. They weren’t beating me up. They didn’t know where to put me so they put me in the garbage can.

Drew Daniel

He lucked out because he got to see all the old school California hardcore acts, like Dead Kennedys, Black Flag before Henry [Rollins], all the classic hardcore that by the time I got to it was like studying something in a history class.

Todd Burns

When did it stop becoming a pose for you?

Martin Schmidt

You can imagine how great that makes you feel. Everybody does this to every generation. “You saw Jimi Hendrix? That’s awesome! You must be so old!”

Drew Daniel

The cool thing about hardcore in Kentucky in the ‘80s was that it was culture that you made yourself. You would go to a basement, which had 20 people in the basement and everybody in the audience, they are all in bands too. There is less of a division between producer and consumer and, really, there is no consumption. My ‘zine cost 10 cents, I made it on a photocopier at five cents a page. This idea that you could make things and you could do it yourself, it sounds really cliché now, and it has been totally appropriated by languages of advertising and marketing and media, but at the time it really felt compellingly the case that you could just make things and instantly disseminate them and that there was no barriers, really. And in a place as sort of fucked up and right-wing and homophobic and heavily Republican and Christian as Kentucky in the mid-’80s, it was incredible. It was like joining the Army to be in a punk band, we just totally drank the Kool-Aid and joined this tiny sect of intensely-felt commitment.

Todd Burns

Was that also constricting, in a way?

Drew Daniel

Sure, totally, because it was homophobic too. It was a straight-edge scene and it had formal limitations, which became pretty obvious that it was about rock & roll. Basically, louder and faster and more distorted, but pretty much formulaic and not as compelling as the Merzbow and Nurse with Wound records I was listening to. The limitations were there.

Martin Schmidt

Drew actually had someone throw a bone at him from a car.

Drew Daniel

Yeah, I got punk-bashed like crazy. These kids from the high school – have you ever had chewing tobacco in your mouth? It produces this warm orange-brown spit. I got chewing tobacco spat in my face and you feel this warm brown lump sliding down your face, and the kids that spat chewing tobacco at me also threw a bone at me. They were like fucking cavemen in Kentucky.

Todd Burns

Drew, you wrote a book recently on Throbbing Gristle. Where does Throbbing Gristle come into it for you as a kid? Because I remember reading the first chapter and you heard this and your mind opened up, “Slug Bait” and these other songs.

Drew Daniel

I was basically into punk rock and rock & roll and then I bought this record by a band called Throbbing Gristle, and didn’t know anything about them, but I thought the name sounded cool. I thought they would be punk rock and put them on and instead it was just this intense, bass-y, throbbing sound that gave me this horrible headache. I had never had music that did that to me, that affected me physically and wasn’t about feeling empowered or part of some community or some lonely set of fanatics, but instead seemed deeply inhuman and anti- human. And there was something about the intensity of what Throbbing Gristle were doing aesthetically. It was very disturbing and not about belonging, but about sort of a total isolation. And I think that is compelling. Too many people bash electronic music for being inhuman and, “It’s so cold,” and they bring to bear this sort of boring humanist idea about warmth. I think aesthetically it’s a good modernist strategy sometimes to just pound the living shit out of whatever is supposedly human and see what’s left on the other side. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think that should be the only game in town. But certainly, when you’re 16 you can relate to that sensibility. Maybe not when I’m 39 now. Oops. [laughter]

Todd Burns

I wasn’t going to say anything. You spent a year in England as well when you went to college, I suppose?

Drew Daniel

I did a junior year abroad and it was a good time because it was right when the Castlemorton rave happened and a lot of ridiculous free soundsystem parties were happening in the UK, so I got exposed to a totally different aesthetic. It kind of reminded me of hardcore, in the sense that it was pretty ghetto and it wasn’t expensive and it wasn’t about money and it was sort of autonomous.

Todd Burns

Was it the first sort of introduction you had to dance music in a large way?

Drew Daniel

Pretty much. Aside from go-go dancing in gay bars.

Todd Burns

You were doing that before? And you met Martin before you went over to England?

Martin Schmidt

That’s how we met. I put a dollar in his underwear.

Drew Daniel

I was wearing a plastic fish jockstrap that I had made and there was a tail that came out of my ass and I would fit my junk in the fish’s mouth, I guess. I also knew that Martin made electronic music because I had seen his band play. He was is in this sort of occult industrial band called the IAO Core, which performed at this punk rock space, Gilman Street warehouse.

Martin Schmidt

The punk rock space that gave us Green Day.

Drew Daniel

Yay! No, boo. Can you believe that they’re a Broadway show now? Fuuuck. That must hurt so bad.

Martin Schmidt

How un-punk.

Drew Daniel

It’s really over. I knew about Martin’s band because I had seen them play at this event that was hosted by Ordo Templi Orientis, which is a cult dedicated to Aleister Crowley, the great early 20th century Satanist. They were all in leather and straps and looking like dominatrixes and then there was this really square suburban guy who was really cute and made all the rhythms, and I was like, “Damn, he’s hot!” So I liked it when you put a dollar in my G-string. That was sort of how the band got started.

Martin Schmidt

And he taught me about techno because I didn’t know that it existed. I was floating at that point in a world of late ‘70s German electronic music, before Cluster and Faust and that sort of thing became something that everybody knew about. I don’t know, in like 1990. I swear I was kind of alone in that, but that’s what I was super into, this late ‘70s German electronic music, which he had never heard. I had never heard of...

Drew Daniel

I made a mixtape, like when you’re totally crushed out on somebody and you make a mixtape when you want them to absorb all the styles that you love, and they have to love it as much as you and love every song for the right reason. I think you turned me on to Cluster and Roedelius and I made this mixtape that was Nurse With Wound, Meat Beat Manifesto, Public Enemy, My Bloody Valentine, a bunch of breakbeat techno and that is basically the template. You imprint really hard in your adolescence on certain records.

Todd Burns

And you were already doing stuff production-wise with samplers?

Drew Daniel

My boyfriend at the time had a house, and if you had a house, you could sign up for a layaway plan where you could pay for a sampler on an installment of 20 bucks a month. So I got a Roland W-30, which is what MC Hammer used. It had 27 seconds of sample time per diskette that you put in, if you were doing stuff at, I think, 12 bit. And I would put sounds that I wanted to sample onto cassette, speed it up to double time, sample it for 1.2 seconds, and then drop it an octave so it could be a 2.4 second loop. I would sequence by counting numerically the exact length of a sample and then I would have to chop every other samples into 8ths or 16ths or 32nds because there wasn’t really a way to quantize internally in its sequencer. You had to do all these funky math tricks in order to get the most out of that 27 seconds of sample time. But it was an incredible lesson in the economy of information. If you only get 27 seconds of sample time to make a song, then you better really fucking care about every single sound. It has to really belong for a reason, it has to be there. Now that we live in the days of hundreds and hundreds of gig drives and people can have a million tracks and can just keep piling on more and more information, I think there’s less of that gun to your head about what really matters to you. I think the severity of it was really helpful in certain ways.

Todd Burns

Obviously, you were trading music back and forth, but you were also teaching Martin about how you are doing sampling and stuff?

Martin Schmidt

He was really amazing with that sampler but actually my come-on line to him was like, “Have you ever used a computer?” Because I had a computer, which was a big deal in 1990 to have something that you could actually record audio onto and edit audio on. He was like, “Yeah, can I edit sound on your computer?”

Drew Daniel

Come up and look at my etchings. So we spent months making musique concrète, cut up sound edits.

Martin Schmidt

Our common interest was Pierre Henry. Anybody? Anybody? Alright, the late ‘50s pioneer of cutting tape up and trying to invent a new kind of classical music that didn’t involve pitches, that just involved the sounds recorded from the world. There was this notion that this guy pretty much – not Pierre Henry, but Pierre Schaeffer – sold to the French Music Academy, to the government of France, in a way that this will be the new music... and it will not involve Germans! Which was a real positive thing, as you can imagine in the early ‘50s in France. It was like the most obscure fucking thing that you could possibly think of for 20 year olds in 1990 and we both loved it, “And nobody knows about this.”

Drew Daniel

We got really obsessed with one piece in particular, Variations for a Door and a Sigh, which is probably his greatest work. It’s an obsessive piece of tape composition built out of the sound of one creaking hinge in the attic of a French country house. And he spent months analyzing the sound of just one creaking door and working over and over obsessively with manipulating and chopping.

Martin Schmidt

Mind you, this is someone who only has a reel-to-reel tape recorder to work with.

Drew Daniel

An intense kind of labor of love.

Martin Schmidt

It’s like a 45 minute piece, and it’s listenable.

Drew Daniel

It’s not bullshit. There was a lot of wanky crap from that period that is sort of modernist in its refusal to give pleasure but isn’t formally compelling on its own. Whereas Variations for a Door and a Sigh is powerful, there is something alchemical that seemed to happen in the encounter with this object. And for us that was really inspiring, the idea that you could commit yourself totally to something that looks on paper like it would be so banal and so uninteresting, but in fact, if you just trust your materials and force yourself to be almost anorexically committed to one thing, and one thing only, then out of the other side comes this really interesting and rich experience and Henry inspired us. For years we’ve been ripping him off, basically.

Todd Burns

So perhaps it’s a bad example, but I want to play something from your first record and just say, OK, this is the culmination of all the stuff that you were doing, one of them.

(music: Matmos – “This Is...”)

Todd Burns

I think it’s interesting because on “Lipostudio…” and that song – “Lipostudio...” to a lesser extent – you talk a lot about all this stuff and make stuff that is exceptionally listenable.

Drew Daniel

That piece wasn’t. That was from our first record, which came out in ‘97, but we had made the tracks around ‘93, ‘94, ‘95 for a while, you know, just getting to know each other. I think when you’re making your first record you are really letting your influences hang out and you’re trying to sound often like records that you love. I was listening to tons of things like Kaotic Chemistry, an incredible early drum & bass record called LSD EP, one of the most chopped up breakbeat techno records ever. But frankly, I do feel a little embarrassed to hear that track because it is just so strongly like “My first jungle,” it is strongly derivative of other music. We have been having a good time playing it live, we just played at this anniversary of SF MOMA, it was really fun to play that track live because in a way, playing a completely traditional sounding drum & bass track in 2010 is hilariously anachronistic and sort of awkward aesthetically. Because electronic music’s justifying rationale for so long was that it was futuristic or about the future and there is nothing less sexy than the recent past. If you watch a movie made in 2002, that was incredibly trendy in 2002... I don’t know if you’ve seen Alex Cox’s adaptation of the Revengers Tragedy, but it’s this incredibly London stylish 2002 movie, and if you watch it now, your skin just crawls. It’s worth thinking about if you make electronic music, because it’s so easy to participate in a scene and to get the sounds and the production tics and tricks that are cool right now, the last ten records you heard this month. It’s so easy to blend in, and you have to be aware what you are doing, especially when you put out a record because that record is going to last a long time. In our case, I’m feeling like a weird trickle of cold sweat listening to something that I made in 1996.

Todd Burns

So in your work now, do you think about timelessness?

Martin Schmidt

It’s been a source of argument between us, always, since then, that I was like, “You’re making something that is not going to last.” I say pretentious shit like that, but when you’re alone in the studio you figure no one is ever going to hear you. So you’re like, “This is not timeless! It doesn’t partake of timeless woo!” But it is true, it is something to think about.

Drew Daniel

I don’t know, dude. That Goldie album was called Timeless, yo. You can’t be timeless, that’s impossible. You’re always a reflection of the total set of forces in the room that is part of why you’re doing what you are doing.

Martin Schmidt

But you can choose. There are choices there.

Drew Daniel

We’ve only had three hours of sleep. I don’t know if I have to point that out or if it’s already completely obvious.

Todd Burns

This goes to a question I had anyway. Clearly, you are a duo. Is it always arguments in the studio over every single track?

Drew Daniel

Pretty much. We have gotten into huge, “I will leave you” arguments about whether, do we put reverb on the snares? We’ve been together 18 years, we have made eight albums, we have done a lot of tours, we have put a lot of extra pages in our passport and we still scream and yell about the most retarded trivial shit imaginable. It’s a function about caring over your details and sweating the details. I think it would be easier if we were intuitive people and we would just simply sit down and express.

Martin Schmidt

You mean, like I’m going to make a song about... my pain is real!

Todd Burns

With the recent album you even had different track listings for the vinyl and CD.

Martin Schmidt

There it is! There it was, Drew’s record and Martin’s version of the same record.

Drew Daniel

We were still having horrible arguments while mastering the record. When you are mastering it’s like, “OK, you really need to know, is this song on the record or not?” And we couldn’t...

Martin Schmidt

Oh, I could!

Drew Daniel

And so could I!

Martin Schmidt

Except we’re supposed to take turns in who is in charge of these records and it was my turn and what ended up happening, Drew?

Drew Daniel

Martin did the CD and so the CD is Martin’s version of the album, and the vinyl is my version of the album.

Martin Schmidt

That is such fucking bullshit! I absolutely feel it right now. Fuck you! I can’t believe that I let you do that. It was your idea! To like, “Oh, we’ll take turns being in charge of the records.” Your idea!

Drew Daniel

So now we have signs in the studio when we’re working on the record...

Martin Schmidt

I took them down and threw them away.

Drew Daniel

...that would say, “Martin is in charge of the new Matmos record,” so when I’m about to argue with him, I’ll just look at the sign and be like... You need the vinyl because it has the track we did with Terry Riley that’s really awesome.

Martin Schmidt

Which isn’t as awesome as Drew thinks it was. Terry Riley is great, the song just didn’t turn out that well.

Drew Daniel

You’re just wrong.

Todd Burns

I don’t even know where to begin from here. [laughter]

Martin Schmidt

By saying, “Martin, you’re right.”

Todd Burns

Martin, I like the CD version of the record. Drew, I haven’t heard the vinyl version of the record. [Martin laughs]

Drew Daniel

Collaboration is difficult. It’s difficult because production appeals to control freaks, it appears to solitary ego-driven people who want to create their own private worlds. I wish you could see the Venn diagram of electronic music production and autism. I wonder how much of the pie is similar. I think it’s important that neither of us gets to be completely happy about these records and that is why they are more than what I could do by myself. I could make records by myself, and I do sometimes, but they are not as compelling to me as to what I make with Martin.

Todd Burns

So, let’s perhaps move on. You talk about being a control freak and having control and you’ve worked with a bunch of other people on their projects, Björk being the big example.

Martin Schmidt

She was in charge of that one. There were no arguments. She was right.

Todd Burns

I guess, putting yourself in that mode, how was that? Completely different? You just try to do your best with the 80 percent of the track that she gave you?

Martin Schmidt

I found that experience creatively pretty frustrating, because for my entire life I have been in charge of the art that I made, and I put a huge store in the back of my mind to knowing that I can do whatever I want. That, if in the middle of the show, I choose to pull my pants off and sing opera, it’s my fucking show and that’s OK because it’s my show. And it really, really bugged me that I couldn’t pull my pants down and sing opera.

Drew Daniel

I think you probably could and nobody would notice, right? Because it’s Björk and everybody’s watching her.

Martin Schmidt

OK, Drew. But that was also true, people weren’t looking at me. That was also a big problem for me.

Todd Burns

Jealous, basically.

Martin Schmidt

It was also a problem.

Todd Burns

Let’s play a track off the record, Aurora is the record.

Martin Schmidt

It’s too bad we don’t have the video.

(music: Björk – “Aurora”)

Drew Daniel

I get really stressed out every time I hear a Björk song because I have an instinct like, “God I am supposed to be on stage, the Björk song has started.” The first tour was a year long, where we were on tour for a year living out of a suitcase and just being on tour for a year non-stop. I had never really done that before. It”s weird to be part of a big family and a big group and not be...

Martin Schmidt

The whole thousands and thousands and thousands of people looking at you was very different from the shows that we play generally too.

Drew Daniel

The first show we played in Paris on that Vespertine tour, we were in the band with Björk, obviously, and Zeena Parkins playing harp. And backstage afterwards Martin and Zeena and I were like, “Fuck! I thought people kind of liked our shows. They applaud when we”re done, but no, they don’t like our stuff. This is the real thing.” We just walked out and people were screaming and screaming so loud, we had quad monitors, four huge monitors all around us and just the sound of people shrieking and freaking the fuck out because Björk is standing right there was just terrifying. It was really scary.

Martin Schmidt

What you are trying to say, it was louder than our monitors. Tven though there’s giant monitors were right next to us, I couldn’t hear them because of people’s screaming. That is weird.

Drew Daniel

Stop loving Björk so much, you guys. Get over it, Jesus!

Drew Daniel

It was fun to have the opportunity, but fun is such a trivial word because it was really scary because we thought we were going to fuck up her music and we’re going to fuck up these shows because we are not very professional. I think Björk has always had a team of people who can make you kind of bulletproof, and she wants people that are a little bit sloppy and a little bit rough and aren’t so used to that. And that wound up being the case when we were there working on programming for Vespertine. We had never been in a studio where you paid by the hour ever in our lives. I had never been in one. We had only made records at home in our bedroom until, all of a sudden, we are at Olympic Studios with Spike Stent and he’s mixed Spice Girls, U2 and Madonna and we’re sitting there going, “Maybe you should have a breakdown here.”

Martin Schmidt

And everyone falls silent in the room and goes [turns his head dramatically and goes silent].

Drew Daniel

“Who are you?”

Martin Schmidt

“ISpeaker: Martin Schmidt m sorry that I said anything, I am so sorry! I was playing Sim City before, I’ll go back to it now!” And then they did it. It was cool. It was like a stupid MTV show. Like, Imposters Go To Rocktown. And now that show is over. On the other hand, I am sort of glad that it’s over, too, because it wasn’t my band.

Drew Daniel

It was really to fun to work with Björk and I really enjoyed it and it gave us opportunities to try things on a scale that we never would have done on our own. I mean, Martin walking rhythmically in a pile of rock salt in front of 60 thousand people would not happen at a Matmos show. But it does at Roskilde. He walks rhythmically on rock salt all the time in Baltimore during the blizzard.

Martin Schmidt

I have to use kitty litter now.

Drew Daniel

But it’s true as well that I like to make all of a work of art and being part of a production team for a pop star. Even a pop star as experimental and open and free as Björk — and she is incredibly unusual in that kind of climate in her willingness to go to places aesthetically that other people on that scale won’t go — is still a part of a very different kind of ecology or ecosystem of how you contribute and what it means to contribute. I’ve got to say, I kind of like making Matmos records where I get to make all of it, even if only 10,000 people hear it or 15,000 people hear it versus millions of people hearing a Björk record. It—s not like one is more authentic than the other or one is better. I think it has more to do with my particular skill set. There are people who would be incredible producers of pop music, who are making incredibly cool sounding pop music all the time, but it—s just not me. And that is part of the humbling reality, I wasn’t a great producer for Bjork. I wasn’t very good at listening emotionally to where she wanted to take a particular track.

Martin Schmidt

We get lost in, “No, but what about this fucked up, weird detail?”

Drew Daniel

“Why do you want one snare? Why don’t you have ten different snare sounds?”

Martin Schmidt

Drew had to point out to me about a thousand times during that thing that people who make pop music hopefully want to make pop music, and it—s not like people who make weird noisy music wish they were making pop music. Because I kept feeling like, “Why doesn’t she do something weirder?” Well, because...

Drew Daniel

From her point of view she had written those songs, Vespertine is Björk’s album. She had written melodies, she had written lyrics, the music was constructed and we were there to contribute production ideas and percussive patterns and sequences. But essentially you are doing the equivalent of set design for a play that somebody else has written, where they have got the big story and you are there to assist them in telling that big story. And I think there’s better and worse, more and less egotistical ways, of serving the interests of a song. Whereas from our point of view, we are all about collage and all about sound and chopping radically and avoiding belonging in a genre. And voices hog mid range. It’s just true.

Martin Schmidt

The human voice robs all the fun of music-making for me.

Drew Daniel

That’s a little extreme.

Martin Schmidt

I don’t know. As soon as someone is speaking or singing, it is over for the rest of the sounds. The rest of the sounds now have become in a support role for the human voice. Come on, man, look at the EQ on a mixing board. If they’re going to put parametrics on it, where are they? They are right in the human voice range. Why? Because fucking 99.9 percent of what we do is listen to human voices. It’s not even a matter of mixing.

Drew Daniel

Why don’t you stop talking in protest?

Martin Schmidt

You just want to stop me talking. You don’t want to stop human voices, you just want to stop mine. And it worked.

Drew Daniel

When we were working with Björk, we had to go with a lot of ultra lows or ultra highs and that is why we go with lots of crispy bacon frying noises as hi-hats and things, or take the little spit sounds of her lip separating and amplify them massively up the high end and then chop the lows, and do it again, and do it again, and do it again and step it up two octaves. Then you have got something high enough that it won’t interrupt Björk, so she can hog the mid-range and we can write basslines. It was just our way of solving a problem acoustically of, “How do you make space for a vocal that is that huge?”

Todd Burns

If you’re listening to Vespertine and listening to a track, perhaps not “Aurora,” what can you pinpoint and say, “OK, that’s what Matmos added. That’s the set design?”

Drew Daniel

It’s tricky. The way she worked on that album was to get Marius De Vries to program rhythms, and we would program rhythms…

Martin Schmidt

She had like 125 tracks that she then was like, “This from here and this from here and this from here.”

Drew Daniel

She would wait until it was the day to mix a song and she would go down to mixing board and mute everything and just listen. Sometimes she would have a Matthew Herbert kick drum pattern and a Matmos snare, and these were patterns that were never made to go with each other, but she was just listening to what actually works and what actually serves the song. And it was highly collectivist in a weird way, even though it sounds like a total dictatorial thing on her part where she is the auteur in charge. It was not like there was any one person whose total vision was getting expressed, it was very much this collective model and she was in charge. I feel like when I hear Vespertine now – and I don’t listen to it very often just because it is maybe too nostalgic or something – it’s tricky. I can hear at the end of “Unison,” we did it all, the rhythms on “Unison.” We did a lot of the rhythms for “Aurora.” But the snow crunching was, I think, Marius De Vries did that. It’s such a clusterfuck that it’s hard for me to put my finger on what’s us.

Todd Burns

Do you think that artists who work with you on your own records and add things feel the same way at the end?

Martin Schmidt

We don’t give them long enough generally so they don’t get to feel good or bad or anything. Generally, it’s about an hour.

Drew Daniel

People come over and think that we are all going to jam and play together and then it turns out being this weirdly cold thing that’s more like a photo shoot or something.

Martin Schmidt

Go like, wom... wom, wom... wom... wom. Along with nothing. Because then we just cut it, cut it, cut it, stretch it, do whatever we like to make it fit into the song. It’s barely like playing music.

Drew Daniel

There are so many ways to collaborate now with people. I can shoot an e-mail to this guy Rudolf Eb.er in Japan and say, “Will you record kendo rehearsals?” And he'll record himself doing kendo, send it to us and that is one type of collaboration. Another will be getting the Kronos Quartet to come to our house and record the string part, and it’s for a song that’s a tribute to Joe Meek. And because he would mic strings in this very ghetto lo-fi way, we are recording the Kronos Quartet and we’re doing it with just two mics in one room and that is all there is to it, it’s not particularly hi-fi.

Martin Schmidt

That was an overwrought collaboration, where we had to send our fucked up cut- up music to a transcriber, who listened to a tape and then wrote it out in staff form for the Kronos Quartet to then play and that was just amazing. Have you ever used Babel Fish translator where you type something and it comes back? You do it again a couple of times and it comes out like this crazy poetry. That’s what this was like, only using this human being as a filter for sound. “Like, OK, take our messed up thing that we made with all these plug-ins and filters and stuff, and turn that into sheet music that a string quartet will now play.” Including all this stuff that we sort of assumed that he would ignore, like the sort of [makes electronic noises], there they were, like [mimes playing violin]. Like, “Wow, is that on there?” That was amazing. And then we ended up cutting out those things that he had laboriously transcribed onto paper, things that should have been cut out in the first place. It was really expensive too.

Drew Daniel

It was a trade-off, remember? Kronos? Oh yeah, no. Arrangers are expensive.

Martin Schmidt

Not doing that again. Actually, we worked with an awesome arranger last time we played in London.

Drew Daniel

Anna Meredith, a Scottish composer.

Martin Schmidt

Fucking amazing.

Drew Daniel

She did a version of “Supreme Balloon” for 20-piece strings and horns and that was really fun to get to play.

Martin Schmidt

The London Contemporary Orchestra.

Drew Daniel

It was weird to play modular synthesizer noodling jam and to treat that as something that you could notate and then have played by traditional instruments. It really exposes your boneheaded cave-person compositional retardedness on a scale that’s quite shaming. It reminds me of Deep Purple Live at the Albert Hall.

Todd Burns

You mentioned Supreme Balloon and it seems like that album was a departure in terms of the way that you constructed it, in terms of from your past work. Can you describe a little bit about why and what the difference was?

Martin Schmidt

That was my album. It was my turn. I was just like, “Let’s swing away. We are the band that does the goofy samples of things band…”

Drew Daniel

It was getting too much of a wackiness ghetto. If you’re in the wacky ghetto too long, it’s annoying. It’s like, “Oh my God they made a song with snails. There is a song made with burning human flesh, how kooky.”

Martin Schmidt

I thought, no microphones, at all. We will do all synthesis.

Todd Burns

Should we play a track? “Cloudhopper” or “Supreme Balloon”?

(music: Matmos – “Cloudhoppers”)

Martin Schmidt

Did you want to ask something?

Todd Burns

I guess, I just wanted you to talk a little bit about the construction of the album. Because you went to a lot of interesting places to find these old modular synthesizers.

Drew Daniel

Once we’ve got an idea, we try to let the world tell us what the hell it is that we should be doing with this, to a certain extent. It was amazing that during the time that we were working on that record that we were asked to come to the GRM in Paris, which is the home of musique concrète. It is the foundation that that guy Pierre Schaeffer started as part of Radio France, that’s still going, god bless the French who so believe in experimental culture. It’s still receiving full-funding in an attempt to create a classical music without pitches.

Drew Daniel

Try to imagine the British Ministry of Cubism. There’s a Ministry of Cubism that funds Cubist paintings.

Martin Schmidt

Still a million dollars a year since 1930.

Drew Daniel

At GRM they had this incredible Ali Baba’s cave of weird old gear in the basement that none of them were using because they’ve all gone digital and they have all gone software. We said, “Can we see and access some of this old stuff?” They had this thing called the Coupigny that was designed in the ’60s by this engineer Francis Coupigny. It’s a little bit like the EMS Synthi. It’s ten oscillators, no ADSR, so there is no wave shaping. You connect and chain oscillators to other oscillators through a matrix pin system. So there is a matrix, in which three different links can create three different kinds of connections. You can have signal model modulate signal, signal modulate voltage, or voltage modulate voltage. So the different densities construct these different relationships as you sort of cascade one sound into another. It was ten oscillators.

Martin Schmidt

Ten oscill... Are there any modular synthesis people? It’s crazy, ten modular oscillators. It’s really impractical. From a musical standpoint, this thing was not made to make music. It was made to make insane noises. Nobody was ever going to be like [sings melody]. There was no keyboard on it and no way to hook up the keyboard to it. Beautiful.

Drew Daniel

I can play some examples of what it sounds like, if you want to hear it. We also made various pilgrimages to players of synthesizers, who were able to get performances that we are incapable of doing. OK, here is an example of the Coupigny going off.

(music: Coupigny synthesizer examples)

Todd Burns

Also, on your albums, of course, you guys always talk about, “OK, this album is the medical album,” but you have people playing clarinet, guitars. The concept has never been the end-all, be-all. It has been a guide but you’re willing to make exceptions.

Martin Schmidt

We’re trying to make listenable music. Purer art is like, “OK, here is the concept, we executed the concept and these are the results and that’s that.” Take it or leave it.

Drew Daniel

The Sol Lewitt idea that the concept is the machine that creates the work. That’s from his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, one of these important manifestos of conceptual art as a technique. And it’s very disinterested in execution and craft, it’s all about the concept is the work. We are whores. We want to make a record that you want to listen to, that you want to tap your toes to, that you want to hear more than once, ideally...

Martin Schmidt

…and that also fulfills those conceptual ideals as well.

Drew Daniel

I want to have the conceptual cake and eat it as a pop desert too, I guess, is the point. You want to have gone to all the trouble of getting snails to interrupt the path of a laser that’s aimed at a light sensitive Theremin, but you want the solo played by those snails to actually sound cool.

Todd Burns

I guess that goes into the performance aspect of what you do in terms of making it. Clearly, electronic music has had this bad rep, performatively, of people looking at a laptop. And you go out of your way to replicate what you’re doing in the studio to make sure that people have at least something to look at, something to engage with. I guess, we will be seeing a video.

(video: Matmos at San Francisco Art Institute)

Drew Daniel

It makes me laugh when I hear the little voices going, “OK, go for it, all right!” Because they’re all from these free CDs that you get when you buy nicotine patches. And the CDs are about encouraging you that you can quit smoking, you really can, it’s going to work. And there’s all these sounds of co-workers sort of celebrating their freedom from tobacco.

Martin Schmidt

OK!

Drew Daniel

Congratulations on your decision to stop smoking! And Martin was on the patch for 15 years. You’re supposed to be on it for two weeks and then just get over it, but we had this arrested development thing for like 15 years. So we had all these CDs laying around and I felt like I got to use this. It just sounds so square and uncool when they are like, “Yeah, let’s party!”

Martin Schmidt

Let’s party by being not too excessive! Let’s be prudent!

Drew Daniel

That gets at the Soft Pink Truth, me trying to make dance music, but I’ve always had a very weird and alienated relationship to dance music because being a closet fag in Kentucky that was into hardcore, I thought that I couldn’t be into dance music because that’s what would make me gay. When I was in the closet. There was this feeling that gay people like Erasure. And I like Black Flag, I don’t relate to queer people, so I must not be gay because I like this.

Martin Schmidt

Thank heavens the Japanese model of “your look and your lifestyle have no connection to the music that you listen to at all” is now taking over the entire world.

Drew Daniel

You look at Tokio Hotel and they look badass and then you hear them and it’s the worst music you have ever heard in your life.

Martin Schmidt

It is a radical thing that has happened over the last 20 years.

Drew Daniel

The final death of authenticity. So anyway, Soft Pink Truth is my stupid issues of shame about queerness and dance music finally overcompensating through this very pleasure-orientated, fun, ridiculous project.

Todd Burns

You said you had been doing quite a few more shows in Baltimore?

Drew Daniel

We moved from San Francisco where everyone is cold and chilly and folds their arms and is here because the blog said it might be good and they can’t wait to post the first message that, in fact, it’s not good. Whereas in Baltimore, people don’t give a fuck and they just want to have a good time and get sweaty and dance because their lives are miserable because they live in an economic crater.

Martin Schmidt

It’s maybe not that dramatic. It’s not that extreme, but there is definitely a lot more of, people are not trying to get famous because they live in Baltimore, so they are quite sure that nothing is ever going to happen. They are, in fact, actually just making music to entertain and illuminate the people who came to the show who are their friends. And they aren’t looking beyond that. The people go to the shows to be amused and illuminated by their friends making music, and the whole thing ends there. It’s amazing. You remember, “That’s right, that’s what we do.” There isn’t this third generation, cynical, “If I was really trying to make it, I’d move to Brooklyn or Berlin. I can’t really make music here.”

Drew Daniel

Who would I make it for? It is the ratio of discourse to presence, maybe Baltimore has like minimal discourse, maximum presence, and maybe San Francisco for us had turned into maximum discourse, minimal presence.

Todd Burns

Do you feel like it has changed or is going to change the way you make music as Matmos?

Martin Schmidt

Drew is very busy being a professor, that is what he does now. But it totally taught me a new way of thinking about playing. In the scene that we are more involved with, it seems to be more based on like improv jazz and these worlds have collided. The noise and rock and punk and this free jazz thing have all collided, and there are so many people who make their own gear and do free improv shows with it. There’s crazy people who make their own synthesizers playing with trombonists. Nobody has any money for a PA system so everything is through guitar amps and it’s all very much based on do-it-yourself, or what-you-can-afford, aesthetics. We had to draw the line when we moved there because I live by the PA. I cannot abide fucking guitar amplifiers. Ugh. So we bought a PA.

Drew Daniel

It is weird, I never felt bourgeois until I moved to Baltimore and we’re like, “Can we have monitor speakers at the show?” And people are looking at us like we asked for a carriage and eight horses. “Who the hell do you think you are, princess?” “Well, I just want some monitor speakers.” It was inspiring. Going to shows for a year in Baltimore, I never saw someone play a laptop and I never saw a rock band. People are not interested, and they can’t afford it, so instead they are playing fucked up, weird stuff that they built themselves and cobbled together and it sounds kind of amazing. It’s been a real inspiration to be taken out of our comfort zone. I loved San Francisco but I really felt that, by the end of living there for 17 years, that it was coasting on a reputation of countercultural bohemian otherness that had not been economically viable since about 1979. The reality of what the software industry did was to give us incredible tools that have made it possible for charlatans like myself to make music. So I am incredibly grateful to that industry. But that industry also displaced a whole class of people from that city. And we were part of it. We got evicted at Christmas one year, right during the middle of the big boom. But it was just a reality, and moving to Baltimore, I mean people live there on $250 a month and that’s all they need, so it changes your priorities.

Todd Burns

OK, let’s open it up to questions. Does anyone have anything?

Audience Member

I have two questions because it seems like I can talk to you guys about anything. First thing, what’s your favorite body part?

Drew Daniel

I am going to make a guess about Martin’s favourite body part and I am going to guess that Martin’s favorite body part is the back of the neck.

Martin Schmidt

Wrong. [laughter] It depends, whose body? What are we doing with it? Definitely hand. I mean, useful. Handy.

Drew Daniel

I like the tongue.

Martin Schmidt

Sexy stuff, that’s different. What do I like looking at on other people?

Drew Daniel

No, language. And your other question?

Audience Member

I heard there is really common in Baltimore to call women “buckets,” is that true?

Martin Schmidt

[laughing] I have never heard that! Where did you hear that? How rude.

Audience Member

I just struggled to think of something to ask you because I don’t really have a question, but I think you guys are really funny. I think your laugh is really good. Have you recorded that?

Drew Daniel

I have that Ernie kind of sound that I make. We made a cassette called “Matmos in Lo-Fidelity,” it is in mono, 8-bit cut ups, and there’s a lot of Martin laughing at me laughing and a lot of sounds that are very kind of domestic and private. It was when we started as a band and a couple and since then… we used it a little bit on The West, too, it’s the final breakdown at the end of that. There is a 22 minute collage, and at the end there’s a lot of us laughing and fucking up each other’s voices.

Audience Member

I was really interested with your idea of how you are trying to do experimental or conceptual art in music, but you also said that you wanted to be listenable to an extent. Some of the work I do I struggle with that idea. Do you think that sometimes by trying to make the music listenable, you are sacrificing a little bit from the idea or the whole concept?

Martin Schmidt

Certainly, like, it’s not pure.

Drew Daniel

I think it depends, listenability. If you think an Aphex Twin track like “Ventolin,” is that listenable or not? It’s like getting into a hot bath. The second your foot’s in it, you’re like, “Fuck, that’s hot.” But within a couple of minutes you are like, “Oh, OK!” Anyway, it is contextual and the frame of a given record might establish what is listenable or not for that record. But, yeah, I think there’s a huge risk in watering down what you are doing in order to please some imaginary listener that you think is out there who is a little more scared than you. That’s not a great approach to making art, imagining that you have to kind of please some invisible demographic hallucination. Trusting yourself and trusting that other people are just as interested as you are is a better way to go, and honestly, the person that modeled that for us most is Björk. She is not somebody who is sitting in the studio and saying, “This is too weird.” She doesn’t really have that attitude and that is weird because she is the one where there is a certain amount of pressure because if she’s too weird, it will sell this much or that much or whatever. Whereas for us, I don’t feel that these issues are really at stake. I feel that in terms of the surgery record, we wanted to make it as poppy and in a weird way, toe-tapping as possible because it was made out skulls and fat and blood and it would be very easy to make an alienating industrial, Marilyn Manson-style “aren’t I scaaaary record?” out of the sounds. But it wouldn’t be compelling, there would be no dialectic. There would be no transformation of surgery by making surgery scary. Surgery is already scary, there is no magic trick in doing that. Whereas, if you can make it sound like something that could just play in a W Hotel lobby, and then you realize that it’s made out of the fat of rich people, then you are like, “Oh, whoa, eew!” So that’s kind of why that record was the way it was.

Martin Schmidt

There was a song we made where we were like, “We need a bassline,” and we could not get a satisfactory bassline sound but I can’t remember what song. We’re like, “OK, we’re going to make this song all out of balloons and whoopee cushions.” Go ahead and just roll it.

[music plays]

So this is all balloons and I was like, “It wants a funky bass sound.” Not to sound like fucking Britney Spears or something. And balloons were just not doing it. I was like, “Why don’t we use a synthesizer?” I don’t think we argued about it in a bad way, but it was like, “Because that’s not a balloon, that’s why we don’t use a synthesizer, Martin.” “Yeah, but the song wants a good bassline.” So we used a synthesizer and the song is no longer conceptually pure. I swear that bass is coming soon.

Drew Daniel

I mean, it’s about 90% balloon. There is a good example of being un-pure on purpose. And it must be said, discovering early Matthew Herbert records as Dr. Rockit was a huge touchstone of this approach, we cannot not pour one out for his technique and his skill because it’s a sort of a parallel evolution. Björk was at a party and played him our record then he e-mailed us and we have been friends ever since. It’s been kind of cool to see somebody else who’s also interested in this, but he comes from a jazz training and deeply musical awareness, whereas we come from a noise background where we are slowly getting more musical over the years. But we started out feeling a fair amount of hostility towards “real” music.

Audience Member

Can I just ask you to kind of look back at your career, and if you were to think of one or two moments when you felt really satisfied and said, “OK, this is why we drive ourselves crazy, this feels really good. It’s OK.” What are those moments?

Martin Schmidt

I am definitely getting that satisfaction a lot out of doing all these shows that are just pure improv lately and I realize – I’m going to pleasure myself here, which I guess, is necessary to answer that question – but I’ve realized that I’ve trained myself to get great sounds out of whatever object I put my hands on. I feel like I can get, not the best, but I know how to play this can. Just by looking at it and holding it. And that’s what I have been loving about these pure improv things lately. We start with nothing. I’ll play the room and it will get sampled or the other people and, man, I really get a good deal of pleasure out of having worked on that particularly bizarre skill for a long time and having it generate stuff successfully.

Drew Daniel

There has been a lot of moments because 18 years is a long time. Records are kind of a message in a bottle and you put it out there and just have no idea if it resonates for other people and it’s a little weird and alienating, and you’re caught up in the workflow of creating it, and then it’s done. But when you get to perform something and it loops back to the context that it was about, then that’s powerful. We made a song on The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, which is a record of queer portraits of people we admire, where we learned their biography and we re-enacted events in the life, and then we make music out of the sounds generated during the re-enactments of events from their lives. We made a track about this guy James Bidgood, who made this incredible film, a kind of quasi-pornographic dreamy film called Pink Narcissus. We basically assumed that he was dead and almost everybody that the songs were about, they were all dead. Or almost all of them. And then we learned that, “Oh my god, James Bidgood is actually alive.” Someone had found him living in a tenement hotel near suicide at a serious rock bottom with a lot of the prints of his photography sitting in shoe boxes in a closet. Just at the edge. We basically rescued him and brought back his art and career, and we got to perform live our song about him to him. Because Antony of Antony and the Johnsons did this benefit that was Antony, Cocorosie and Matmos, which was a benefit for a queer homeless youth shelter in Brooklyn, and Antony sings the song of ours about James Bidgood. So we got to kind of do this serenade, where James Bidgood was sitting on stage and Anthony is singing to him and we’re playing our samples. I contact-mic’d a sheet of paper and I watched Pink Narcissus and jerked off and I recorded the sound of my semen splashing onto a piece of paper as my heart was racing watching this movie. So I’m kind of transmitted these amplified sounds of my heart beating and my semen and I’m sort of splashing it all over James Bidgood. It is the most ridiculously masturbatory thing possible, but if you want to look for what was the artistic money shot moment, that might be it.

Martin Schmidt

If you ever see him interviewed, he is the kind of guy who would appreciate that. He’s just like a filthy old man. We were interviewed for this well-meaning gay documentary…

Drew Daniel

About, like, “Intergenerational respect between different eras of gay artists.”

Martin Schmidt

He looks at the camera and he’s like, “I don’t want to fucking talk about that! I want to fucking talk about drugs!” We were like, “Yes! I love this guy.”

Audience Member

I have a question. You were talking about conceptual purity and you were talking about respecting it to a certain degree and then breaking it. I think that is really interesting; do you think that purity is something better than subverting?

Drew Daniel

I think they each travel towards different demographics. There is that Japanese guy Aube, who made this record called Pages of the Book, which is just Bibles being burned and it’s just an hour of the burning of a Bible. It’s a pure conceptual art kind of piece, and that’s what that is. We made a record where you can hear the pages of Bibles turning, but there was also an acoustic guitar, which plays an empty, melancholic figure. Ours is more musical than Aube, I don’t think that makes ours better.

Martin Schmidt

I think the sound of the page... the acoustic guitar is not doing all the work. I genuinely think the sound of that page, it’s a great recording. It is definitely doing some of the work of telegraphing the feeling that ends up being there.

Drew Daniel

If you put a right microphone and a left microphone on either side of a Bible and close-mic it and you get a nice stereo field, an old Bible with a sort of vellum-y print paper, which makes a good rustling sound as it strikes the air. There is a lot of material there, if you really want to work with it and caress it and deal with it as an object that could make an interesting musical sound. I think as long as you are compelled by what you’re hearing, then there is purity whether there’s a guitar or not.

Audience Member

Sometimes it’s more about the thrill. Sometimes you seek concepts to seek bigger thrills, right?

Drew Daniel

You have to realize that when you are curating the information and telling someone it’s a Bible rather than just a book, that is a huge artistic choice and it becomes very loaded. Sometimes we tell people stuff and sometimes we don’t. On the first record there is a collage that involves something that we just called “Polish Trains,” and we didn’t mention that they are the trains that go to Auschwitz, because we kind of felt that if we had done that, it would be sort of clobbering people too hard and it is too loaded, and you’d better fucking bring it if you’re going to even reference that. We felt like dialing it back in terms of the information. The sound is there and we know what it means, and I guess now you guys do. But it was an important decision I think to be kind of controlling about how much information is the right amount, and that’s an artistic decision.

Todd Burns

Isn’t there some kind of pleasure in keeping those mysteries to yourself?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, when we did our porno soundtrack work, because we made the soundtracks to like six porn films.

Martin Schmidt

That would be for money, by the way. It wasn’t like, “Yeah, we did that for art.” No, we were paying the rent.

Drew Daniel

They wanted like 100 minutes of music and they would give you $1,000, but you only had three days.

Martin Schmidt

That is right, 100 minutes. Those of you that have worked for weeks on a three-minute song. “Yeah, we need 100 minutes, we need it Friday. OK, thank you.”

Drew Daniel

You would just make ridiculous, fake Portishead, fake Nine Inch Nails, but we would hide esoteric things that were pleasing ourselves. Things that were not erotic, but really disgusting that we would sort of hide inside the porno soundtrack because we are just corny like that.

Todd Burns

You reversed voices on that, I think? The porno soundtracks are one thing I wanted to ask you about. They asked for a 100 minutes music, but then they would take three minutes and just loop it. They didn’t really care about it.

Martin Schmidt

They were like, “Oh, these guys are good, we can get six films out of them.” And they would just take stuff and cut it and put it and paste it into other movies. It”s like they didn’t care that much about the art they were making! [laughter] When we originally started doing that we were doing these careful timed out by the scenes and the climaxes would occur…

Drew Daniel

“Do the cymbal crash when the poppers guy comes in.”

Martin Schmidt

And, they just so did not care and just slapped it on the movie wrong.

Drew Daniel

They had a great slogan about how to approach it. They were like, “Don’t be interesting.”

Martin Schmidt

“Guys, don’t make it too interesting.” What an awesome command for art!

Todd Burns

They probably don’t want the music to be getting in the way of the porno.

Martin Schmidt

If you are a painter, and someone asked you to make a painting not so interesting, are you then a designer? That was so the reaction that I wanted! Owwww! [laughs] What is the function? What is music? Is that what Muzak is? I think that was their slogan and they literally meant the opposite of that, and that is why that slogan is so good, it is less than music.

Drew Daniel

Boring music makes boring work less boring is the sort of core idea there. Sadly, if you think about the ease with which you could buy Ableton and know nothing about what you wanted to do, but just kick around some plug-ins and some soft synths and some Impulse drum kits... [Matin starts to beatbox], the sort of de-skilling in electronic music is a serious concern, I think it ought to be a concern to everybody in this room, right? It is precisely vastly too easy to make electronic music now of a certain sort. That doesn’t mean that therefore you have to rip your ovaries out to make something good. But it does mean that you are your own worst enemy when you’re making electronic music, because it is too easy to take it about 30 percent of the way there.

Audience Member

I think you guys just answered my question with that little performance, but I would like to ask you, if there was no audience and you were just making an album just for you personally – not even for each other, just for you – how different would that sound to what you make already?

Drew Daniel

People often, when they are defensive, say, “I make my records for myself, and if other people like it that’s cool, but really, it’s for myself.” I have always felt very frustrated by that attitude because you are communicating to other people and it matters. You don’t want to pander to an imaginary version of other people when you’re making the art. You don’t want to cut corners and be like [mimes licking]. Would you like it more if I went like that for a while? Don’t do that obviously, but the record is not completed until it is out there in the world and until it is part of the social network that you can’t control.

Audience Member

Do you think music has to have an audience to have a purpose? Say, for some reason you’re making an album that is not going to be listened to, no one is soon going to open it until you die.

Martin Schmidt

That is hard to me to think about. To literally wrap my mind… “Make an album that no one will listen to. Go!”

Audience Member

But that you like, still.

Drew Daniel

I have seen the way that if you do put out a record and it does get this sort of reaction…

Martin Schmidt

We have made records that no one listened to. It’s all too easy!

Drew Daniel

It contaminates your process if you start to go, “Oh, well that last review said it was too mellow, so let’s make a harsh record.” The pendulum swing that you’re doing in reaction to discourse, I think that’s really worrying and damaging and you have to find ways to insulate yourself from it. Maybe making a record that nobody will ever hear, there’s that Emily Dickinson model, My Letters to a World That Never Spoke to Me, you just create in your lonely room and you create for the joy of creation. That Henry Darger model of the outsider artist, painters like Henry Darger, they seem like sacred monsters of creativity because they don’t care and they don’t sweat it. But I think it’s important to be able to test what you are doing in front of an audience and to experience that.

Todd Burns

You talk about discourse being damaging potentially but you reviewed records for Pitchfork and other sites?

Drew Daniel

I know, I feel like an asshole. Giving numeric ratings to records is something that really troubles me. That’s why, when I wrote for Pitchfork, I would write, “This is a great song.” But I wouldn’t take someone’s album and go, “This is 7.2. It’s not really a 7.4 because it doesn’t have that certain resonance that 7.4 would have.” I think that’s really annoying. On the other hand, the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about something that I think is amazing that might get ignored is something that I don’t want to pass up. I don’t feel like journalists are the enemy. I was making a punk rock ‘zine before I was in a punk rock band. I don’t think the divisions are all that awful. But I think we are in a moment now, because of the blogs and because of the internet, where a universal climate of canny, snarky, knowingness prevails and people’s egos are built up by being the first person having liked something, and if too many other people have liked it, too, that’s contaminating. The quest for cultural capital keeps having these diminishing returns in the form of people not being able to have careers anymore. Because they are uncool by the time their album is actually out. By the time it is actually in a story, it is so antic it is banal and who needs to buy it and then it’s on to the next one. Jay-Z is right again, “On to the Next One.” That is exactly the attitude that prevails in the way that music discourse has been accelerated now. And now I just sound like an old person.

Martin Schmidt

I sometimes feel like no one could make another record and we could be pretty satisfied for five years on just listening to the records that no one bothered to listen to twice from the last hundred years. I swear, half of the Wire reviews section is reissues of records you’ve never even heard. You never heard these records that are pretty darn good, records from the ‘60s and ‘70s, all this amazing electronic music. Who needs new records? Stop!

Drew Daniel

You know who you’re talking to, right? [laughs] I think that returns to the question of whether you want to get pleasure out of the process and whether you want to make things because they’re driving you crazy until you complete them. If you respect the force with which they are nagging at you enough to really devote yourself to it, then you will probably make something that will be worth listening to, hopefully now, maybe ten years from now. But life is long. We were making songs together for four years before we put out a record, four or five years of just making tracks and sending them back and forth to each other and working on them again and again without any idea that anybody was going to listen.

Martin Schmidt

And we were perfectly happy. You had better be happy with it. God knows, you had better be happy with making songs and albums that no one listen to, because it’s unlikely that anyone is ever going to listen to them. I feel like we’ve been unconscionably lucky that other people listen to our stuff, But I swear that I would have been happy having no-one besides my friends ever listen to this stuff, and I would continue making this stuff.

Drew Daniel

He made a vinyl record, Moods for Misty Evenings, and when we move we still have these giant cases of Moods for Misty Evenings. No one bought it, no one cared. When we started to make Matmos nobody was interested. We sent out demos to labels and we sent out letters and we tried to get people interested and we got rejection letters, techno labels were like, “This is fucking noise, this is bullshit.” Noise people were like, “This is silly.” So we got thumbs down, thumbs down, thumbs down. So we put ourselves out on our own label, total vanity label, where we just think we are like pleasing ourselves and it is going to embarrass us. Every time we move we’re going to have thousands of copies of the CD that no one gives a shit about, and we put out our own record ourselves on our own vanity label and Rough Trade in London took ten, I guess, and one of the ten people that bought it was Björk. And she calls us and we do a remix and then we’re in her band. It actually can happen.

Martin Schmidt

If you want to be in Björk’s band.

Todd Burns

Are there any other questions?

Martin Schmidt

Let’s eat lunch.

Drew Daniel

Thanks for your time.