John Goodridge has a chat to Drew Daniel of Matmos with occasional contributions from M.C. Schmidt. Coming to Australia for the Sydney Festival, the Matmos chaps talk about hitting Australia for the first time, recording sound, travelling and more.
Hi Martin. This is John calling from the AU review in Australia. How’s the weather?
Rainy, cold and crappy.
Well you’ll like Australia when you get here.
I’m excited.
Will this be your first time in Australia when you come to the Sydney Festival?
Yes it will. I’ve been to New Zealand but I’ve never been to Australia.
This is Drew, the other half of Matmos. I was in Australia when I was two years old and have been told all sorts of stories of meeting various exotic Australian fauna that I have absolutely no memory of, so I feel like this is the real thing.
Yeah, Australia’s pretty well known for it’s exotic animals and insects and things. Maybe you’ll get a chance to do some recording of insects and whatever?
Yeah, I’m gonna bring a zoom recorder and try to get some recording in while I’m in the country. What sounds do you think I should look for that is particularly definitive?
If you can get out into the bushland, there are lots of insect sounds.
What about a social noise in downtown Sydney that exemplifies the sound of Sydney?
I would say if you can get on the trains or underground that is what signifies Sydney.
Drew: Who’s interviewing whom here?
Laughs. I’m actually fascinated by the whole process you go through recording sounds. How do you get your inspiration for what sounds you want to record?
Well we take turns in charge of records and there’s “Martin” records and there’s “Drew” records and they’re pretty different. I tend to get obsessed with a concept that binds the whole album which determines what I’m gonna work with and why. Martin likes to start from instrumental objects that make good sounds and let’s build a song out of that object. He’s more driven by what you find and what you can make a good sound with. Whereas I tend to start with an elaborate conceptual framework and work my way down to sounds from there.
Which means A Marriage of True Minds is your record?
Yeah, it is. I have the albums with the pretentious titles.
I was reading about the Ganfeld experiments and to me it’s really fascinating. Did you get some feelings of ESP or things like that?
Well I will say that the first time we did it I didn’t know if was going to be a joke and wouldn’t go anywhere and the very first experiment that I did, was admittedly with a friend, somebody that I’d known a long time, but I felt an incredible sense of connection that was genuinely kinda disturbing. The track that was generated by him during that session was something that we used in the song “Just Wait” which is a very strange kind of poetic track, so from the very beginning I was feeling a lot more than I expected to feel about the experience. Many people were way, way off from the concept that I was attempting to send. But there is at least one song on the album where somebody got it exactly right and that was probably the most disturbing thing in the process.
My feeling about that is that everything is interconnected and all you need is the right medium to transmit.
I know what you mean. There are so many pathways for perception. Even if you just pay attention to what it means to see something or feel something or smell something. That emotion. You go into a room and you just sense that there is unease. There may be a chemical story to tell there, about pheromones, I don’t know. But I do realize that as a performer I do know that I rely on something that is a lot like telepathy. I can be in a room with a crowd and maybe they aren’t saying anything, but you can feel if people are with you or ignoring you, if they’re following you or you need to break or change what you’re doing. You rely on intuitions like that. That’s what’s fun about travelling and playing in countries that you’re not familiar with in that it can sort of throw off your ability to read people and it sort of challenges you. So there’s a big difference we’ve noticed between say Madrid and Amsterdam about what the crowd is like. I’m curious to find out what the deal is with Australia.
To me, I would say Sydney has a bit of a connection with New York.
Okay. So beware of folded arms and ‘been there, done that’ vibe?
Nah. I have a feeling that the audiences will be excited for the show.
Well we’ll have to flash our teeth and smile pretty for them.
Can you tell us what it’s like working with other artists like Bjork for example?
It’s a challenge, because I think electronic music production encourages you to be a bit of a tyrant and a dictator and you control everything, so when electronic people collaborate with somebody that already brings to the table an incredibly strong voice and melodic flair and ideas, it’s really about how can you serve that song and how can you add to it without overdoing it or wading things down. I think our aesthetic is very cluttered and her aesthetic is very focused, so it was a challenge to work with Bjork on lots of levels. It was lots of fun. Lately we’ve been playing music with Anthony, and that’s a real challenge too because his sense of timing and rhythm is very unique, very personal. I guess what a classical person would say is very rubato, you know, flowing, speeding up and slowing down all the time and that’s a huge challenge to people who are used to a kinda software environment like us, so it always changes you. It’s like any relationship, you don’t know, am I the messy one and he’s the neat one or with somebody else would I be the neat one and he’s the messy one.
I just finished reading Godel, Escher, Bach and in it, Hofstadter described how Bach had a really strict regime of writing music, which created a sort of butterfly effect in the way he created music. Is that something that you do with your music or is it more organic than that?
Well I would never put myself in the class of a genius like Bach, but I do know what you mean in that often we start a song with a very simple restriction, like lets make it all out of the end of a rabbit or lets not use any microphones. It’s a very simple thing and then so much crystallizes out of a commitment like that. Once you make that commitment a lot follows and yet you also have an opening out of possible ways. It’s sort of like following a rule. A sonnet might tell you you can have fourteen lines, yet there are millions of sonnets that you can possibly write. Yes, you’re following a rule but you’re also free within that constraint. I think all of our work returns to that same dynamic.
That’s what I was thinking along the lines of. By imposing strict rules you can become more creative?
For us, the rhetoric around electronic music production is that the possibilities are infinite and you can have any sound you want and I find that really a kind of a vacuum and it produces sterile music where there’s a bunch of things collided together but for no particular purpose. I don’t find that blank page problem a good place to start from. I like to start from a kind of level of intuition about a particular object or particular idea and let that get into the driver’s seat. I think it’s also because I’m not making music as an emotional outlet. Matmos isn’t about my feelings so much. Obviously I’m a person and the work comes from somewhere, but I don’t tend to regard emotional expression as what we’re about. I know it might sound like we’re intellectuals who are up their own asses a bit, but there are plenty of people who are really good at expressing an emotion, but Matmos is trying to step sideways from that idea about what music’s for or where it comes from.
So the live performance that you’ll bring to the Sydney Festival, will that be something that you’ll write specifically or will it be a selection of songs?
Well we always try to balance things that are exciting and new to us so they aren’t a song that we’ve played a million times but with eight, nine albums it can be fun to go back and play something old that we haven’t played forever and see if it makes sense against the new work. So I guess that’s a round-a-bout way of the wedding logic ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’. That’s what we’re likely to bring. Especially when we’ve never played somewhere before, we’re aware that there’s some people in Australia that have been writing to us for decades who have all the records and know our work really well, for them it might be fun for them to hear us play – well we don’t have ‘hits’, but a kind of older tune from our catalogue. But I also really like to improvise, I like to have an object and Martin will play it and I will sample it and see what we get out of it. I think that cooking show vibe of doing it live and showing the process has always been important to us. But it can kinda blow up in your face.
But I think that’s the beauty of art. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. But when they do they can be spectacular.
And if they don’t, demand your money back.
The choice of sounds you use, like cut hair, rats cages and latex clothing for example, is it important for the final song to be a reflection of the sound that you’ve started with?
Every time you make a song, there’s a spectrum from the raw sound of the object to something completely transformed. There’s the raw and the cooked. I like our music to have a transition from one to the other. I don’t necessarily think it’s always important that people can tell what something is. I think it needs to be sonically exciting on its own even if you don’t know what it’s made out of. When we work with a real world sound on a record we do try to make sure that we don’t override it to unrecognisability. It’s all too easy to do that with software. I mean, you can start with mashed potatoes and wind up with a bass drum. Or start with an insect sound and wind up with an opera singer. The idea for us is to work with a real sound and maybe knowing what can be done with it without making it unrecognizable.
Do you ever find yourself walking around the streets and hearing a sound and saying, “I wish I had my recorder with me?”
Oh God yes! The big heartbreak there is that as human beings, we’re very good at ignoring certain sounds to focus in on what we care about; you bring a field recording device and make your recording, and then you realize that underneath and on top of and all around that super cool sound that you love, is a bunch of car noise that you as a human being can kinda filter out and ignore. But the microphone can’t do that. Clearly, the effect of car sounds on the environment that we all live in is so much more profound than we realize. It only shows up when you start documenting things. We’ve often had drive far out into rural areas or wait until very late at night to try and get certain sounds.
Martin: He doesn’t even mean unusual sounds. I had this idea when we were doing the record The Civil War on the song “Pelt and Holler” and I had a movie-esque vision of a rabbit running away from something. So I said, ‘We have to go outside and record bushes. High grass bushes rustling’. So we get in a car and drive to a nearby park and put our headphones on and take out the mike and it sounds like we’re in the middle of a fucking freeway. Even though we had perceived this area before we put on our recording goggles as a very quiet place to record a bush and in fact it was totally unusable.
I guess that gets back the idea of art being a spectacular success or spectacular failure.
That’s also the beauty of art is that we can take some dry branches and take them into an insulated quiet room and make the sound of just the object, and then put that into the right place on the song and then presto – it sounds like what you want. It’s a bigger philosophical question, really. When you record an object, are you really recording that object or are you recording that object’s relationship with its space and with other people? I mean, when you strike a drum, is it the sound of a drum or is it the sound of a hand on the drum? It’s always about contact and that’s part of the mystery of sound that it’s the third thing that happens when objects in the world collide. I think there’s something queer and very odd about sound that is naturalized by associating it with textures. Like strumming the guitar and out comes the sound. I think there’s something queer and weird about the nature of electronic music that is the maxim of this. I find that really intoxicating. I think that some people find that bewildering.
I always find it really fascinating walking with my iPod and listening to the street noise overlaid that sometimes they go so well.
I’ve never been able to wear them, ever since the walkman. I gave that a try. It feels terrifying to me being disconnected from the actual audio world. I don’t know if I’m paranoid or too damn precious. I can’t do it. I’m jealous.
Martin: Steve Burns did an experiment where you record the sound of street noise and walk down the street playing the street noise back at the street. It has this very strange effect of kind of doubling and offsetting the real. That’s a very unusual thing. You should try that sometime.
You’re playing the City Recital Hall for the Sydney Festival.
Yeah we’re in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, then New Zealand. We tried to get people to present our shows in quad, but no-one will do it.
I remember my parents bought a quadrophic stereo years ago.
What happened to it?
I don’t know, actually.
Get that out of the basement!
So the name Matmos, where did it come from?
It’s from the movie Barbarella. It’s psychedelic slime that looks like a lava lamp that’s underneath the city of Sogo and feeds on evil thoughts. Duran Duran got their name from that movie too. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Okay, we’re out of time. Thanks for the chat.
Thank you. Have fun.
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MATMOS AUSTRALIAN TOUR
SYDNEY FESTIVAL: Wednesday January 15
Matmos @ City Recital Hall, Angel Place.
SYDNEY FESTIVAL: Thursday, January 16
The Soft Pink Truth DJ set @ Paradiso Lates, Paradiso Terrace Bar.
Free entry, starts 11.30pm.
HOBART: Saturday, January 18
MONA FOMA.
Tickets & info from www.mofo.net.au.
MELBOURNE: Sunday, January 19
Howler w/- special guests to be announced.
Tickets on sale now from https://howler.ticketscout.com.au/gigs/1913/Matmos
