Five Records: Matmos

Welcome once again to Five Records, the regular FACT feature wherein an artist we admire talks to us about five records of importance to them – be they obscurities from the depths of their collection, childhood favourites, enduring loves or platters that have influenced their own musical practice.

This month we hear from Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, the two erudite gentlemen you know best as Matmos. Infamous for their inspired and, shall we say, “involved” approach to sampling, showcased in exhilarating live performances and classic recorded works like A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure and Rat Relocation Program, Matmos subverted expectation with their most recent album, 2008′s Supreme Balloon, moving away from concrète strategies in order to work entirely with vintage synthesizers.

This week the Baltimore-based duo are in London to lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy, and they’ll be performing for the Academy at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday (12 January) alongside Carl Craig, Moritz von Oswald and others. For more information and tickets, click here.

01: JOHN HASSELL / BRIAN ENO
FOURTH WORLD VOL.1 – POSSIBLE MUSICS
(EDITIONS EG LP, 1980)

FACT: Why this particular record?

M. C. Schmidt: “It’s partially a personal experience that made this record especially important to me…In 1981 or so, in high school, I had gotten into a furious fight with all my friends but one. We decided to deal with our ostracization by taking some LSD.

“We waited and the drug didn’t take effect. Evening fell, we went to the record store and browsed and I picked up a copy of Fourth World and was looking at the cover. Suddenly I realized I had been looking at the cover for half an hour or more.The chemicals had worked. It was to be the trip of a lifetime.

“We decided to deal with our ostracization by taking some LSD…”

“I knew who Brian Eno was from being played – and loving – Before and After Science and Here Come The Warm Jets, but this looked more like science than a rock record! Of course, I bought it and took it home, but it’s impact on me in the record store was to somehow prevent me from actually playing it…So we listened to [Eno's 1977 LP] Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy instead, and were suitably dissolved, projected, mocked and informed.

“It was to be weeks before I actually listened to Fourth World, but I did so with a new mind, with a deeply ingrained chemical respect for the pseudo-science that Eno frequently brought to the way his music during that period was presented.”

Hassell once remaked that he regretted having Eno’s name on the sleeve. To what degree do you feel Eno’s fingerprint is there in the music?

MCS: “By now, of course, I’ve realized that really Fourth World was a Jon Hassell record and Eno’s name was a come-on – Hassell records without Eno were just as shifty, funky and otherworldly as that one. Not to denigrate at all Mr Eno’s super-genius. I certainly think that the teaming brought many people to Hassell’s work who would not have otherwise had the treat.

“The other great Hassell records of that time include Aka Darbari Java and Fourth World Vol.2, but he continues to turn out beautiful, listenable sandscape funk to this day.”

02: KAOTIC CHEMISTRY
LSD EP
(MOVING SHADOW 12″, 1992)

FACT: When did you encounter hardcore and early jungle?

Drew Daniel: “I was into Public Enemy in high school and then Meat Beat Manifesto as a freshman in college and the heavily chopped breakbeat techno that eventually turned into jungle just seemed to make sense as the next evolutionary step. In college I did a junior year abroad at Oxford and went to Trade and and, later, harder parties like VFM, Technical Support and Dead by Dawn (an awesome squatter scene party).”

Did your interest in jungle persist throughout the 90s, as the sounds grew harder and techier?

DD: “I didn’t mind that drum and bass got harder and darker and more macho. And it didn’t bother me that it lost ‘funkiness’ but it suffered from a standard evolutionary narrative – overpopulation and extinction of some strains, mutation of others.

“Lately we’ve been having fun playing mutated versions of ‘This Is’, an old Matmos quasi-drum and bass tune from our first album (Matmos, 1997) – but at that late a date it was already a pretty tangential take on the genre. To me, playing a straight-up drum and bass track in 2010 is hilariously dated in a way that’s kind of refreshing. It’s a total slap in the face to trendiness.”

“I have sympathy for the dancefloor. I don’t have contempt for it, or presume that I’m here to educate people.”

Though so obviously a product of the early 90s, there’s a rawness, a primitiveness, to these tracks that makes them oddly timeless…

DD: “I get wistful about how labour-intensive it was to make a track like this – the ridiculously tricky vocal cut-ups required a lot of discipline and precision and tender loving care. In a sense the
streamlining of a package like Ableton has ‘de-skilled’ this approach and taken away its allure for younger producers and listeners, I’m guessing. The genetic recombination of the sampled phrase ‘Dance, you know the time, it’s time to get ill / get on the jam while the jam’s going uphill’ into all of those million scrambled re-shufflings is so intense the first time you hear it.”

You can hear this record’s influence on [Daniel's solo project] The Soft Pink Truth, right? How would you describe SPT’s “relationship” to dance music in general?

DD: Kaotic Chemistry is totally an influence on my approach in The Soft Pink Truth. SPT is me working out my issues about queerness in a – hopefully – funky way. As a former go-go dancer in gay bars, I have sympathy for the dancefloor. I don’t have contempt for it, or presume that I’m here to educate people. I do that when I’m being a professor [Daniel teaches English at Johns Hopkins university].

“It’s been awesome playing SPT shows in Baltimore [Matmos recently relocated there] because the kids go nuts and really want to dance and get sweaty and sloppy.”

Do you think breakbeats will ever again sound as vital and insurrectionary as they did back in ’91-’92?

“Never say never. I think the timing has to get looser and more oblique. Maybe what John Berndt is doing with ‘relabi’ music is the next step in funkiness.”

04: G*PARK
SEISMOGRAMM
(SCHIMPFLUCH LP, 1990)

FACT: Who or what is G*Park?

DD: “G*Park is a guy in Switzerland named Marc Zeier who records sounds in caves and natural settings, and also quiet, unobtrusive noises from everyday life that are often gentle, soft and mysterious. He folds them into these freeform tape collages that have a very esoteric, beguiling quality – it’s not like French academic musique-concrete at all, it has a kind of dreamy, rural quality sometimes and at others a slightly perverse feeling. You feel like the music is shrinking you down to the level of microscopic events.”

Where does Seismogramm fit in the G*Park oeuvre? What’s special about it?

DD: “This was the first record by G*Park that I ever heard. I got it as a ‘thank you’ for donating money to KALX, the college radio station in Berkeley. Knowing nothing about it, I put it on and heard these sound collages made out of the sounds of agitated wires, the sound of a tree trunk twisting in the wind, the sound of a cat (named Buxy!) mewling softly. It was completely original and sui generis, a very rare and esoteric record, and kind of perfect. The other G*Park albums (Geopod and Yack Park) are also great, but this is my first love and a long favourite of mine.

“You feel like the music is shrinking you down to the level of microscopic events.”

Much of G*Park’s work seems to have been released on cassette. There seems to be a resurgence of underground cassette culture lately. Is the cassette a medium you feel any attachment to, or nostalgia for? What about vinyl?

DD: “We have a tape deck in our car and I love cassettes. The noise scene is awash with great tapes…some I have been rocking lately: Sixes, Dog Lady, Emeralds, Needlegun, Sick Llama, DJ Dogdick.”

MCS: “The hardcore practical side of me is very frustrated when I encounter these fondnesses for old media, but I try to listen and understand why people have these feelings. It’s true that it’s hard to love a compact disc as an object…they just don’t seem to have any, um, soul, but technically, as a reproductive medium, they beat the crap out of cassettes and vinyl records, so the two parts of my personality are at war over this issue.”

05: ENOCH LIGHT AND THE LIGHT BRIGADE
SPACED OUT
(PROJECT3, 1973)

FACT: Is it possible to treat an album of synth-augmented lounge covers as anything other than kitsch? Is kitsch a bad thing?

DD: “Kitsch is a bad thing if your name is Clement Greenberg. I love the arrangements of Enoch Light as music, full stop – he’s just a brilliant collage artist who happens to have worked with human beings and notes instead of scissors and glue. We’re sufficiently historically distant from the time when there was some kind of viable distinction between ‘rock authenticity’ and ‘pop trash’ that the idea that Beatles and Bacharach covers somehow lose their vitality by being set for glockenspiel, Moog, strings, 30 piece choir etc seems absurd to me.”

“Radical joy might be a more appropriate response to the desperateness of our contemporary situation…”

There’s obviously a real joy about this record; it’s music that delights in itself. Is that a quality you feel is lacking in contemporary music, electronic or otherwise?

DD: “I think you have to listen for it- it’s there in music that formally has nothing in common with this record – for me, mostly in noise music. But it’s true that joy seems absent these days – I think there’s something reactionary about the way that underground aesthetics have become so credulous about ‘melancholy’ necessarily being the only critical stance that’s left, the only ‘deep’ emotion. Radical joy might be a more appropriate response to the desperateness of our contemporary situation, in its insistence upon something absolutely absent. But that’s hard to sustain when you’re looking at pictures of Haiti right now.”

What’s your attitude to reinterpretations and cover versions in general? Could you ever imagine really throwing yourself into a Matmos covers project of any kind?

DD: “Sure, there’s music we’ve covered live that I would love to record: songs and compositions by Bo Diddley, Robert Ashley, Terry Riley and Kraftwerk come to mind. We’ve released covers of songs by Coil and Gladys Knight & the Pips and John Philip Sousa and I’ve been bugging Martin to cover a song by Holger Hiller. It’s a slippery slope though – once you start, you can’t stop.”

Kiran Sande