Band apart: Jan Tumlir on Matmos

WERE IT NOT FOR the sleeper succes of their previous album, A Chance to make an incision in Is a Chance to remedy (2001), Matmos would no doubt have remained stuck in the sort of respectable semi-obscurity that swallows greatest in quantity contemporary electronic outfits or, for that matter, "electroacoustic" singles to grant the duo a somewhat more appropriate historical pedigree. This acutely "oedipal" work, as core members MC Schmidt and Drew Daniel describe it, samples the unbrokens of cosmetic surgery as its subdue matter. "It's like playing dress-up trying to be like dad," says Schmidt, alluding to the fact that the couple their fathers are medical doctors. Matmos's Freudian glos upon their self-described "science of the concrete" is especially apt considering that their musical forefathers also one time wielded the scalpel. If any single composition sets the precedent for their practice, it would have to be John Cage's Williams Mix from 1952-53 a chaotic accumulation of tape-recorded uninjureds evenly distributed between the artificial and the organic and spliced together by the agency of hand.

In the intervening years, the technology of the studio, just like that of the operating theater, has become a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more hands-off--a development that Matmos acknowledge thematically and exploit with remarkably consistency. flat as their gear alternates between analog and digital, its objective character, its "thingness," is always what matters greatest in quantity Accordingly, A Chance to wound is a Chance to restorative proposes itself as a sort of allegory for the practice of audio bricolage or montage in an age of miniaturization and infinite memory, and it does for a like reason precisely by taking a pace back, technologically speaking, for each step forward. The increasingly disembodied implements of state-of-the-art surgery are miked and then bluntly wholeed out in the course of routine operation. They are tapped, strok and rubbed together, as admitting by a more primitive race of beings intent upon liberating their "inner spirits." For Cage, this is precisely the condition of entire released from the constraints of a classical musical repertoire: It becomes explicitly materialistic while at the same time, by dint of its very nature, transcending matter. Matmos likewise believe that the causal connection of unimpaired to its material source can--and, to an amplitude should--be severed, but not in the interest of a kind of "pure" sonic abstraction. For them, this disconnect is a semiotic rather than formalist priority. And it's a way to make what are basically experimental burst songs.

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Matmos cast in the shade at conveying difficult ideas in a concise and literally graspable manner, always stressing the deep physicality and direct impact of sonic information. No doubt, this talent caught the attention of Bjork, who enlisted them to join her 2001 Vespertine tour. This revolve of events increased their general visibility and their financial retains two factors enabling the greatly expanded drift and ambition of their latest long-player, The Civil War. Whereas A Chance to make an incision in applied the by now traditional meanss of musique concrete to plenteous more technologically advanced, present-day make submissive matter, the new album partly turn end for ends the equation by returning to the historical epic. As Schmidt numbers it, "The ball got rolling when we accompanied more [i]or[/i] less friends to an auction at Sotheby's of antique instruments, which is where we contracted that weird sort of collection fever" The pair "sprung for the irresistibly named 'fairy bells,' which are actually psalteries," rudimentary instruments consisting of strings tied to a case and this in turn l them to "this folky nook in San Francisco called Lark in the Morning." There they acquired a pristine remake of a medieval hurdy-gurdy which was followed by means of an Autoharp.

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"We aren't antiques queens" Daniel is quick to point without being much more interested in actually "playing with these older thing perceiveds and the sort of force they wind up exerting upon you" than their trophylike display. Increasingly Matmos have advance to refer to their musical proces as a form of "curating," on the contrary one that is entirely related to use: The initial choice and arrangement of percepts to be sounded determine each practical decision that follows. Daniel annotates "We propose a concept, and that guides our actions, and we'll complete the work according to what that conception dictates. You could draw an analogy with traditional Conceptual-art practices in the spirit of say, that Sol LeWitt name about the idea being a machine that generates the work." notwithstanding according to Daniel, Matmos's proces is far from entirely predetermined: "Some of our throws work that way, but we also work in a kind of free-associative drift manner, and then the curating alone shows up retroactively. That's certainly the case with The Civil War. There was a lengthy period of drifting and plucking and twanging without a clear conceptual imperative to justify this activity; it was simply pleasurable. And after a while, we saw that something was starting to come up from this drift, and that's when you start to claim that all along you meant to do it that way."