biography

Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, aided and abetted by many others. In their recordings and live performances over the last nine years, Matmos have used the sounds of: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, a bowed five string banjo, slowed down whistles and kisses, water hitting copper plates, the runout groove of a vinyl record, a $5.00 electric guitar, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, rat cages, tanks of helium, violas, human skulls, cellos, peck horns, tubas, cards shuffling, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, electrical interference generated by laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions and balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones on a dinner plate, Polish trains, insects, ukelele, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room, dogs barking, people reading aloud, life support systems and inflatable blankets, records chosen by the roll of dice, an acupuncture point detector conducting electrical current through human skin, rock salt crunching underfoot, solid gold coins spinning on bars of solid silver, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal.

Epitonic bio (from 2003)

This pair of electronic collage artists stands out as innovators in a field noted for innovation.Matmos's Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have intriguing backgrounds which help explain their brainy, decentered approach to electronica. Daniel is a UC Berkeley graduate student in Renaissance Literature and a longtime radio and club DJ who has collaborated on both film scores and hip hop projects with Louisville musicians Jason Noble (Rachel's) and Jeff Mueller (June of 44). Schmidt manages the conceptual art department of the San Francisco Art Institute and has pursued a number of experimental and/or electronic projects in the past.

In their spare time Daniel and Schmidt work to change our perceptions of what music means and where it comes from, creating whimsical and peculiar electronic sound assemblages that often feel like musical versions of Alexander Calder's playful mobiles. Most striking about Matmos, perhaps, are their unique choices for sound sources; over their career, the adventuresome duo has employed the sound of amplified crayfish nerve tissue, human hair, plastic surgery, frozen steam thawing in the sun, latex clothing, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, and a whole heckuva lot more. Yeah, they're brainiacs. Or maniacs? The fact is, while Matmos has been enthusiastically embraced by the left field electronic music community, their work displays a degree of originality and willingness to experiment rarely found in any music today, aligning Matmos with the great musical academicians of the last century as much as with any of their peers.

The duo conducted some of their boldest sound experiments on their first two albums, Matmos (1997) and Quasi-Objects (1998), both released on their own Vague Terrain label, but these recordings got limited attention outside the Bay Area. Their fascinating 1999 project The West generated significant critical attention, however. Not imitating but transforming rock, country, and folk stylistic elements, The West roams the territory of later John Fahey and Gastr del Sol, but arrives there from a very different starting point: instead of making organic music that uses electronic textures, The West is electronic music that feels organic (organica, perhaps?), both in its sound sources and in its construction. Instead of the bizarre sound sources of the previous two albums, The West features musique concrete elements with a more everyday quality: a phone ringing, a car starting, pages turning, water dripping. The West also draws from a remarkably diverse group of friends, including members of Tortoise, Slint, Papa M, Lesser, Acetone, Palace, Cars Get Crushed, Amber Asylum, The Radar Bros., Neurosis, Cul de Sac, and The For Carnation. "Sun on 5 at 152" is an ode to a favorite strip of freeway, flickering between gentle repetitions of Mark Lightcap's (Acetone) acoustic guitar and discrete, unnerving digital edits, before bursting into full drums/banjo/violin/cello orchestration and peaking with thirty seconds of drum and bass.

In the spring of 2001, Bjork invited Matmos into the studio to create her album Vespertine and later asked the duo to join her (along with Lesser) for her world tour. Around the same time, Matmos released their fourth and possibly most macabre album, A Chance To Cut Is a Chance To Cure. Leaving behind the bucolic bricollage of The West, A Chance To Cut employs sounds from the operating room, constructing snippety rhythms from the sound of slicing scalpels, breaking bones, the buzz of laser eye surgery, the hum of muscle tissue being cauterized during rhinoplasty, and lots more. Creepy though these sound sources may be, the music is anything but, tending towards upbeat, accessible techno-pop, with plenty of Matmos's trademark whimsy. "Lipostudio...And So On," the album's opener, starts as a snickety glitchfest that makes prominent use of the squelch and squish of sucking fat during liposuction surgery, before shifting midway through into a more ambient piece.

With their 2003 album The Civil War, the dynamic duo moved from sly commentary on the body to sly commentary on the body politic. Returning to the landscape of their near classic The West, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt make creative use of banjos and fiddles and all sorts of stringed things, not to mention flute, bagpipes, military percussion -- in short the music you'd associate with the Civil War. The "concept" that shapes The Civil War is apparently both the American Civil War and the British Civil War of the 17th Century and at times the album feels like an authentic historical document as Matmos's omnimpresent laptops are rendered transparent. Both abstract and distinctly rooted in time and place, The Civil War represents one more entry into the increasingly significant "future folk" canon, raising unanswered questions about the relationship between music and heritage for the century to come.

http://www.epitonic.com/artists/matmos.html

Better Propaganda bio

There's a lot of lip service paid these days to various electronic-based music being "experimental"- but Matmos' musical practice genuinely deserves this much abused term. Using samplers, analogue keyboards, field recordings and guitars, Matmos make atmospheric, idiosyncratic electronica. In addition to incorporating chance operations into their sequencing enviroment, many songs are based upon a working methodology of "conceptual restriction"- songs are built entirely out of samples from a single sound source: field recordings, contact microphones on hair, even the sound of an amplified synapse from crayfish nerve tissue. Sometimes these samples and recordings are built up into elaborate rhythmic sequences verging on (but tweaking) the by-now familiar subgenres of trip hop, drum and bass and electro; sometimes these sound sources are kept beat-free, and sculpted into frighteningly noisy atmospheres, or shot through with eerie silent pauses and gaps.

Based in San Francisco, Matmos is Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt. The band members biographies reflect their brainy, decentered approach to electronica- daniel is currently getting his PhD; Schmidt helps manage the conceptual art department of the San Francisco Art Institute. Daniel is a veteran of the indie rock scene in Louisville, Kentucky, and has collaborated on film soundtracks and, oddly enough, hip hop projects with Jeff Mueller (of June of '44) and Jason Noble (Rachel's). In addition to radio DJing, drew has DJ'd in jungle and trip hop clubs in England and San Francisco and has been making experimental electronic music since high school. M.C. Schmidt has been making experimental electronic music for many years, as the leader of avant-garde drone outfit X/I and industrial occultists Iaocore, in which he did time with current members of Amber Asylum and Tipsy.

http://betterpropaganda.com/artist_page.aspx?id=15