I just found this on an old hard drive–an article I wrote about Matmos, five years ago, for Res magazine. I haven’t looked at this piece since 2006; it made me chuckle when I read it. I wish I still had the photos that went with the story in the magazine, but for now this’ll do. Hope you like it.
MATMOS
by Geeta Dayal
[Originally published in Res, May 2006]
“We knew we wanted to collaborate with snails, but snails aren’t the loudest thing ever,” explains Drew Daniel, half of the San Francisco band Matmos. “Unless you wanted to step on them, and that’s not cool!”
Snails aren’t a particularly out-there choice of sonic inspiration for Daniel and his partner Martin Schmidt, who have been making music since 1997 under the Matmos moniker. Their 2001 opus A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, for instance, sampled the gruesome whooshing sounds of liposuction surgery, hearing aids, rat cages, human skulls, and crayfish nerve tissue.
Matmos’ fifth full-length album, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, is a collection of loving sonic portraits of various figures admired by the duo—a motley assortment of people, including the legendary disco DJ Larry Levan, the wily philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who inspired the title of the record), the Germs singer Darby Crash, and the mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith, who just so happened to be an avid collector of snails. The album is accompanied by a lavish booklet of portraits especially commissioned for the record, by various luminaries including the comic book artist Daniel Clowes.
“In each case, it was about the individual–trying to find some object for sound source ideas that seemed to really say something about that person, but also yielded something musically compelling,” explains Daniel. “I know that on paper, what we’re trying to do can sound like we’re trying to be perverse, we’re trying to get the shock reaction. . . in each case, there’s a reason why the sound resonated with the subject of the song.” [click to continue…]