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MATMOS
Formed in San Francisco and now based in Baltimore, electronic duo Matmos – aka Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt – have become known for their high-concept albums that see them building sonic experiments around a central theme. Their latest, the excellent Plastic Anniversary, sees the pair creating rich soundscapes purely from recordings of plastic material. We caught up with Drew Daniel to find out more...
When did you start making music?
“When I was 16 I was heavily into William S Burroughs, and specifically the ‘cut-up’ novels like TheSoft Machine and TheTicketThat
Exploded. Following his instructions about making field recordings, I started to collect cheap tape recorders and do primitive experiments in tape collage using the pause button.”
Tell us about your studio/setup
“We’ve always made our records at home, and now in the basement of our house. Basements flood in Baltimore so we wired all the electricity to the ceiling. After 26 years of making music we have a huge hoard of instruments, both acoustic (including a 19th century psalteries and a hurdy gurdy) and electronic (our friend Paul Brown keeps his enormous modular synth in our studio, we have an ARP 2600, multiple SH101s, some cool boutique synth instruments like the Double Knot and the KNAS Moisturizer). It all goes through a 32-channel Midas Venice F-32 mixing desk.”
What DAW do you use, and why?
“Martin and I started out making music to an eight-track reel to reel, but we were using a computer from the start too, making cut-ups in SoundEdit that were in mono and with only 8-bit sound, but the flexibility of onscreen editing was really intoxicating to us in the early days. Back in the mid-’90s we used Performer and transitioned with it as it became Digital Performer, and stopped using the reel-to-reel and started mixing through an outboard mixer back into digital. We’ve always used that software with a MOTU audio interface as our DAW. It just feels like second-nature. It’s really just for the assemblage and editing and the arrangement of a song. The processing and manipulation of raw recordings tends to get handled on laptops before we track.”
What gear is indispensable for you?
“We really love the Barcus Berry Planar Wave transducer. People often misunderstand what you can and cannot do with a contact mic and they have real limitations, but this one has given us some great results. It was really instrumental in playing the broken shards of vinyl on the song
BreakingBread from our new album. That is a song composed entirely out of the sound of amplified broken pieces of LPs and 7” records, and we got a really strong, articulate noise by pressing vinyl fragments tightly between a Barcus Berry pickup and a brick. Pluck the vinyl shard sticking out with your finger and great sounds will emerge.”
What was your latest purchase?
“We make our music by sampling objects: cacti, oatmeal, latex, chocolate pudding, you name it. So for us, the point is not to acquire new gear but to acquire new instruments for each album, essentially starting all over with brand new instruments every time we make an album. The things we make music out of aren’t musical instruments until we kidnap them and force them to serve our musical ends.”
What are you currently working on?
“I’m working simultaneously on two Soft Pink Truth projects, one very political and angry and one dreamy and soft. Mostly, we’re figuring out how to play PlasticAnniversary live: still deciding how best to bring a breast implant and a riot shield into focus onstage for an audience. Fingers crossed that we can sort that out!”