Matmos Makes Quite a Pair

Matmos's latest album, Supreme Balloon, abandoned sampling altogether in favor of focusing on synthesis. Every sound on the album, without exception, was created by a synthesizer of some sort. The concept here was a playful, "cosmic pop" record, a way for the two to let their hair down, luxuriate in the sounds themselves and see what happened.

"That made it fun to do, because it was such a challenge," Daniel muses. "What do you do with something that's such a blank slate? And often the experience of making the songs was sort of like when you see a face in the clouds or a face in the fire. You know, when you're looking at something quite abstract, but then it becomes very organic the more you look at it — or, in our case, the more you listen to it. All sorts of things would start to emerge pretty quickly. It's a bit like a Rorschach blot, you know?"

With such a cerebral approach to music, it might seem like Matmos wouldn't be well suited to live performance, but Daniel and Schmidt have built a reputation as engaging performers who utilize custom videos, improvisational elements and a sense of the absurd to engage their audiences — sometimes with mixed results.

"People respond to our music in a lot of different ways," Daniel points out. "We've had people really love us; we've had people heckle us and hate what we're doing completely. Frequently, they tend to sort of project a narrative onto what we're doing. It's often described to us back as something cinematic. Unlike most electronic music, we tend to work with sound sources that are very loaded and that we make clear to the audience what they are. So if you make recordings of surgery, you're tapping into people's anxieties and fears, but also their curiosity about the surgery clinic as a space. I wouldn't say cerebral in a disconnected, dry way. We're often quite silly and often quite gross, so, yeah, it's not intended to be clinical — even when it's surgical."

Schmidt promises something special for Colorado audiences. "We try to make a show out of it," he says. "I've made a lot of videos, and we'll be doing pieces from The West, which is a CD of ours that's been out of print for eight years. We're going to add a bunch of stuff for the Colorado show, because we've never played there before."

Outside of Matmos, both Schmidt and Daniel stay busy with a dizzying array of side projects, collaborations and other activities, both musical and otherwise. Most notably, Daniel recently began teaching English literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a job that necessitated the group's relocating from San Francisco to Baltimore — and resulted in an uncomfortable moment for Daniel.

"Inevitably, students now, they're all good researchers," he points out. "They sign up for your class because they want to take your class, but then they Google you and find all sorts of incriminating information. In our case, there's a lot of really ridiculous pictures of us doing various absurd things on stage while playing a Matmos show, and it got into the student newspaper at Hopkins. There was an article where the headline was 'Professor Daniel Reveals his Secret, Other Life.' I was kind of mortified."