Matmos/Photo: Obie Feldi
The new record from Matmos has led me to wonder, were those guys from Quiet Riot right? Will “metal health” drive you mad? Their recommendation, of course, was to “bang your head,” but Matmos has chosen to bang that metal instead. Not heavy metal, but whatever actual metal happened to be lying around at the time. I suppose that would be one way to extricate yourself from the musical straitjacket of modern music.
Those who were disappointed by the premise implied by the title of Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” should find a whole lot to love on Matmos’ new album, “Metallic Life Review,” just out via Thrill Jockey. Composed entirely from metal objects, there’s a surprising amount of human touch pulsing through these creative improvisations, somehow generating an organic vibe.
Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt formed Matmos in San Francisco in 1997, but the duo’s been based in Baltimore since Daniel started teaching at Johns Hopkins in 2007. While making music entirely via metal objects would seem a bizarre move for a band like… Quiet Riot, for example, it’s absolutely “of a piece” for these two: Matmos has taken electronic music past what most would have considered the final frontier, with samples of bizarre sounds like the amplified nerve tissue of crayfish, turning pages of the Bible, water hitting copper plates, cameras and VCRs, contact microphones on human hair, rat cages, tanks of helium, a cow uterus, human skulls, snails, cigarette burns, cards shuffling, whoopee cushions, balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones, trains, insects, life-support systems, inflatable blankets, rock salt, solid-gold coins, a PVC police riot shield and surgeries involving liposuction, chin implants, eyes and silicone breast implants.
Not to mention their own Whirlpool washing machine, which comprised 2016’s “Ultimate Care II,” pressed in three vinyl editions: a “regular” edition on virgin vinyl, “clean laundry” on blue with white swirl vinyl and a “very dirty laundry” limited version on brown with white swirl vinyl.
Matmos have also collaborated with a wide array of artists across disciplines. A select list of musical collaborators includes Björk—who recited some Wittgenstein for them on a 2006 album, and whose “Vespertine” record they programmed beats for and toured behind—plus The Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley, Marshall Allan (Sun Ra Arkestra), So Percussion, Anohni, Yo La Tengo, The Rachel’s, Oneohtrix Point Never, Jefferson Friedman, Zeena Parkins, J.G. Thirlwell, Jeff Carey, Wobbly, David Tibet and Mouse On Mars.
The metal sounds on “Metallic Life Review” —with a title inspired by the “my life flashed before my eyes” psychological phenomena from survivors of near-death experiences—were captured over the entire length of the existence of Matmos as a band.
I ask Drew Daniel, one half of the Matmos partnership, why this theme, and why now? “We tend to take turns on albums, and it was my turn,” he responds. “I think after doing a few albums in sequence that were backwards looking in very different ways (“Regards/Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer” and “Return to Archive”), I wondered if we could keep the retrospective attitude but re-apply [it] to material sounds and objects rather than pre-existing musical/sonic archives.
“Effectively, it let us continue a certain kind of momentum,” he continues, “while also changing the sound palette” and their way of working. “Those last two albums were really fun to make,” he continues, “but we wanted to return to things we could hold in our hand and manipulate instead of just approaching a folder full of pre-existing material.” Plus, he concludes, “It’s good to get your hands dirty/rusty?”
Daniel also thinks that this record may have completed a kind of trilogy with the “Plastic Anniversary” and “Ultimate Care II” albums, each for Thrill Jockey with Ted Mineo cover art. “This seems to me to belong to that as a series. Metal is so omnipresent, so open-ended in terms of what it suggests: does it mean ‘hard?’ does it mean ‘bright/sharp?’” The seven compositions on the new record entirely sourced their sounds from metallic objects: bronze, copper, steel, aluminum and various alloys, from collected field recordings of metal objects from around the world. Daniel believes that this concept “had the right mix of constraint and freedom to let us create.”
Daniel begins delineating the individual tracks by noting that the fitting opener, “Norway Doorway,” is “a song based around a very old recording” that they have been “hoping to use forever,” and “this album became the opportunity to finally use that.” The sound is a doorway recorded on tour in Norway, naturally. Clanging bells and a creak that sounds like the final cry of a dying trumpeter swan only set the stage for the rhythmic tapestry that follows. Like the next composition in sequence, “The Rust Belt,” it features guest percussion from Swans drummer Thor Harris, whose (ten-drummer!) project Water Damage just released “Instruments” last month.
When “The Rust Belt” was released, Daniel said, “I had always loved Thor Harris’ drumming—I saw him in Swans at Basilica Soundsystem, and I have been jamming the Water Damage records, which are incredible. So it was really sweet and unexpected when he wrote out of the blue to say that he liked Matmos” and wondered if they might collaborate in the future.
Daniel said that they sent Harris “Norway Doorway” and “asked him to respond to it in any way so long as he was playing metal objects.” They were impressed with the material he returned, and given that the opener and the next track were at the same tempo, “we split what he sent in half and used some of it in the first song and some in the second song. In a way, his presence joins together the more militant, industrial sounding songs that launch side one.”
About “The Rust Belt,” Daniel elaborated:
This song evolved over a year of editing in which we kept adding and taking away and playing solos on top and chopping and re-mixing. The intro is entirely manipulations of aluminum cans and then it gradually expands to include more and more sounds, including us playing some ‘drum solos’ on all the pots and pans from our own kitchen. The central riff is made out of a steel bar that M.C. Schmidt played with his fist and fingers. The ending sounds are manipulations of a steel railing from an underpass in Switzerland. The kind of foghorn-like tone is made with a steel slide-whistle that we are heavily processing.
The first single, “Changing States,” follows next with a very different vibe, and features the late Susan Alcorn’s pedal steel. Daniel describes the composition process and how the fellow transplanted Baltimorean Alcorn got involved:
I sampled a tuning fork and chopped it up into tones, and then a chord, and then from there, a pretty elaborate chord sequence, a kind of long list of chord changes that I shaped until they seemed to really grab my ear. This is how normal people make normal music all the time, but for Matmos it is quite unusual—we rarely have chord changes.
The result was something that they liked, and wanted to combine with other instruments. “But it turned out that the tuning fork was not actually in a standard pitch,” he went on, “and so all the chords were a bit sour and a bit weird. Which meant that if anyone wanted to play along, they would have to do it with instruments that can slide and glide: like a trombone or a pedal steel.”
Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt realized they were going to have “to step up and get brave and ask Susan Alcorn, because she’s the deepest pedal steel player we can think of, and of course we’d always admired her music, and her playing.” Alcorn was receptive. Daniel sent her two songs in progress (“Changing States” and “Steel Tongues”), and she spent “a staggering amount of time” generating a detailed chord map of how to play along to “Changing States” and how to arpeggiate along with those changes.
We didn’t really understand how labor-intensive it would be until we went to her house and looked at her charts. I was embarrassed, but the results were so beautiful, so we spent a great day at her house just recording her playing multiple takes and looking at her record collection and meeting her cats. She was a wonderful musician, just a truly focused artist with a warm presence.
Matmos saw her perform on a bill with David Grubbs a week before she died. They were all hanging out together, and Alcorn “seemed to us to be in great shape, and she played beautifully. She also spoke powerfully about the Trump administration and the need for queer and trans people to feel security together in our communities as we stand up to this kind of fascism, and I had never heard her be so forthright before. It was inspiring. We mixed ‘Changing States’ that week, and the morning after we mixed the song we woke up to the news of her death.” She was seventy-one. Matmos dedicated the composition to her memory.
Daniel says he and Schmidt were “terribly sad about such a sudden, arbitrary loss,” calling it “gutting,” citing a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “the end of a melody is not its goal.” Daniel elaborates:
Susan’s life is not about the fact of her death. I remember a vital, funny, wildly talented person. She was a terrific improviser, quite fearless. We will miss her. We’re very glad that she blessed us with her playing on two songs. If you’re reading this and want advice: don’t be shy about approaching people because people aren’t around forever and if you want something, you should do what you can to make it happen while you can.
“Changing States” is followed by another track featuring Alcorn, “Steel Tongues,” which Daniel has described as having a “buried allegory about capitalism inside it: the rhythm is partially made out of clinking a handful of American quarters, and some of the beat is made by sampling one of those ‘executive desk toys’ called a ‘Newton’s cradle’ that you used to see on the desks of people in the 1980s, the one with the swinging metal balls.” He said the song ends with a “distorted noise made by the gates of a cemetery” to underscore “a buried (not to pun) mortality theme on this album, and this song has a kind of easy, gentle beat made out of money that leads the listener straight to the grave.” He noted “a dark humor behind the assemblage that might not be apparent to a casual listener, but is a kind of inner joke for us, or an Easter egg.”
About the following cut, “The Chrome Reflects Our Image,” Daniel says he wrote a melody for sampled glockenspiel, an additional layer was added to that, and then Schmidt “started to hear in his head” an “additional layer—he wanted a very twangy guitar sound.” He believes his partner had a “Duane Eddy twang” in mind, and he “mentioned the work of Angelo Badalamenti for David Lynch’s films as a reference point.” They asked their friend Jason Willett, bassist for Half Japanese, to replicate what Schmidt was hearing, and “Jason really came through, we think. We got that twang!”
We have always admired Lynch as an artist, his persistence, his weird way of loving and hating America, of showing it as a place of darkness and beauty. We were pretty far along with working on the song when David Lynch died. It made immediate, intuitive sense to us to dedicate the song to him. The title is a phrase spoken in a deleted scene from “Fire Walk With Me” that seemed to capture the question of reflection and memory as a kind of distortion. The chrome reflects our image, but if the chrome has a curve, then it might be bending our image, too.
Before we review side two of “Metallic Life Review” with Drew Daniel, it’s intriguing to get his take on where Matmos fit in with perhaps their most obvious antecedent, Einstürzende Neubauten, the German experimental music ensemble from the early 1980s, whose name literally translates to “collapsing new buildings.” Daniel says, they “mattered enormously to me in high school. Before I had heard John Cage or Merzbow or the broader spectrum from academic avant-garde to the ‘noise music’ underground. I was really inspired by [1985’s] ‘Halber Mensch’ and ‘Strategies Against Architecture’ [series of compilations that began in 1984] and ‘Kollaps’ [their 1981 debut]. It probably helped that they looked so incredibly cool to me.”
Both Daniel and Schmidt have seen them live several times, naturally, and he concurs that they are “of course the ultimate ‘banging on metal’ band, so the link is very direct, and the standard they set within that is very high. If you look deeper or farther back though, of course people have been playing everyday metal objects as percussion in so many folk traditions since forever: the metal washboard in zydeco and Cajun music, for example, it’s the same idea. Rhythms of everyday labor make people notice that metal is musical and that everyday actions in life are also rich sonic resources. Neubauten took that and made it highly individual and specific to Berlin and about a place and its history. Test Dept took that aesthetic and re-applied it to labor unrest in a deindustrializing Britain. We live in Baltimore, another deindustrialized city.”
While Daniel also recognizes a kinship with minimalism, that’s an overly reductionist perspective; there’s certainly a lot more going on within the sounds of Matmos. Daniel says that Matmos “has a funny kind of one shoe on, one shoe off relationship” to minimalism. “In some senses, we are conceptually minimalist: making an entire record out of one sound source, or a whole song out of one object, or a whole album out of one object, can sound, conceptually ‘minimalist.’” However, as Daniel continues, “the sound of our music is often cluttered and baroque and pretty busy, so we’re not minimalists in the formal sense.” He makes it clear that any particular movements are not what attracts him. “I am inspired by any crew that believes in what they are doing and shows fidelity to their aesthetic idea,” he says, “and in that looser sense I am moved when I see the example of other creative people who never stopped.”
Side two is entirely composed of the twenty-minute-plus title piece, which Drew Daniel refers to as a narrative that “flows in and out of more structured sections.” While they are quite pleased that this successfully captures the Matmos live sound, he cautions that the question as to “what is improvisation is kind of tricky.”
To deconstruct the process of performing and recording side two is a tad complicated, but to break it down into steps:
- Two years ago Matmos booked a day at Tempo House studio in Baltimore run by their friend Craig. They brought an abundance of metal objects, and “we just improvised with them,” sometimes as a duo, some that Schmidt improvised solo, and a bit of Daniel doing what he calls “solo sound-making.”
- “Then we chopped those up into patterns and grooves that became quasi-songs,” Daniel recounts, “and we figured out a narrative flow from the more structured parts to the more open parts.”
- Then Matmos performed that piece on tour “as a flow that ranged from twenty minutes to forty minutes.”
- Then they returned to Tempo House and recorded a “live in the studio” performance, which Daniel describes as “us playing the song-like parts, but also improvising—and in places improvising digitally with recordings of improvisations. So the whole thing is strangely recursive.”
- There is also a layer within the first six minutes of “Metallic Life Review” that cross-fades between Matmos live in the studio in Baltimore and a performance live on stage in Paris. “So the same patterns keep getting reworked and overlaid, Daniel says.
- He concludes by saying that he is “sorry for the long answer, but this was a weird thing to do!”
Somewhat “steel tongue in cheek,” I can’t help but wonder if Matmos was more tempted to use their metal sounds to record a cover of Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” or “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley”? Daniel says that having recorded three cover albums as The Soft Pink Truth, a solo project allegedly started on a dare that he couldn’t make a house record: “I have mostly gotten the urge out of my system, for now. They’re a bit like Doritos—you think you will do just one, and then you keep wanting more until the bag is empty. I think in the wake of our covers of The Buzzcocks ‘E.S.P.’ and our attempted homage to Bow Wow Wow/The Strangeloves ‘I Want Candy,'” they’re no longer in a “covers mode.”
Although he doesn’t see that as their next move, Daniel does make it clear that he’s still proud of their versions of songs by Coil, David Bowie, Bo Diddley and Gladys Knight & the Pips. “Most ambitiously,” he reminds me, “we have covered three acts from Robert Ashley’s opera ‘Perfect Lives.’” Given that Matmos drew the inspiration for their name from the 1968 Jane Fonda spacewreck of a movie, “Barbarella,” just as Duran Duran did, would a cover of “The Reflex” or “Hungry Like The Wolf” be too much to hope for? Probably.
“Weird things to do,” to paraphrase Daniel, seems to be a specialty of Matmos, even if through a tubular bells-like pretzel logic, this record completes some sort of spinning cycle, from their plastic letters to their washing machine and now their metal music. It would be interesting to study if listening to it could impact the efficacy of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Giving this sonic platter multiple rotations is a guaranteed brain stimulant of some kind; it is fantastic headphone music, and even stimulating when relegated to the dreaded background. Cranking it at full blast might be best if you live alone—otherwise, it’s easy to imagine everyone else on your floor calling the super about your building’s plumbing falling apart.
As an album title, “Metallic Life Review” does nicely encapsulate the sounds within, from creaking open the “Norway Doorway” to embracing “Changing States,” reflecting in the clattering chrome or finding the groove within what appears to be the complete chaos of the title track. It’s both an echo of their past and a flash-forward to a future. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt as Matmos continue to innovate along the continuum of what constitutes post. The promise of post-music now seems more than simply the illusion of wind that sets off the windchimes, or a hard rain on a tin roof that surrounds the madcap madman within, who by now can hear nothing but deafening applause.
Matmos play Constellation, 3111 North Western, on Sunday, June 29. Doors at 8pm; show at 8:30pm. Tickets are $25, available at constellation-chicago.com.
