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What was it like playing a cow uterus on stage? A strange question, unless you are talking to one of the two members of the electronic band, Matmos. At first when we sat down with Drew Daniel in his quaint, book-lined office, it seemed like we could have been speaking with any other Johns Hopkins University professor. Daniel, however, is not your typical professor, nor your typical musician. Matmos is the electronic music duo consisting of Drew Daniel and his partner, Martin Schmidt. The two met in San Francisco eighteen years ago and have been making music ever since. After a great deal of experimentation with different genres and sounds, Daniel and Schmidt fused techno with a noise-collage style of music to create what Daniel calls “instrumental pop music composed of extremely unusual sound sources.” Matmos is signed to music label, Matador, which, Daniel explained, is very exciting for the band (though they consider themselves the “weirdos” of the label compared to other more mainstream Matador artists such as Cat Power and Sonic Youth). Matmos is known for using objects, body parts, animals, plants and even surgical procedures to create the inimitable sounds in their music. The pair has not only made a name for themselves in Baltimore, where they have been living and working for four years (both Daniel and Schmidt also teach, at Johns Hopkins University and at MICA), but have also traveled the US and the world, and to this day continue to shock, please, and bewilder with their unique music.

RR: How do you come up with the ideas for the sounds in your music?

Drew Daniel: Martin and I take turns being in charge of records. When he’s in charge he’ll typically pick up an instrument and just start playing and gradually a genre will emerge. I like to think in terms of concepts that drive entire albums, so when I’m in charge of a record I tend to pick a big theme like medical technology or telepathy and then I’ll imagine situations or objects that express the idea. Then the ball starts rolling.

RR: What are some of your favorite sounds that you’ve used?

DD:  I think the sound of spit on people’s lips when they’re separating – when they’re about to speak (smacking lips) is one of the most beautiful sounds. It’s incredibly intimate; it’s a sound you only hear when you’re very close to someone.  If a sound can do that – pull you closer to the world or to another person – I think that’s very powerful.

RR: How do you develop your sounds?

DD: There’s definitely manipulation going on. I’ll make Martin play a cow uterus or play Agate Coasters or play marbles inside of a piano, and then we’ll take the sound and put it on the computer and listen and see what is most musically compelling. Maybe it has an internal tempo or a hip hop tempo or sounds like a waltz. We don’t start with an idea like, I want to play a country song or I want to play a rock song. We let the genre sneak up on us by just playing with noises. The song grows out of the object—that sounds kind of voodoo, but that’s what we were trying to achieve.

RR: How does Matmos perform live?

DD: It’s difficult. Sometimes we’ll try to use the objects that we play on our recordings. We’ll bring out a rat cage or we’ll bring out a cow uterus and just play it on stage. But some things aren’t very practical. We did a song that involved the sound of my skin getting burned with a cigarette. It’s about the cry of pain when you get burned. I didn’t really feel like getting burned with a cigarette every night on stage (points to a scar on his wrist) so that ended.

RR: How would you play a cow uterus exactly?

DD: That’s a good question. I had to do a lot of convincing to get my boyfriend to be willing to touch it—he’s better at playing the objects than I am, I’m more of the computer guy.  Farm supply catalogues sell the uterus and vagina of a cow to teach farmers how to artificially inseminate cows – to practice before they’re facing a real cow.  We bought one of those. It comes in a bag and it’s preserved in formaldehyde and it smells really bad.  We reversed the flow of air in our vacuum cleaner, and we inserted the vacuum cleaner tube into the uterus.  Then we inflated the uterus and squeezed the vaginal lips, basically making a queefing sort of noise. It’s kind of like playing a saxophone or bagpipe— just forcing air through an opening. Playing it on stage was more difficult, though. You’ve never felt as impotent as when you can’t, you know, get your cow uterus to make a sound.

RR: Are there any sounds that you won’t use?

DD: Never say never. Some things I’m not cool with for ethical reasons. For instance a friend of ours stole a cassette from a mental hospital with recordings of deeply depressed and psychotic patients. It’s an amazing recording. I was tempted, but I did feel like ethically there was a line there – a line of consent that I couldn’t cross. That and auto tune. Auto tune and crazy people.

RR: Do you and Martin ever have differences in opinion over your work?

DD: Oh yeah, there are a lot of couple fights.  That’s the challenge of being in a band with your romantic partner. When you know someone really well you can’t lie to them, so there’s a lot of conflict.  But I think ideally it makes the music better and it certainly makes touring more fun. But there is a danger, especially because electronic music appeals to control freaks and people who want to manage every little detail.  But we try to make it more like a rock band where there’ll be people jamming, and there’ll be friends of ours who come over who play the drums or play a bass part… to keep it open, so that we’re not in each other’s face so much.

RR: Do you collaborate with a lot of different artists?

DD: Collaboration’s important. We just made a record in May with So Percussion, this quartet of drummers from Brooklyn.  I think it’s helpful to have other people flesh out what we’re doing, because honestly we’re not that musically talented. Our musically talented friends help us seem more together – a little more like real music. For instance we had a commission from the Kronos Quartet and we got to play with them in Carnegie Hall.  My mom was there and it was a very “you have arrived” sort of moment that I never really would have seem coming.

RR: What inspired the type of music Matmos plays?

DD: Martin and I met in 1990 and we both had a love of a form of music called Musique Concrete, which was made out of the noises of things like trains or a creaking door. There have been people, in France especially, manipulating recordings of sound into music for a long time as an avant-garde practice. Then there’s also people in the techno and house music scene who take odd sounds and chop them up and make beats out of them. Dr. Rocket, also known as Mathew Herbert, made some great early house records with names like “Cameras and Rocks,” which is just made out of the noises of cameras and rocks hitting each other.

RR: Tell us about your career as both a Hopkins professor and a musician.

DD: It’s a difficult thing to try to do two things well. I take a lot of inspiration from my colleagues who have children because they’re passionate about being professors and they’re also passionate about being parents. I’m not saying a band is like a child, but I am saying that I think you can care a lot about two things at once. But we’ve had to adjust. Because of my teaching commitments I can only tour in the summer time. We’ve had to turn down a lot of offers. It’d be nice to go off to Brazil for two weeks and be fabulous at various techno events, but it’s also important to teach and to continue my publication and work on my books. I have to be strategic. I don’t sleep a lot. (Laughs) Something had to go.

RR: Do you ever combine teaching and making music? Do they interrelate?

DD: I combine teaching and making music on a theoretical level because what I’m interested in is ways of reading Renaissance texts as assemblages – that is as things that are kind of collaged, compositions made out of sources. If you think about Matmos songs themselves – they’re also assemblages. They’re collages made out of quotations and little pieces of culture, pieces of information being manipulated. So yeah, there’s a theoretical way in which the creative work and the scholarly work are connected.

RR: How does Baltimore play a part in your work?

DD: It’s been great moving here because it’s such a tight, close knit community. It’s not like San Francisco where everyone has a laptop and a web job and money. There’s poverty in Baltimore – there isn’t a lot of infrastructure, there aren’t a lot of clubs with awesome sound systems. But the people pull together. For instance we’ve played benefits to pay the BGE bill for a squat called America on the West side. We played a benefit to buy a PA for another noise, hipster space called The Bank. We’ve played The Trans Modern Festival. We’re always called on to help pitch in when people are in trouble and people are in trouble a lot here. It’s also fun to see the risks people take in their work and the joy that people have at shows. You play in San Francisco and people’s arms are folded and their standing and being cool. Then you play in Baltimore and they’re sweating and raging and having a great time.

On top of that I think the standard of what people are creating in Baltimore is really high. Any small town will have people who will slap you on the back and say, “Oh you were great,” but here people’s work is really compelling and original, whether it’s a noise band like Nautical Almanac or dreamy and smoochy music like Beach House.

RR: What are the next months looking like for Matmos?

DD: I’m organizing a conference this June in LA called Art in Politics that’s going to involve the philosophers and critical theorists Alain Badiou, Joan Copjec, and Lauren Berlant. Matmos is also going to be playing at it. Right now I’m figuring out what can I do that will be meaningfully political while not being corny.

RR: On your website you mention upcoming “public outrages.” Will you describe anything particularly outrageous of Matmos’s past?

DD: We used to do a spanking piece that involved a video of Martin spanking someone, that then staggered into a gamelon, rhythmic pattern of ass smacks. Then Martin would drop his pants and I would spank him, or we would take someone from the audience and spank them. The high point of doing this piece was when we did a show in a public square in Italy. I remember looking out into the crowd and seeing a priest, sitting and watching me spank my boyfriend. That’s when I really was like, I love this band, this is fun.

Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt will be speaking and sampling their work on April 6th, at Johns Hopkins University. For more news and information on the eccentric duo, visit their website: http://brainwashed.com/matmos/

Written by Juliette Eisner and Victoria Scordato

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