Questions by Deniz Ekim Tilif & Eylül Deniz.
Baltimore based unique experimental electronic duo -and iconic couple- Matmos (Drew Daniel & M.C. Schmidt) are back today with their fifteenth record Metallic Life Review, which is composed entirely out of metal objects. We listened to the album beforehand and had a chat with Daniel & Schmidt before their kickass Berlin performance on May 28 at Silent Green. We now proudly present to you this joyful conversation.
How’s the tour going so far?
Drew Daniel: Good! We’ve played two shows already, so we’re not decadent yet. Sometimes when you play like 10 or 12 shows, you’re like, “OK, on to the next one!” You become a bit of a machine. We had a funny experience the last time we went on tour. We met this guy in Texas. He was at the first show and he’s at the merch table and we’re like, “OK, here’s our stuff.” He’s like, “Oh, I have all this.” We’re like, “Whoa, OK.” Then we play the next show and he’s there. We’re in Nashville and he’s there, and then we’re in Boston, and he’s there. (all laugh) This guy flew across the country. He went to every single show of ours. It makes you really aware that if you tell the same joke every night, you’re maybe not being authentic.
Martin C. Schmidt: It made me crazy. I was like, “Did I say this last night?” Because I could see him, there he was in the audience.
Drew: Yeah, he could start mouthing.
Martin: He was super nice though.
Drew: It keeps you honest if you suddenly are aware of the fact that every evening is a new experience, and in some ways, it should be. Berlin is a tricky place, because there’s so much electronic music here. The fear of “Are you redundant? Are you bringing something new?” is very constant.
Martin: This is the judgiest place in electronic music. (all laugh)
Judgiest place in other stuff too.
Drew: Yeah, we were worried. We were setting up once in Berlin. We were going to perform, but we’re having trouble with setting up the video projector. It was just taking a little more time, and the audience was getting restless. Then someone in the crowd just goes, “We’ve seen videos before!” It’s like, damn! Well, let’s just leave now. (all laugh) It’s like, well, you’ve also heard sounds before, you know? But yeah, I’m looking forward to tonight’s show. I was worried because circular spaces with sound can be challenging, but they seem to have a very good approach to putting sound into this room. So it all sounds hopeful. I hope we’re going to be OK. Touch on wood!
About your fear regarding Matmos being redundant: I don’t think Matmos will ever be redundant anywhere.
Drew: Well, I hope not. I mean, we’ll see. When you’ve been a band a long time, it’s scary, because-
Martin: The only real fear is that we’re redundant to ourselves. I think we definitely are guilty of that. I listened to things from five years ago and I’m like, “Oh, that sounds very familiar!”
Drew: Yeah, if you’ve done 15 albums, you have to ask, like, does somebody really need the 15th on their shelf? Or maybe they’re good, you know? Gotta say, I buy every Nurse With Wound record, and I’ve been doing that since I was 18 years old. I’m 53 now, and he hasn’t let me down yet. So I’m a lifer. I hope there’s people that would check our new record out, and you just don’t know who’s hearing you for the first time. That’s valid, too.
That’s always part of the deal though, right? You get both fans and new fans.
Drew: And our fans bring their teenage children. They’re bringing a 16 year old who’s like, “Dad is into weird stuff! I don’t know, whatever.” (all laugh) They want to win them over. If it’s interesting, it should work for people that aren’t biased, you know?
I listened to your new album Metallic Life Review before this meeting. One of the main reasons I do interviews is that I’m a fan of stories of people, but I’m also a fan of the stories of objects. And this is a very fruitful album to talk about objects. You recorded it entirely with metal objects that are part of your collection. They have stories. I don’t think we can go through all of those, but can you maybe choose three objects that are very dear to you and tell us their stories?
Martin: Sure. I play a saucepan in a couple different songs. It’s the saucepan that my mother used to make soup for me. I still cook with that. My mother’s been dead for 35 years. We brought it to the studio and I’m like, bang, bang, bang, just like I did when I was six years old. That’s pretty good stuff. Drew picked one, too.
Drew: Yeah, I went to my mother’s house. She lives in California now in Half Moon Bay, and she still has the pot that she used to make the spaghetti. It’s a big iron pot. And on the bottom, it says ‘club’. I had never noticed that as a child.
Martin: If you get the CD, the picture of the bottom of that pan is the picture on the CD.
Drew: So we both have this very direct relation to our mothers in the kitchen in which our mother fed us.
There is a sound that is the bells in a village in France where I lived when I was 12 years old. It had three roads, one street light, one church, no stores. There was a post box and one phone booth. It’s a really small town, but we went and recorded those bells. So I played those bells every night and put them on the song “Metallic Life Review”. That just seemed like the place for it on the record. It’s not an object in the sense that I can’t carry the church in my pocket, and I’m not religious. It’s not that it makes me think of prayer. It takes me back to my past, and it’s a particular kind of tone that those bells have.
There’s also objects that are mass produced. They’re not personal. You know, there are objects like, “Oh, this is from your mother, it’s what created you.” You have relationships that’s so intense. And then of course, we live in global capitalism where objects just circulate. So we have a tray from India called thali, and a lot of those patterns in “Norway Doorway” that aren’t this door in a nightclub are just that tray. It’s nothing emotional. You know, that tray was like $2.50. I bought it at the Punjab market a block from our house and I just loved the sound of it. But it has no deep personal meaning, you know? It’s just that sonically, there’s pleasure in the pitch of it.
Martin: For whatever reason, India is clearly great at manufacturing chrome, super shiny stainless steel. Most of what I play tonight is that stuff. I finally fulfilled a goal that I’ve had since I was 20: go to the restaurant supply store and buy all the bowls, whether big or small. I’ve always wanted to make bells out of them. Unfortunately I could only bring five on tour. I have so many more at home.
Tonight will be the first time I see you guys live, and I’m really curious about the practicality of the show you’ll put on tonight.
Drew: It’s a financial cost for us that we want to bring the actual objects. Martin has this chafing dish that is big. So we added a suitcase just to bring this chafing dish, and that’s like $400, just an extra excess baggage.
Martin: I was like, I really want to bring this square chafing dish and I added it just because, you know, you add things up. You’ll see what I do with it.
Drew: It’s the nature of the music. If that’s what you need to make the statement you want to make, yeah, why not? We don’t want to spoil it too much, but you’ll see a lot of different objects being played, large and small. I have a tiny object that’s an instrument called a Noise Box that’s built in the UK and it’s just a sealed steel box, but it has all these different spines and a bobby pin coming out like the ones you use in your hair. It has these metal tines from a music box that you would pluck and it’s really loud but really clean, and that’s a beautiful sound. It has a bunch of springs on it too. I’ll be kind of caressing this object, and you can come up after the show and take a look, so you can see what it is.
There’s a lot of different approaches. We also had some gear break in England, so we had to fix some things and find new ways to amplify things. We use what’s called a Barcus Berry Planar Wave Transducer. It’s something that you put underneath a piano to get bass sound. So it’s like a contact mic, but it broke. This thing is the fanciest contact mic. It’s $500 and it is amazing. I just f.cking took it out of the suitcase and it didn’t work. I have no idea what’s wrong with that. So instead, we’re using a $5 contact mic. We met a kid named Freddie in the English countryside who had it, so it got resolved.
Martin: C’est la vie. We’re going to make it work.
When you think of the recording process of the album, what were the two tracks that you produced the easiest and the hardest?
Martin: On “The Chrome Reflects Our Image”, the sound of the strings-
Drew: The romantic tearjerker sound.
Martin: It is made out of that spaghetti pan that he told you about, and it sounds like a violin section. I think that’s both of us working together separately where he made the original sound and then I tweaked it, tweaked it, tweaked it. I worked so hard on the timing to make it sound like violins. I don’t know, I’m in love with these 1960s Muzak records, and I really wanted it to sound like that. I wanted it to sound like the strings guy Percy Faith, like 8 million violins playing one stupid melody!
Drew: In a certain way, the sidelong piece “Metallic Life Review” might seem like the most elaborate, but that’s because we had played that live a lot, and then we just did it in the studio live where it went faster, whereas “Changing States” evolved over a long time and involved a lot of different edits and decisions. It was very complex what Susan Alcorn had to do to transcribe the arpeggios so she could play it on pedal steel guitar. That’s not our skill, that’s her skill. But that song, I think, was pretty. There’s a lot of work involved in that one. “Norway Doorway” went pretty fast, I would say, because formally it’s a little bit simpler. “The Rust Belt” had many versions, and then Martin did a mix where he got rid of a lot, and just carved out a lot of space. I think I had made it very cluttered, and too much like normal techno. There’s a lot of people that make techno, we don’t need to pretend to be techno artists when that’s not really our skill. We have friends that do it that are really good at it, and people like that, they know what they’re doing for us. But Martin did a mix where he just removed a lot and that helped solve the problem. If your room is cluttered you just feel like, “I need to clean this place up!” Sometimes you have to do that about songs.
Maybe we can give a shoutout to people who contributed to this record, like Thor Harris of Swans fame.
Drew: Sure! I saw Swans many times, and I saw them with Thor at this festival in upstate New York. That’s a really fun festival. He starts the show with the gong and it’s so loud, and then more drums, and it ‘s really loud. And then the band comes, and gets even louder.
So transcendental.
Drew: Yeah, it’s just a huge sound. I was aware of him and I like that other band he’s in, Water Damage. Then he wrote to us. He was like, “Hey, Matmos, I really like your records. Maybe something could happen that we work on together.” I was like, “Well, actually, as it happens, we’re making this metal objects record. Do you have a bunch of metal objects in your studio? Would you be down to play along to this tempo?” And we liked what we got. He gave us so much, too, maybe 12 different instruments, from a cheese grater to an Afro pick. We split it up. Half of them we put on “Norway Doorway”, and half we put on “The Rust Belt.” Partially because they were the same tempo, so we could make it work. I’m really glad about that. So two songs in a row have Thor, and then there’s two songs with (the recently deceased) Susan Alcorn.
Owen Gardner is on one song. He’s our friend from Baltimore. He plays guitar in this band Horse Lords, a really amazing band. He’s an incredible guitar player. He’s also very interested as a composer in unusual tuning systems. We wanted to have moments on the record where the tuning system got weird, because metal objects often have a pitch, but it’s not a sweet pitch. He has these glockenspiels where he has carved the lengths of the metal a little shorter. It makes a weird pitch. When he plays a run, it’s not like Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si, it’s like a really odd set of pitches. So that’s happening at the end of that song “Steel Tongues”.
Actually, there’s a Berlin connection I totally forgot about. Last summer, we were going to stay in an Airbnb near Berghain, and we stayed at this apartment of this lady, and she was a sound healer. She had all these gongs and tongue drums. So I recorded her tongue drum and her gong. And some of her tongue drum is in the song we’re going to play tonight, when we play “Steel Tongues.” It’s actually this Berlin sound healer lady. I don’t remember her name.
Is it a recording or the tongue drum itself?
Drew: A recording. Yeah, no, we’re not playing her tongue drum. We didn’t steal it. (all laugh) We just got out the mics and recorded it because we had our interfaces, so we could do a proper recording. I’d forgotten that there’s a Berlin connection! We play a really harsh noise thing that’s a bunch of sounds made by Aaron Dilloway in the show, and then right after, we play the sound healing. We kind of give people what they call an aftercare.
Martin: We beat them up and then we take care of them.
Drew: We explore the butch-fem duality. (all laugh)
“The Chrome Reflects Our Image” is dedicated to David Lynch. Can you elaborate on your connection to him?
Drew: We knew he was going to die because he was such a heavy smoker, but it was still so sad to lose him. We went and saw Inland Empire in the movie theater when it came out. I think we’re just reminded of the intensity of his commitment to doing his own vision, and not really being commercially minded about it, and just being very consistent internally. I learned about his art when I was a child because my stepfather had a movie theater. So he showed this weird movie called Eraserhead, way back in the day. I saw that.
Great kids movie. (all laugh)
Drew: I was really young, and I thought that movie was amazing, because it takes the very common story where a young guy’s girlfriend gets pregnant, and makes you see it in a completely different way. Horror and comedy combining, just exploding genres. There’s a lot of respect for what he did. I think it’s true to say that when people say Lynch, they often also mean Badalamenti because his soundtracks are so powerful. Certainly in the case of that song, I would say Martin wanted a guitar sound that was twangy in the way that the big Twin Peaks theme notes are played.
Martin: I don’t have any good story. I just heard what you did and I was like, I know what goes there.
Drew: Yeah, I was surprised at first because it was really guitar-based.
Martin: You didn’t want it.
Drew: Well, that piece feels to me very-
Martin: Well, we’re so literal, we say “It’s the metal record! Everything must be metal.” And I was like, “F.cking electric guitar strings are made of metal. The pickup is metal. Those are all metal!” (all laugh)
Drew: I think that song, in some ways, is also very influenced by Labradford, because we toured with them. When you consider their approach to melody and minimalism and repetition, I feel like “The Chrome Reflects Our Image” is a little bit like a wannabe Labradford.
Martin: They are so much better, though.
Drew: Well, yeah, they’re better at it because they understand what guitars do. We kind of just hunt and peck.
Martin: I got a real guitar player to play it!
Drew: Yeah, it was Jason Willett from Half Japanese. A classic American band, but a very different kind of sound, generally speaking.
I was thinking this morning that “Norway Doorway” also sounds like something Badalamenti would do.
Drew: Yeah, I get what you mean. I think that those big landing doom strikes makes that feeling. It was also because Thor and I were thinking about Swans and the way that they land with a big horrifying chord. I don’t know if it’s about Trump or trauma, but I feel like out of that terrible sound and silence, and then another terrible sound and silence, gradually, a form emerges. I didn’t think that song should be the first. And Martin was like, “No, that should be first.” And I’m glad, actually, that he decided it should start the record. I don’t think I would have done that. I would have been more like, “Oh, let’s have a cute one and kind of warm people up.” (all laugh)
Martin: A couple of people have asked us about David Lynch. It’s so complicated. I had so many thoughts over the years. I’ve never been like, “I love David Lynch!”, but clearly he’s been in my life consistently and super importantly as one of the greatest American artists, and it feels like there aren’t many of them who does stuff that’s good and true about American culture, which is ugly and stupid.
Drew: Abusive too.
Martin: Stupidity is really important to America. I mean, look at our f.cking president, there he is. There is a spotlight on stupid people being ugly and hateful. And David Lynch is really good at showing that, too.
Drew: But also giving you comedy and a sense of awareness of people’s everyday lives and of a Hollywood fantasy world. It’s inspiring art because it engages with so many levels of our society and its history, but it also has something very unique and very perverse.
Martin: I love that he was able to put out that- Have you ever heard any of his records?
Yeah, there’s some great stuff there.
Martin: Well, and some actually really terrible stuff, because he was just like, “Whatever!”, you know? (all laugh)
I would say that’s part of his greatness, right?
Martin: In a way, yeah!
Drew: Thinking about the unconscious, how do we bring what is inside us out into the world without translating it immediately to gain popularity? How do you preserve what’s perverse in your core?
Martin: I’m suddenly worried about our merch table. There’s a bunch of people there. I’ve been watching them come in and we brought a boy from Baltimore to help us sell merch, but we never told him how much anything cost. (all laugh) Wonder what he’s doing?
He’s probably just telling people to pay what they can.
Martin: Nooooo!
Drew: I mean, he comes from a real noise underground. So for him, the prices are probably super low.
Martin: I got to go. (all laugh)
(At this point, Martin leaves the table for good to check the merch table, and we continue our chat only with Drew.)
Drew: You know what? I don’t know if you have advice for me, but I feel like what we’re experiencing with Trump either mirrors or reflects your own situation with Erdogan.
I would say that there definitely are certain parallels. We have been under the Erdogan regime for some time now, and since the tech oligarchy fascism is recently on the rise on a global scale, those parallels have become more apparent. Your album’s liner notes end with the phrase: “Death to Fascism”. So maybe this could be a good time to talk about all this.
Drew: Yeah, it’s a very frightening time. We live in a time where there’s a sort of shadow of the possibility of what is coming. The size of the shadow is used to make you afraid and to make you feel that you’re powerless. And maybe the reality is different. You know, the reality might not be what the shadow of the threat is. We live in this odd time of constantly feeling fear of what might happen. I teach at a school and my school has lawyers, and the lawyers send me emails that say, “If ICE comes to arrest people, it’s a felony. If you intervene, it’s a felony. If you try to hide somebody from the police, if they come, you can’t do it.” That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means the lawyers for your employer won’t help you if you do it. You’re on your own.
Everybody’s conscience is their own. I don’t have to decide to fall in line just because there might be consequences. That’s my choice. Everybody is seeing what’s happening in Palestine. Everybody is seeing what is being done to Gaza. So the idea that you can’t talk about it or if you talk about it you’re an Antisemite is insane, there are all these impossible constraints.
That’s especially true for Germany.
Drew: Yeah! Germany has its traumas, and I think it’s letting its traumas about the Nazi lead to a terrible false choice, and the silencing of people. So yeah, it’s a really scary time. If I stay at home alone and just look at my phone all night, all I feel is fear and I feel powerless, you know? Whereas if I go and see my friends and we do something together, I’m reminded that there’s lots of people that I can trust and there’s lots of people that feel the way I do, and I’m actually not alone. Maybe it sounds corny, but things like that are still pretty moving. You know, there is a hardcore band in Baltimore called Turnstile that did this event where they were raising money for healthcare for homeless people, and they got 7000 people. It was massive. So being there was a really good reminder that I don’t have to just sit alone and go, “Oh my God, we’re doomed. Oh my God, he’s coming for us.” I think they want us to be afraid. They want us to feel like there’s no hope. They want us to feel like they decide everything and they decide what you can say. And it’s just not true. Of course, it doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences, because we’re seeing people like Rümeysa Öztürk being taken from the street just for writing an op-ed. That’s really disgusting and wrong.
When I say “Death to fascism”, it’s death to an idea. I think a lot of people in the United States right now that are powerless have a fantasy: They want Trump to just have a heart attack or a stroke. They just want him to die and go away because if that were to happen, they think it would solve the problem. Unfortunately, I don’t think it would solve much, because it isn’t really about that one guy. It’s all the people that were cool with voting for him. All the people that hold up these signs that say “Mass deportations now.” That goes a lot deeper than just the Democrat party versus the Republican Party. I grew up in the South, in Kentucky. A lot of my family’s from Alabama, a lot of my aunts and uncles think of themselves as Democrats. They think of themselves as left of center. But when they get together and talk, the way that they think about poor people, the way they think about black people, a lot of what they say is not really all that different from the people that are voting for Trump.
I think race and the history of slavery and the legacies of slavery in the unconscious of America is a wound that never healed. I don’t think we ever as a society processed what happened. I think a lot of the political things that are happening now are a result of not really being able even today to talk about it. If you think about it, it is maybe six generations away. My family owned slaves. My name is Andrew Daniel. There is another Andrew Daniel in my family that fought for the Confederacy. So he fought for keeping slaves. My name is tied to someone that was on that side. And when I visited my family in Alabama, I saw a photo album and there was a photograph of an old black lady. I was like, “Oh, who’s that?” They were like, “Oh, that’s Aunt Cindy. That’s the last Daniel slave.” So these connections of who can afford a house and who can get a loan from the bank to buy a house and who can’t, it’s tied to slavery. Things about the US are rooted in the history of harm. That history isn’t really just, “Well, it happened and it was bad, but we’re all going to just move on, because if you look at household wealth of which families have how much money, are we really gonna move on? It’s generational wealth, and we know how capitalism works. You invest and it grows, and you pass that on, you know? Trump is bad, Macron is bad, and Putin is bad. A lot of the rulers are bad. They’re bad in different ways.
There are some parallelisms too.
Drew: Yeah, there are parallels. I mean, maybe there’s a limit because not every society that’s struggling with inequality is doing it because of slavery. In other cases, the inequality works differently. I guess what we all have in common is capitalism.
Your generation, because everything’s been taken away from you, asks for everything, and why wouldn’t you? Everything’s been made unaffordable for you, so you don’t have a stake in just keeping it going the way it’s been going, because it’s not working. Whereas I look at boomers and even my generation -I’m 50-, and a lot of us are kind of doing OK. So we’re just going to pull up the drawbridge and hope that we’re OK. I talked to my parents about Trump and they’re like, “Oh, it’s too upsetting. We don’t really look at the news anymore, because you can’t do anything about it. So what’s the point in learning about it?” They really are putting their heads in the sand. They’re just not thinking about it because it’s too painful, I guess.
I don’t think that’s a generational thing. Even some people from our generation refuse to think about it. I think it’s partly due to social media.
Drew: Yeah, social media and the worlds that people consume and where they get their information affect us. I guess that’s true. We used to have this fantasy that the younger generation is always going to be more radical or more leftist, but that wasn’t true in terms of who voted for Trump. If you’re only looking at these TikToks or specific Youtubers, then that’s where you get your perspective. I don’t know what the solution is. I think being micro to your community and your scene and your people might be a good thing. But I say that because I like my community. I don’t know if I have wisdom about it. I remember DIY scenes in the 80s were just your people, your friends in bands. You go and do a show in a basement and it’s you playing for your friends. That was the level at which culture was happening. Maybe that’s another way to approach it now, I don’t know. Instead of hoping for virality or something.
I liked the part where you talked about a certain binarism in US politics where the two main voting options are historically divided into two parties: The Democrats and the Republicans, in which the former sees himself as a leftist answer to the latter, whereas in reality it’s just a less right-wing version. I would say we have a very similar situation in Turkey.
Drew: Yeah. The options you are presented with are very narrow and constrained. It seems like a scale problem too. You don’t get to stand on the platform unless somebody paid for the ads on TV. And the ads on TV cost so much that the only ideas that get put forward are the ones that don’t threaten anybody that’s really holding the power.
I think it’s very important as a musician who has an audience to have the power to go to a stage and use their platform to speak up.
Drew: Yeah. We as Americans feel funny about it, like, “People have already heard enough from Americans!” (laughs) But I get what you’re saying, it’s not every day that somebody gets a microphone that can talk to hundreds of people. If you have that chance, why wouldn’t you say something, even something simple?
We were just in Scotland and I made some remarks about trans people and trans rights. I think people appreciate it just because that big legal decision against trans people in the UK was because of a Scottish group. It was a Scottish gender-critical terf crew that just made everybody’s lives harder. It’s so sh.tty, it’s such a limited understanding of these things.
So yes, maybe it is like preaching to the choir, but that’s OK. I don’t mind.
You can check out Matmos’ Bandcamp profile here.
