Matador Records

08/06/03 — The word from Drew and M.C.:

"When we're not staring glassy eyed at our Friendster page or scarfing down a complementary breakfast at this week's Polish seaside resort hotel, we are busy playing in Bjork's band as her tour rampages across the planet. Suffice to say that nothing could have prepared us for the sight of 75,000 Danish Bjork fans getting their lighters out for that Meredith Monk cover that got added to the set list. Soon though we will be back to full time Matmos and as we get closer to opening the kimono on our new album "The Civil War" some live aktions are also being planned. We are curating one night of the Dissonanze Festival in Rome, Italy on October 3rd thanks to the invitation of our pals at DNA Concerti. Should be quite a hootenanny what with People Like Us, Lesser, Mouse On Mars, Hrvatski, and ourselves all agreeing to take part. We are also trying not to freak out about the fact that we'll also be playing at the Throbbing Gristle reunion festival next May, but it's hard because we're pathetic TG fanboys. We want to play a concert in Manhattan in late September in a space that is not a bar or a standard rock venue, so if you have a kooky idea bounce it off us at mcess@prodigy.net but keep in mind that we're all jetlagged and slow to respond."

05/20/03 — New album!
From the band: "We are happy to announce that we've finished our new album, entitled 'The Civil War'. We recorded most of the new record at home, and at the homes of some friends in Los Angeles (

Steve Goodfriend and Jim Putnam of Radar Bros. and Mark Lightcap of Acetone/The Warm Inventions) Some synthesizer recordings were made with Keith Fullerton Whitman at the Harvard University Studio for Electro-Acoustic Composition during our residency there. It was an honour to get to play one of the original Serge modular synthesizer built by Ivan Tcherepnin himself. David Grubbs plays some piano which he recorded in New York City at the Rare Book Room. Keenan Lawler recorded some guitar for us in a sewer pipe in Louisville, Kentucky. There's also some location recordings from Hoover, Alabama which we gathered while travelling. The album's design and layout has been done by Rex Ray and looks rather lush. Mark Boswell made a video for our version of "The Stars and Stripes Forever".

04/26/02 — Drew reports: “We are doing our best to stay busy in our autumn years. In fact we’re stressed out, OK? When we’re not busy preparing for our concert at the Wexner Center with Terry Riley, we’re busy programming Bjork songs for the Coachella festival, unless of course we’re busy working on our collaborative project with the Kronos Quartet, which we do when we’re not busy working on the promotion and dissemination of our brand new CD ‘Matmos Live with J Lesser’ which we’ve put out ourselves on our own vanity label Vague Terrain. You can find out how to get this record at our website. In between these bouts of being busy,

we are busy plotting and planning the new Matmos album, which will be rather labour intensive and requires lots of extra technical assistance and car trips to remote desert locations. In the off hours we remain busy with impending remix action involving Matmos versus the Melvins, the Coup, Iannis Xenakis, and Tipsy. Lastly Drew keeps himself occupied with a solo project of cut up house music as The Soft Pink Truth. So we’re kind of busy you could say. Somehow we manage to hold down jobs too, of a sort.”

03/21/02 — Drew and Martin will be playing alongside Bjork when she headlines the Coachella festival in April. In addition, Matmos will be performing on April 19 at the prestigious Wexner Center for the Arts located on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, OH. I know, I know, “prestigious” and “Columbus” in the same sentence. Here’s the scoop:

Weigel Hall
1866 College Road
Columbus, OH 43210.
8pm
$20 general public
$16 members

Here’s what Drew wrote for the programme:

“Drawing upon the heritage of musique concrete and contemporary sampling, sequencing and digital signal processing techniques, the San Francisco electronic duo Matmos make music which is based upon the musical possibilities of unusual sound sources, and the unusual playing possibilities of everyday instruments. Their past recordings have built baroque rhythmic collages out of the noises of plastic surgery, rat cages, balloons and whoopie cushions, latex clothing, walkie talkies and, infamously, the amplified synapse of crayfish nerve tissue. This unusual approach has brought them into collaborations with a diverse cast of musicians from indie rock/new chamber ensemble the Rachel’s to Icelandic pop phenomenon Bjork, whose Vespertine album was partially programmed by Matmos and who chose the duo as her backing band for her last world tour. In performance Matmos veer wildly between toe tapping pop structures and chaotic improvisation, frequently accompanied by their own video work. In their performance tonight Matmos will debut a new composition for electronics and live instruments commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. Having recorded the Kronos Quartet rehearsing the very first piece that Terry Riley wrote for them “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector” (1981) and taking their cue from the somewhat open and player-determined structure of that piece, Matmos have taken samples from the points in the rehearsal where the performance broke down and re-stitched them together into a new piece which they perform tonight in homage to Terry Riley.”

(note from label management: the Kronos Quartet are not a side-project fronted by Venom’s vocalist. This may or may not impact your decision to attend. Thank you.)

02/12/02 — A quick Matmos update this time around since these guys are hard at work juggling so many projects at one time. After their worldwide tour opening and performing with Bjork and promoting their latest album, Matmos returned to their hometown, San Francisco, to finish what they left off before they went on the road. Then, on very short notice, they’ve been asked to play with Bjork on a two week promo tour in Paris, Cologne, and San Remo for a bunch of music awards and radio shows. They end in London in the studio working on Bjork’s new material.

01/09/02 — (Drew Daniel, M. C. Schmidt, Jay Lesser) says:
We just got back from a Karl Lagerfeld photo shoot in Paris. Tonight we play in Reykjavik. It’s the last show of our world tour with Bjork. We celebrated the end of Jay Lesser’s birthday hangover with a dip in a geothermal spa in the pouring rain. It was very dark as it’s winter here in Iceland, and Drew’s mother and brother were there, and the whole Bjork crew and a choir of Greenlandic girls. The tour has been full of utopian, ridiculous excursions like this one, and we don’t have space to describe them all, but we will tell you that we have had a really good time. If you saw any of the shows then you’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. In non-Matador related news, in the upcoming months we will release a CD of “Matmos Live with J. Lesser” (aka “High Live and Dirty”), and a recording by Kevin McKereghan, on our own label, Vague Terrain. Matmos will be playing a show with Terry Riley at the Wexner Center in April. M. C. Schmidt will go back to his job at the San Francisco Art Institute and Drew will write another chapter of his dissertation. Jay Lesser will ride a bicycle.

07/19/01 — Matmos —
Humbling the rest of us with their frenzied schedule
“We just flew back to the West Coast to shoot new video footage inside a surgical clinic. Drew’s sinuses and ear canal were anesthetized and then an endoscope was inserted very, very far into his orifices; the results will be imposed upon Bjork/Matmos fans worldwide once the joint tour kicks off in August. We have convinced Jay Lesser to relocate to our NYC crib and join our rampage, so expect showier signal processing and onstage injuries. Recordings of note: The new Slicker album ‘The Latest’ (Hefty) boasts of a track touched by the hands of Matmos; the humidity of our collaborative show with People Like Us was the talk of the SONAR Festival, and there’s a 12" of more PLU/Matmos jiggery pokery coming soon; and finally, Drew has released a 12" of fucked up house music under the name ‘The Soft Pink Truth’ (on Matthew Herbert’s Soundslike Records) which is out now and causing a ruckus, but we’re not going to break up over that sort of thing.”

Drew was too humble to mention that it is his birthday on July 20. Also, Matmos will be appearing with Bjork on the BBC’s Top Of The Pops television show at the end of July. This used to be one of the most prestigious, you-have-arrived moments in pop, but then the Strokes got booked, so never mind.

05/10/01 — Matmos are continuing their important work on the upcoming Bjork full-length, as well as making the occasional unannounced (to us, at least) DJ appeararances at various NY nightspots. A recent Tonic show alongside Cex and Kid 606has been cited by more than one witness as the kind of superstar revue rarely seen in these days of battling egos.

Other associated Matmos projects you ought to be aware of:

5/7: 4 track House 12" by The Soft Pink Truth (aka Matmos) on Soundslike Records
5/15: Remix of Richie Devine on the Schematic House of Distraction compilation
Out now: Remix of Speedy J + Muziq on Planet Mu's "Slag Boom Van Loon So Soon."
Out now: Matmos track "Keine Zahne" on Mille Plateaux's Clicks & Cuts 2
Out now: Remix Twirl EP of Kid 606 track "Twirl" on Mille Plateaux

03/07/01 — Matmos — Slicing & dicing
As universal acclaim continues to pour, drip and seep in for the S.F. duo’s ‘A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure,’ Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have begun assisting Bjork on her forthcoming new album. Look for Matmos as part of Bjork’s touring ensemble (including Zeena Parkins!) later in 2001 — a scenario that will hopefully result in Matmos (on their own) performing in many far flung places they otherwise wouldn’t have hit.

07/05/00 — Matmos — These guys are making everyone else look lazy.
“Our split record with the Rachel’s “Full On Night” is out now on Quarterstick/Touch n Go, and the newest 12" by Disc (called “Transfer,” it’s our collaboration with Kid 606 and Lesser making 100 locked grooves of CDs skipping) is out on Deluxe Records. These are not Matador Records but they’re still pretty good. Our Summer Vacation: We’ve been running around in Europe having all sorts of misadventures — we rented a car in Paris and toured the Languedoc looking for castles related to the Cathar heresy and the mystery of Rennes Le Chateau. Much fun, much duck fat. Then we drove on to Barcelona for SONAR (too many great shows to mention, but here goes: Stockhausen, Coil, Etant Donnes, Panasonic/Einheit, Kit Clayton, Hecker, People Like Us, Phoenecia/Rich Devine, PanAmerican, Herbert, Mark Almond (!?*!), laptop orchestra). Now we are home, eagerly anticipating our Fat Cat 12" (split with Motion) and slaving away on the new album. Oh yes we are. Oh yes. And working on new mixes for Mu-Ziq, People Like Us and Phoenecia, plus some sneaky house music that no one needs to know about.”

03/12/99 — Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Matador Europe has licensed (from Vague Terrain) ‘Quasi-Objects’ and Self-Titled by the San Francisco experimental electronic duo Matmos. What do they sound like? Rhythm that hustles promiscuously somewhere between 2 Live Crew, Spike Jones and Muslimgauze; melodies inspired by slot machines and duck calls; basslines with the low end presence of dub or Miami bass; sharp bursts of abject noise puncturing the sound field when you least expect them, and most deserve them. As the title ‘Quasi-Objects’ indicates, the group have an ethic of restricting sound sources to everyday and not-so-everyday objects (balloons, whoopee cushions, walkie talkies, latex fetish clothing, a banjo, the human body).... We'll have a full bio, sound clips, and all that up shortly.