Sunny Lam: Prior to becoming Matmos, what type of relationship did Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt share, if any? What event, inspiration, or idea led to Matmos's collaboration? (How it started? How it was decided?)
Drew Daniel of Matmos: I was a go go dancer in a gay bar called Club Uranus. Martin was flirting with me and found out that I made electronic music and asked me if I wanted to learn how to sequence using a computer, and how to cut up digital audio. That was his pickup line and sixteen years later we are still together. I was aware at the time of his noisy occult industrial band called IaoCore, and he knew that I did solo noise as Western Blot. We teamed up romantically and artistically at the same time. This was in 1993, more or less.
SL: Much of your music is sourced from unusual sounds. What motivates Matmos to create music of this nature? Is it originality, shock value, or is it just the fact that you can, and do?
DD: I am inspired by the legacy of musique concrete, which showed me the example of making music out of objects and everyday noises from day to day life and one's surroundings. Sometimes the objects are shocking and sometimes the objects are totally banal and normal. I think sound is a great "leveler" of human values: the sound of a bone being broken in someone's face and the sound of a cup of tea being made can both become music, and with sound manipulation you can make bones breaking "beautiful" and a cup of tea "ugly". So sound lets you transvalue the ethical. The main reason that we do it is because it's fun to do, as a kind of artistic challenge. How much can you get out of how little?
SL: Has music always been a passion, or did the music find you? Did any external factors (like growing up with musically inclined parents, or music class) encourage Matmos into the musical field? If music wasn't a passion growing up, what were your aspirations before becoming electronic musical giants? What are your unaccomplished aspirations that you still plan to accomplish as electronic artists and as people today (any goals or to-dos that need to still be done)?
DD: I did not have musical parents really. My mother liked to sing along with records, but nobody was particularly accomplished. I think my parents certainly encouraged me to be creative visually, and I only started messing about with sound as a result of stumbling onto some William S. Burroughs books that my parents had that discussed the "cut up" experiments. I decided to try it as I was already doing collages with scissors and it just naturally seemed like an extension of the same ideas. It's fun to take things and change their forms and make them "yours". I still have lots of goals and things that I long to achieve outside of music. I am a professor now and I really want to publish my book on sixteenth century melancholy in English literature, philosophy, painting and medicine!
SL: Did Matmos ever envision the success that you have today, or is there more to be done? I read in your bio that you guys worked with Bjork. I find her music to be awkward, but nonetheless artistic and original. How was it to work with her and go on tour as well? Was there a most memorable moment?
DD: We certainly did not envision anything like the reaction that we've received, and we know that a great deal of it has to do with Bjork's support of our work and her desire to collaborate with us. It was hugely helpful in spreading the word, and helpful to us as artists to get to work with somebody so different from us, and so talented. She opened many doors, and learning to play her music affected how we thought about compositions. We had never had anything like a "chord change" before we were in her band. I would not single out any moment as the one, after all it was about three or four years of close working and friendship, so there were many moments. I can recall the sound of the crowd the first time that we performed with her in Paris; the noise of people's emotional reaction to her was not something I had heard at any other concert that I had ever been to, let alone played at.
SL: In the future I plan to make my own music (particularly trance, drum 'n' bass, and electro house). As an aspiring Dee Jay, is there any advice you could provide me with to get me to my ultimate goal of headlining a massive musical festival, such as Lovefest in San Francisco, California?
DD: That is a tough one. We have had the most pleasure and the best results from following through on our own instincts and ideas as honestly as we can, and not cutting corners at the level of execution: some songs take years to finish. But when we were trying to fit into existing scenes and to "fit in" we didn't get anywhere. You have to go your own way and work through the early years when you're going to want to make music that sounds like things that you already know and like. That's a necessary starting point, but you have to get past it. Sounds pretentious, but I think it's true!