Matmos are an eccentric forward thinking electronic duo hailing from Baltimore in the United States.

Matmos are an eccentric forward thinking electronic duo hailing from Baltimore in the United States. Over the course of nine albums, their most recent being 2013 s The Marriage of True Minds in which they presented a musical investigation into telepathy, Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel have increasingly become known for their highly conceptual works that walk the tightrope between cross genre experimental musicality and a rigorous urban lights investigation urban lights into their chosen urban lights subject. It s an approach that has the power to transform objects and find a latent musicality lurking in the most unexpected places. 2003 s Civil War saw them playing a rabbit pelt, whilst 2006 s The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth of The Beast had them recording snails and burnt flesh, whilst 2001 s A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure saw them playing around with the sounds of plastic urban lights surgery. Their recent Marriage of True Minds is based on parapsychological Ganzfeld experiments which group conducted with a series of volunteers who were put into sensory deprivation whilst Drew Daniel attempted to telepathically transmit the concept urban lights of the new Matmos record to them. Matmos then created audio representations of the resulting transcripts. urban lights
Drew: The records that I do tend to be the ones where there is a concept and the commitment to the concept creates the work. I think for Martin it s much more organic it s about objects and people that are around and the songs crystallize.
Martin: The nice thing is that because of his work my work ends up conceptual too. The Civil War and Supreme Balloon were ones that were quote unquote my records and honestly the concept for Supreme Balloon was lets not sample stuff… urban lights
Martin: And dingus urban lights here, just like he just did crystallizes it into this extremely conceptual thing. So there can be no microphones so that s what I m going to say over and over there can be no microphones. All I wanted I wanted to do was God can we stop sampling all these retarded objects?
Martin: We are so lucky that we have this conceptual shtick because of this process, right now, which is talking to you. I don t know what the hell lets say Autechre, urban lights what do they talk about? Granted I ve never read an interview with them, I m sure they do fascinating interviews. If you make things that are completely abstract what the hell do you talk about in these conversations?
Drew: They d talk about form and the things they hear in hip hop records or they re aware of looking at graffiti and that gives them formal concepts. I think the irony here is the word conceptual or the phrase concept album implies urban lights that didactic story or some argument to make, but really conceptualism turns itself inside out very quickly and becomes a new way of being a literalist. You become very literal about what a concept denotes, what s included in something like medical technology. You re not necessarily making your mind up about is medicine good or bad, or do I want to encourage this form or that form. You re not really taking a position like that. It becomes more like a scavenger hunt and once you determine the objects you re going to work with it becomes about the objects as material things urban lights that sound a certain way and then encourage a certain way of playing and you re already off and running constructing songs. The time of the concept is really a weird crazy intuition or hunch of commitment urban lights that happens early on and then you just let go. There s a Kierkegaard quote that the moment of decision urban lights is the moment of madness and I think that s true for a lot of the concepts that have become drawn to our albums. We don t really have a way to justify it other than there s some kind of personal magnetism. Whether its queer biography or medical technology or telepathy, these are things that speak to us. But the answer to why is really the music. I mean I hate that because I don t want to sound like oh it s just the music man, because we re not that kind of band.
Bob: I always assumed it was a way of considering how to construct the music. We live in this world where there s so many options available to you that its easy to have option fatigue, or you can think about this history of music and you can create music that is a reaction to this or a homage to that. A way to create something new is to involve these new ideas, these interesting concepts that may not necessarily be related to music, and I assumed urban lights you used that as an inspiration point to jump off from.
Drew: The irony here is that now you can now buy from Ableton a sound suite that is a bunch of metal objects, and plastic objects, there s already been a pristine sounding of a lot of different material urban lights objects. Martin: And what a sad motherfucker buys that. For god s sake people it s not about convenience. Go get a microphone. Half the fun for me is recording these things in the first place.
Drew: To me the point is the poetics of your commitment to a particular object urban lights is a composit