Let me hear your body talk

>> The clinically precise medical music of Matmos

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

A bell is a cup until it is struck, they say. Likewise, a human body is just a body until it's doped up, laid out and opened like a Christmas present. At that point, provided San Francisco duo Matmos are in the operating room, it becomes a musical instrument.

M.C. Schmidt and his partner (yes, that kind of partner) Drew Daniel have been wowing the experi-music set for some time now. Their angle is generating sounds out of familiar but unexpected physical materials--crawfish neural tissue, latex, walkie-talkies and whoopie cushions--and creating complex and inspired e-music with the results. Philosophically stacked but engaging in and of itself, their music has attracted the attention of the likes of Labradford, Rachael's, Slicker and the Kronos Quartet, as well as Bjoerk, whose forthcoming Vespertine album will feature deep involvement by Matmos.

In the meantime, the pair are dropping into Montreal's Mutek new music and technology fest to showcase A Chance To Cut Is a Chance To Cure, their latest record. An ambivalent exploration of medical technology, it highlights field recordings of surgery altered into surprisingly warm electronic tunes. On other numbers, they're plucking cage bars to memorialize their departed pet rat ("For Felix"), stroking a Tibetan skull ("Memento Mori"), taping electrical jolts across Schmidt's skin ("Ur Tchun Tan Tse Qi") and turning a monotone deaf-test lady into a contrary house diva ("Spondees"). The Mirror had a lively chat with the two sons of doctors on speakerphone from Matador Records' NYC office.

Mirror: I feel that the title of the album sums up the spirit of the album in the sense that this could have been a very dark, moreover very cruel album. I'm thinking back to a Nurse With Wound album I heard about 12 years ago, which had this sample that really freaked me out, the sound of a bone being broken. I remember thinking, what an incredible act of cruelty on their part. Your album could have gone in that direction, but instead you guys have produced something really thoughtful, engaging and most importantly, frequently fun.

M.C. Schmidt: Why, thank you. I think that's an excellent summation of what we were thinking, too. The actual phrase, "a chance to cut is a chance to cure," is a quote from Drew's father, who is a surgeon. It was uttered while Drew was having some minor surgery done to him by his father. What Nurse With Wound album was that?

M: I don't know, Live at Budokan? I can't recall.

Drew Daniel: I love what industrial culture did with medical imagery and sound--especially Throbbing Gristle's Journey Through a Body. But that angle has been covered and covered quite well. So we kind of had it in mind as a negative example--we didn't want to be redundant.

M: There's also the potential for a sorta Luddite fear of medical technology and industry.

DD: Yeah, I was hoping to stress the similarities between the perfectibility of the human body and the way software and sequencing environments all hold out this promise of perfecting one's sound, that every performance can be fixed, that bum notes can get nudged until they're right--playing around with the similarities between making people perfect and making music perfect. I mean, in a comic way. It's not like I wrote that out and stared at that paragraph while making the songs.

MCS: It sounds a little more heavy-handed in post-mortem.

Art surgery

M: Now, Drew, you collected most of the actual field recordings. It would seem to me that that would be one of the most difficult and decisive stages of the process, initially gaining the trust of the patients and doctors.

DD: It was sort of a pincher movement. We tried to go through the patients and where that wasn't possible, we went through the doctors. The patient would be under anaesthesia and have no idea they were being recorded--which is quite illegal, so I can't reveal the whos and the wheres, aside from that it was all done in California. Sometimes the patient would be a friend of ours, and they would do the convincing for us, which was always the best. With the surgeons themselves, it took a while. I had to stress that we were successful in the art world, rather than that we were musicians. I'd namedrop that we'd played at the Pompidou Centre, things like that, in order to not sound like some rave scumbags. There was a lot of "No." At first I tried to do autopsies, because I thought, in that case, these are people who've given their bodies to medical science, and they're not alive to complain or feel like their privacy was being invaded. I thought that would be easiest, but in fact, in every case there was a last-minute "No, uh, not a good idea." In retrospect I'm perhaps glad because, while we did do the skull piece--which was good because it allowed us to focus on an object in our home studio--it would have had a much darker flavour.

MCS: I would also say that, while it was decisive to be able to go and record the surgeries, the vast majority of time spent on the album was spent trying to go as far we could at home with what we'd gathered. That's really where a lot of clean-up had to be done. Recording this album wasn't like anything else we'd done. Normally, we have an object and can isolate it and get very quiet sounds out of it. You can't do that in an operating room.

Plastic makes perfect

M: I want to talk about the plastic-surgery pieces, which are "Lipostudio" and "California Rhinoplasty." Neither is overtly judgmental, but there is an element of dry, underhanded humour to both. What are your feelings on the culture of plastic surgery.

MCS: It wasn't meant to be a "tsk, tsk, shame on you" record, because I think people have a lot of different reasons for having this surgery. There's some finger-pointing that could be done, as far as vanity and disposable income leading people to make extremely minor alterations that are motivated by some fundamental unhappiness. But it's not my place to determine whether person X on the operating table falls into that category or not. I don't know these people, or what their motivations are. If there's criticism, it's often more of the genre of music that we end up making out of the source, or the fun that can be had making that genre out of sound-sources that are so loaded. There were nods toward house and poppier kinds of music, which are marketed in terms of beauty, youth and this lifestyle you can purchase. Especially in the gay community--there's these compilation CDs that go along with the big, glamorous circuit parties. The covers always have pictures of hunky guys with perfect abs etc., so the idea of making a slightly housey song out of someone having their fat removed so that they can look perfect is more of a joke on house music than on people who get surgery. Also, there's some housiness to the record, but we wanted it to be sort of off as well, so in "Rhinoplasty," there's housey beats but they're only about 100 bpm, too slow to get a party started, a little stumbly and narcotic. I think the goal there is to flirt with pleasure but spike it with something that's a little wrong.

Sing the body electric

M: The next thing is "Ur Tchun Tan Tse Qi," which is fascinating both in a "Gee, how did they do that?" way, but also because it's a nod to forms of medicine that differ from the Western standard.

MCS: I have a good friend who's an acupuncturist, and that song is borne out of a device he had--kind of a cheating device. Acupuncturists have to learn all the meridians of energy, for lack of a better word, that flow through the body. They reach these nodal points in the body that are extremely specific, and this device is an electronic thing that actually detects them. Your skin conducts electricity better at these points. It works a little like a lie detector in that you hold one pole of a battery and the pointer thing is the other pole. There's a buzzer between them, and the better the conductivity is, the higher the pitch and the louder the note. I mean, it's a pretty low-tech device, but it's amazing in that it offers actual evidence for there being really something there.

DD: I'm happy it's in there because it sort of opened the bandwidth. I didn't want cosmetic surgery to be the be-all, end-all of medicine. The overarching category was medical technology. The rat cage was a stretch--

M: Which leads us to "For Felix," to me the most important tune because the issue of animal ethics became part of your consideration of the medical environment.

MCS: We started working on that piece purely as a personal elegy for the death of our pet, but when we were thinking of what counts as medical technology, we decided it was any object or tool used to create medical knowledge. Rats' bodies are directly that, in our society. So in referencing the conditions of that, but also being personal about our own rat's death, we felt there was an incongruity between the amount of personal loss we were feeling versus the absolute insignificance of rats within our culture. It's not a simple issue in that I certainly have friends with life-threatening illnesses, and I would hope that doctors would experiment on rats to learn how to cure them. On the other hand, I'm not sure about the current laws about how reproducible results have to be, meaning that every time you do a procedure you have to prove it'll happen another 500 times, or that every time a new variant of toothpaste is invented, it has to be rubbed in 500 rabbits' eyes before anyone can brush their teeth with it.

With AELab and Rechenzentrum at Ex-Centris on Thursday, May 31, 9pm, $20