Matmos is taking its new music for a spin, literally.
The electronic music and conceptual art duo, which consists of gay couple M.C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel, recently released “Ultimate Care II,” which was made using and manipulating the sounds generated by the Whirlpool washing machine in the basement of their home.
When we talked to them, they were in a van with said washing machine, dragging it across the country for their live shows.
“It’s weird to be in a van with a washing machine at its center,” Daniel said. “There are no guitars, just a washing machine and some electronics. So I don’t know if we look like a band on tour or like itinerant plumbers. We made the album entirely out of that washing machine and we’re going on tour, so why not bring the actual star of the show? It’s a bit fanatical maybe but that’s our style.”
“Ultimate Care II” is presented as one continuous album that isn’t broken up into individual tracks.
Matmos did make videos for individual songs but Daniel said those were made somewhat out of practicality.
“It was important to us that the album be a continuous experience because that’s what doing the machine is like,” Daniel said. “But part of videos when they are released before the album is to create a certain suspense about what the total picture is going to be. There’s also the reality that the labor-intensive animation and editing involved in creating the videos would be pretty onerous to saddle one of our friends with making an entire 38-minute video. Martin has, however, made a video for the entire performance, so when we do it live, there’s a special video that he made that is a continuous 38-minute expression.”
Matmos formed in the mid-1990s in San Francisco but is currently based in Baltimore, a move Daniel said they made to accommodate his other career as an English professor.
“I finished my Ph.D. and I went on the job market,” he said. “I was lucky enough to score a job at [Johns] Hopkins. The academic job search is pretty grim and brutal, generally speaking. There aren’t many tenure-track positions. When I was lucky enough to get one, that was it. Martin and I took a chance on Baltimore and it turns out we really love it. There’s an amazing bumper crop of cool bands and weirdo people to hang out with and be friends with there, so it worked out real well.”
Matmos also works with Björk, having appeared on a number of the singer-songwriter’s recent albums and tours.
“We self-released our first two albums and there were 10 copies that went to London,” Daniel said. “[Björk] bought one of them and really liked it. She’s an incredibly omnivorous listener and knows so much about music. She still turns me on to all kinds of stuff. She’s still finding all this crazy shit that I’ve never heard of and I’ve learned a lot from her.”
As if he doesn’t have enough projects going, Daniel also has a side project, The Soft Pink Truth, which focuses more on danceable electronica.
“It’s a pretty major difference,” he said about how The Soft Pink Truth compares to Matmos. “Matmos is about Martin and myself finding a place where our aesthetics overlap where we meet. Soft Pink Truth is about me being very self-indulgent and creating a certain persona. There’s something vey obnoxious about Soft Pink Truth. I think maybe it’s overcompensation for the fact that most of my life is scholarly and quietly reading 400-year-old books. When it’s time to make The Soft Pink Truth, I try to tap into my ‘go-go dancer in gay bars’ past. It’s that mindset of staying up all night in a club and hearing ridiculous music.”
Matmos brings its washing machine to Philly for a performance conversation with Heather Love 7 p.m. April 13 at International House Philadelphia, 3701 Chestnut St. For more information or tickets, call 215-387-5125 or visit http://vague-terrain.com/.