May 29, 2011
Tonight is Berlin, tomorrow is Leipzig, and then we bid a farewell to Europe. Tour has been delightful and we wish to thank John Wiese, Gianluca Turrini, Martin Hoersch, and Nikita Lavrichenko and all our choir members across the continent for the good times. Citizens of Los Angeles and San Francisco, strap down and get ready for strange Matmos manifestations in your cities: Saturday, June 4th at the Hammer Museum in LA; Wednesday, June 8th at the Bottom of the Hill in SF.
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April 24, 2011
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February 17, 2011
With the melting of winter’s ice and snow, Matmos will soon emerge from its studio hibernation to commit a bewildering variety of public outrages.
03/02 – Baltimore County – The atrocities start on Wednesday, March 2nd, when we will speak on the campus of UMBC (that’s University of Maryland, Baltimore County) in lovely Catonsville.
04/06 – Baltimore - Compounding the damage, on Wednesday April 6th we will lecture at the Mattin Center on the Homewood Campus of Drew’s very own Johns Hopkins University, a few blocks from our house. At both of these “lectures” you can expect to hear examples of our work, spicy personal stories, and theoretical and technical digressions. Snacks are often served at this sort of thing, but we make no guarantees.
04/09 – Birmingham, England - Sometimes people come up to us after our shows and ask “Who makes your videos?” The answer is M. C. Schmidt, and it’s a real honor to transmit the news that somewhere in the vicinity of Saturday April 9th M.C. will have a special screening of his video work in Birmingham, England at the IKON Gallery. This event is part of a festival in which a personal favorite of ours, Martin Creed, is rumored to perform. Someone tell us if this is true.
04/09 – Brooklyn, NY, on April 9th Martin’s improv-unit side project INSTANT COFFEE! will be performing at an event hosted by the Issue Project Room but held at Little Field, which is near by. INSTANT COFFEE! will be joined on the bill that night by our frighteningly awesome pal, Marcus Schmickler, and and and C Spencer Yeh, Carlos Giffoni, CoH, and Robert Piotrowicz! Golly! http://www.issueprojectroom.org/music/unsound-new-york-littlefield-coh-carlos-giffoni-robert-piotrowicz-c-spencer-yeh-marcus-schmickler-instant-coffee/
04/16 – Pennsylvania – Every so often Matmos has had the honor of being offered a residency at an institute of higher learning. Harvard and Oxford are now joined by an institution much closer to home, Haverford College in Pennsylvania. As the concluding event of a weeklong “residency” (no, not couch-surfing) there, on Saturday April 16th we will do a special performance on the campus of Haverford College in Stokes Hall at 8 P.M. The event will be the premiere of our first chorale (which is, no doubt, not technically speaking a chorale, but who’s keeping score?).
05/06 – New York City – People who read Matmos liner notes will no doubt recall the gorgeous and spooky string arrangements that the composer Jefferson Friedman created for the Matmos track “Semen Song for James Bidgood” on The Rose Has Teeth album. On a forthcoming CD for New Amsterdam , Jefferson’s string quartets have been recorded by The Chiara String Quartet and paired with some Matmos remixes of same, and the release of this work is the occasion for two East Coast concerts featuring both ensembles. On Friday the 6th of May Matmos will play together with The Chiara String Quartet at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City. Following from this, there are rumors afoot that we might also present this double header in Philadelphia on Saturday, May 7th too, so be on the lookout. Buy tickets here: https://secure.gigmaven.com/events/4644/orders/new
05/14-30 – EUROPE – Once we’re really warmed up from all of that, and once Drew has taught the final installment of his graduate seminar in the Department of English on “Early Modern Literary Ontologies” and M. C. has finished his fledgling semester teaching video at MICA, it’s time to get in a van and punish the people of Europe with a quadrophonic Matmos / John Wiese tour! We’ve loved John Wiese’s approach to sound design and noise forever, and Drew and John have been kicking back and forth a collaborative project for many years too, so it just makes sense to join forces and blow eardrums together. Adding immeasurably to the festivities, San Diego’s brightest hope Jay Lesser has agreed to be in Matmos for this tour too, so expect gnarled synthesis and bloodstained video cameras (a long story . . .).
14/05/11 Glasgow (UK), Old Fruitmarket
15/05/11 Birmingham (UK), MAC Art Centre *
16/05/11 Dublin (IE), Button Factory *
17/05/11 Belfast (UK), SARC *
19/05/11 London (UK), Auto-Italia *
–>21/05/11 MILANO (IT) Leoncavallo* THIS IS A CHANGE!
–>23/05/11 Rome (IT), Circolo degli Artisti * CHANGE OF DATE!!
–>24/05/11 Bologna (IT), Scuderia * CHANGE OF VENUE!
26/05/11 Paris (FR), La Gaite Lyrique *
27/05/11 Brussels (BE), VK *#
28/05/11 Metz (FR), Les Trinitaires *
29/05/11 Berlin (DE), Hau1 *
30/05/11 Leipzig (DE), Centraltheater *
* w/ John Wiese
# w/ Oval
Drew is very sad that he will be missing Maryland DeathFest this year, but touring Europe with Jay Lesser and John Wiese will make up for missing Corrosion of Conformity’s reformation of the “Animosity” lineup.
06/04-05 – Los Angeles – This sounds like a lot already. But it’s not the end! We are pleased to be able to cryptically hint that we will be in Los Angeles on Saturday the 4th and 5th of June to participate in a very ambitious but top-secret event called “Art&Politics”, a two day combination of academic talks, dramatic and musical performance which Drew is in the middle of planning with Professor Kenneth Reinhard of UCLA. When the time is right, you’re going to hear a lot about this, as some pretty incredible people have agreed to take part. But that time is not yet upon us.
06/08 – San Francisco – If our gear holds out, we will play a show at our Alma Mater, The Bottom of the Hill. I believe our pal Wobbly will open for us…and probably play with us for a reunion of Simultaneous Quodlibet lineup. Did you buy that, by the way? You really should. It’s very dense, it’s sort of like three records in one…at the same time!
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February 16, 2011
Enjoy many breathless minutes of us us us! This was a fun day for us…though perhaps we talk too much? Here’s the show:
http://www.motherboard.tv/2011/2/15/electric-independence-matmos
…and some car commercials.
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December 24, 2010
Greetings good people of the Internet. We are home from our recent sojourn in Germany, where we played six shows in Frankfurt and Berlin as the live musical accompaniment to “(theLID” a work choreographed by Ayman Harper (formerly of The Forsythe Company) and featuring Baltimore’s own Jermaine Spivey and costumes, stage and set design by Tomi Paasonen of Finland. We’re going to do some more performances of this piece in (deep breath) 2012 in Texas and in Germany, so please plan accordingly.
Jermaine Spivey struggles with the Wyrm during The Lid with Matmos accompaniment in Germany this year.
It’s been a year with major ups and some downs too. In April, we had the honor of performing at Carnegie Hall with the Kronos Quartet at their kind invitation; despite a sneaky slide guitar cable hiccup, the show was a delight. Drew’s mom was there! We will play with them again in the springtime in Scotland, no less!
Matmos with Kronos Quartet...ok this is actually at Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. but it's a lovely picture.
We also played some fun shows this year with Konk Pack, Leprechaun Catering, Sissy Spacek, the Bang on A Can all stars, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Emeralds, Dam-Funk, and lots of other folks we like at cool spaces like The Bank and the Fifth Dimension. Martin toured with his improv / noise / weirdo trio Ear, Nose and Throat across the West Coast.
Drew gave lots of academic talks about melancholy, materialism, and punk rock, published some articles about Shakespeare and masochism and demonology, and taught a seminar on Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”.
We released not one but two albums this year, both in collaboration with friends and fellow travelers of longstanding. In May, our collaborative record with So Percussion, “Treasure State” came out on Cantaloupe Records featuring cover artwork by Robert Syrett, and we hauled lotsa gear and a prickly cactus about as we toured the United States and Canada with Josh, Jason, Adam and Eric spreading the post-everything crypto-classical rhythm gospel with some help from the Lexie Mountain Boys.
Matmos and So in The U.S.A.
A smattering of the cornucopia of gear that is So.
Fat delicious Dosa in Vancouver.
In October, the collaborative record “Simultaneous Quodlibet” (see below), a three-headed monstrosity created with Wobbly and J. Lesser and featuring cover artwork by Jason Mecier, was released by Important Records. Big things really do come in small packages.
The losses this year were personal and of wildly disparate categorical “sizes”: the mysterious departure of our cat Gibson for parts unknown was followed by the death of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, whose artistic work and personal example are an enduring beacon (“light shines darkly”). We will miss them both. This turning over of the decade prompts us to continue to work on the new Matmos album, “The Marriage of True Minds”, an ongoing four year plot which just keeps thickening. You can also expect some surprising remixes, and some concerts in the spring in the United States and Europe in the summer, but we aren’t ready yet to get all TMI about that yet.
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November 15, 2010
Boundry Walls from High Zero 2010
Here is one of the performances from The High Zero Festival that we (in this case, just M.C.S.) were involved in. See below for a fuller explanation of High Zero. This improvisation threw together:
M.C. Schmidt playing hi-hat, scrape-y things, egg timer, voice and v-synth,
Mike Muniak playing Mackie 1604 mixer feedback,
Keith Fullerton Whitman with his Doepfer modular synth system and
Dragos Tara using unknown software on a laptop.
There was no preparation or discussion between the players beforehand. You probably don’t want to play this while a baby or invalid is trying to sleep.
Clockwise from UL, Mike Muniak, K.F. Whitman, Dragos Tara, M.C. Schmidt Photos by Stewart Mostowski
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November 6, 2010
Some years ago we participated in the filming of a documentary about music. It has reached fruition, and here is a link to it! Have a look!
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October 11, 2010
Rather like the seemingly random and spontaneous emergence of
carbon-based life-forms from a swirling soup of enzymes and primal
goop a long time ago, the surprisingly catchy and toe-tapping
quasi-music heard on this album started out as chaotic and
off-the-cuff group improvisations recorded while Matmos, Wobbly and J.
Lesser indulged in a West Coast tour. These improvisations were then
heavily chopped and screwed, layered onto each other, and additional
overdubs of drums, organs, and bizarre ephemera were committed to hard
drive at Snowghost Studios in Montana. As you might expect from this
three-headed monster’s collective predilections, the results throb
with vintage synthesis, plunderphonic theft, and skittering and loping
rhythmic loops that take various genres (doomy jazz, exotica,
reggaeton, musique-concrete, horspiel) hostage and then abandon them
in favor of the open road. Privileging flows and dissolves over
crowded rest stops, the result is a hallucinatory journey into the
frontiers of organized sound, where the intuitive and the
labor-intensive shake hands.
So: what is a simultaneous quodlibet, you ask? A well known web-based
source of unattributed lies and distortions tell us that “a quodlibet
is a piece of music combining several different melodies, usually
popular tunes, in counterpoint and often a light-hearted, humorous
manner. The term is Latin, meaning ‘whatever’ or literally, ‘what
pleases.’ “ It goes on to specify that, among the major types of
quodlibet, “in a simultaneous quodlibet, two or more pre-existing
melodies are combined.” Despite that prickly feeling on the back of
your neck, you can rest assured that there are no “mash-ups” on this
album: the title just felt like a high-falutin’ way to talk about the
layering of multiple streams of potentially unrelated sonic ectoplasm
that somehow feel “right” when placed on top of each other, a layering
that took place in the intuitive moment of improvisation and again in
the eternity of studio re-workings that ensued later. If you put the
above quotation in an N+7 generator, you get: “A quodlibet is a piggy
of mutation combining several different memos, usually popular turds,
in counterpoint and often a light-year-hearted, humorous mantel. The
terrapin is Latin, meaning “whatever” or literally, “what pleases.” “
Which is closer to the truth.
But who made that astonishing cover illustration/construction? The cover is a
collage portrait of America’s funnywoman Phyllis Diller, executed by
Jason Mecier out of the personal effects and discarded property of Ms.
Diller, with her consent. (We don’t know if Spike also consented.)
Jason is responsible for the portrait of Patricia Highsmith
constructed entirely out of snails and cigarettes that was used as one
of the portraits within the artwork for the Matmos album “The Rose Has
Teeth In the Mouth of A Beast.” He is no stranger to demanding,
labor-intensive procedures, and no stranger to some of our planet’s
most intriguing celebrity garbage cans, either.
Why is this record on vinyl? We love vinyl, and during the editing
process these works naturally took on the form of two LP-length flows
of sound. This was the most appropriate format.
Simultaneous Quodlibet, available now from your finer retailers and at Important Records.
The Dignity of Labor. Dr. Daniel, Lesser, Wobbly and M.C. Schmidt It was 109º when this photo was taken in Weed, California.
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October 5, 2010
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September 18, 2010
Halloween is the anniversary of Drew and M. C. sealing the deal and becoming a couple. We can’t remember if this year will make it 18 years (our porcelain anniversary) or 19 years (our bronze anniversary), but in either case it’s been a long ass time. And what better way to punch our way that much closer to the big 20 than piling all the gear in the car, driving for hours and rocking out onstage in front of a random gathering of thousands of strangers in Asheville, North Carolina? We’re not going to list everybody who is playing at MoogFest, but we’re pretty stoked to play at a festival that includes DEVO, Van Dyke Parks, Emeralds, Panda Bear, Dan Deacon, Dam-Funk, and Ikonika (and we will probably be all drunk and sing along with Cee Lo’s ‘Fuck You” song at the end of the night too). Anyway, Matmos does it to the crowd on Saturday night, October 30th. Go see www.moogfest.net for all the details, and ticket info and whatnot. And plan your damn costume, come on people.
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