Matmos post mortem

IC: What did everyone think of the visuals during th Matmos lecture?
KG:Some of it is relevant, authentic, like the germ burn...
KG: The healing of the scar was somewhat surreal. Certainly the visual are very literal, not abstract.
-Some of the visuals are provocative for the sake of the performance.
KG: Did anyone see them in concert?
-Yes, the visuals in their live concert are more relevant to the music.
KG: The lecture was quite spontaneous. It did not have a staged feel.
(Speaking of the intimacy of Matmos' work)
IC: They seamed to retain an intimacy in their work that is in contrast with the publicness of the live performance.
(Speaking of homosexuality in contemporary art)
There's shift of the sexual politics today that has allowed couples like Matmos to reveal their intimacy with each other in their work.
You could see the relation unfold during the talk.
KG: Yes, there is almost a tension between the two. There is the silent one and the talkative one.
(Speaking of the spontaneous nature of the two on stage)
KG: I like how they took advantage of a technical malfunction as a way to demonstrate a bit of the way that they operate. They just played with what happened. They embrace spontaneity.
KG: In reference to conceptual art of the 60's, how does conceptual art today rely on text narative to aid the understanding of the work of art. Does one need the text to understand conceptual work?
-Yes certain pieces are inaccessible without the description
KG: Others don't need that kind of description.
IC: Mastmos refers to the re-dematerialization of their work. Especially in their obsessive documentation of their sound research and methods.
KG: In reference to Bruce Nauman's work, to which Matmos' album refers to the piece " The rose has no teeth" , their is a tendency to over explain your art work today. The curator act as a organizer but also as a critic of the work the is curated which an odd position to take. There is a distance between curator and artist.
(Speaking of public privacy)
IC: There is an intimacy in the closeness and tactility of their work that is consistent with the way that their sounds are recorded. The sounds suggest a nearness that can't be perceived in the visual medium for example.

Recombinant Media

Linky

more matmos photos!

hope everyone had as good a time as i did.

ATC 10th Anniversary: Matmos

cheers,
joanne

Matmos Photos

Hey Everyone,

I just posted the photos I shot at last night's ATC event to Flickr. Here's the link:

http://www.flickr.com/gp/75788916@N00/235oqB

Enjoy!

Question for Matmos

There are notable similarities between the "theme-variation-theme" form encountered in some modern jazz music and the "exposition-experimentation-decomposition" found in your work wherein a sonic palette is exposed to the listener in a discordant, asymmetric way and then formed into a rhythmic structure before being broken down again. My question deals with your composition style.

When you were creating soundtracks for pornographic films, you looked to film scores and existing pornographic soundtracks for guidance. When you explored the composition of house music, it was again possible to look to an established body of work from which to begin experimenting (or integrating). With Matmos' music, what musical traditions or trends do you look to with regard to arrangement, composition, and overall song structure? Is the above likening to jazz structure something Matmos has thought about?

Matmos question

Like the Dixie Chicks, you are a group without a genre in both the music scene and the art world. I could argue that your sense of playfulness and fun is one of the things keeps you at odds with both these worlds.
Do you agree?
Is this deliberate?

Questions {about, for} Matmos

A question I wanted to pose to the class, but didn' t have a chance to:

In their interview, Matmos refer to their experimentalism: "... usually it's generative, our homemade angle, but sometimes it's a disadvantage." This reminded me of the sort of happy mistakes of self-exploration Pamela Z referred to last semester. How does their approach, both in technique and attitude, differ from hers? (Requires some explanation of Pamela Z....)

A question for Matmos:

You say that some people fetishize the low-fidelity, "homemade" sound as more intimate. Can you elaborate more on how you balance the frustrating process of experimentation and your desire not to sound amateurish within your own concept of intimacy?

Three Q's for Matmos

Can you tell us more about your attitudes towards cover-songs? What does it mean to use field recordings as a means to cover a song, such as "Stars and Stripes Forever"? What would it mean to cover a field recording?

I love the sound that you hear from the inside of an MRI machine. But given the powerful magnetic field inside one of those tubes, standard metal recording devices couldn't work.. Are there sounds that you feel are inaccessible, given your methods of capture? Is there any correlation to the accessibility of sound, and the appeal of their use as the pieces of your creation?

How did you use an Enigma Machine in your music that's about Alan Turing?

-Kevin Lim

Questions for Matmos

1. You have described your musical process as consisting of two different approaches: (1) as a form of "curating" in which you propose a concept and execute a work according to what the concept dictates (e.g. tracks in A Chance to Cut), and (2) as more free-associative approach in which you engage in music-making, eventually identify a theme, and then build upon and refine that theme to create a complete track (e.g. The Civil War). Which of these two approaches do you prefer? How do they complement one another in your music-making? Have you found yourselves leaning towards one over the other more recently?

2. You've described The Civil War as an effort "to suture the English Civil War of 1640 with the American Civil War of 1865 with the domestic civil war between us boyfriends and bandmates with the current civil war in America between those who support Bush and those who despise him as the spineless usurper that he is" (Artforum, March 2004). To what extent are the aural juxtopositions you create in your work meant to be politically provocative? Do you strive to create such undertones in all of your work, or are some efforts more politically-charged than others? If so, what drives the difference?

3. What are the benefits and difficulties inherent to making music such as yours with someone who is also your partner and lover? Do you find that the nuances of your relationship emerge in the texture of the tracks you produce, or do you make a concerted effort to distance such emotions from your work? How has that interaction between work and relationship evolved over the time that you have been together and created music together?

Since I didn't get a chance to comment in class I thought I would throw in my two cents on Matmos and Musique Concrète

Musique Concrète, at this point, has a 50 year history that features a rich body of creative work and critical theory. I am by no means an expert in this area but I have composed several pieces in this genre of art music and I can at least point people in the right direction if they are interested. Do a search on Pierre Schaeffer, Musique Concrète, objet sonore, acousmatique or acousmatic, and you should come up with stuff that will at least give a cursory outline of some basic ideas fundamental to the art form. If you are so interested you can visit Brian Kane's site (recent UCB graduate) for a great article on Schaeffer: http://browsebriankane.com/My_Homepage_Files/Page2.html Also, for beginning-of-the-century precursors check out Russolo's Futurist Manifesto, The Art of Noises. Unfortunately Schaeffer's seminal text, Traité des objets musicaux, has not been translated into English and so remains basically unknown in the US.

Matmos as Musique Concrète:

Actually what Matmos does in terms of Musique Concrète is fairly standard and might be considered a bit banal. For me, their novelty comes from the marriage of the pop genre of electronica with the art music genre of Musique Concrète.

It is common for entire Musique Concrète compositions of 20 minutes or more to be based entirely on the manipulation of just 3 seconds of sampled audio. With a bit of experience it is fairly trivial for anyone to come up with radically altered sounds derived from source recordings; however, it can be a challenge to sculpt them into other completely different but recognizable sounds such as liposuction => drum beats. This is where craftsmanship comes into play and obviously Matmos are masters of their craft. There is definitely a sense of pride composers feel in the craft of there practice. I think this is in part what is behind Matmos wanting to document there source sounds so meticulously (they are showing off...in an analogous way it would be like Beethoven saying, "check out the wicked awesome way I used the neapolitan to modulate to that super remote key area"). When they say it doesn't matter if listeners know the source of the sounds I think we can basically take them at face value (in order to enjoy a piece by Beethoven you don't need to be steeped in the traditions and theory of Western music). Or rather, what I think they mean by this is, "we have encoded all the information we think is necessary for people to enjoy and appreciate our music as a musical experience" (having said that my Musicology colleagues would remind me that you can't every really separate music from its culture and context). If they wanted to make the sources of their sounds obvious to the listener and more a part of their music they would expose them as such as part of the piece (typical Musique Concrète practice). However, true to the inherent nature of Musique Concrète, understanding the source material brings an added layer and depth to the semantics, perception, and psychoacoustics of a work, and it can open a wonderful world of juxtaposition and perceptual/conceptual dissonance (likewise, in knowing Western musical traditions and theory Beethoven's music takes on a much more profound and expressive quality).

Further listening:

Schaeffer -- Étude aux chemins de fer
Schaeffer -- Symphonie pour un Homme Seul
Varese -- Poem electronique
Stockhausen -- Gesang der Jünglinge
Stockhausen -- Telemusik
Wishart -- Tongues of Fire
Wishart -- Voiceprints
Wishart -- Globalalia

There are some other great french masters but I forget their names at the moment. If you are interested let me know and I will dig them out.

-jeremy

For Matmos

Preface
On the subject of Materialization and Dematerialization, Matmos emphasizes the contrast between concretization of the recorded sounds and subsequest abstraction of it through the editing process. In that persepctive their work is radically different than "musique concrète". In a way, their work is akin to the work of artist Damien Hirst in the concept of "capture, isolate and display". The digitalization of the organic field recordings are in effect a form of post-modern specimens collection for later dissection. Except that in this case the dissection is presented in the narrative format of a song.

Questions
Do you want you audience to understand your music within the context of your conception? To what extend do you think about the different levels of perception of your work?

How do you situate your work within the context of conceptual art? Or do you?

"Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein"

Here's a track by track breakdown of the most recent Matmos album...

On Wittgenstein:

With regards to our decision to make a musical portrait of Wittgenstein based upon the sound of (among other things) teeth grinding and clicking, here's one of our favorite Wittgenstein quotes that you might want to chew on:

"When I imagine a piece of music, as I do often every day, I always, so I believe, grind my upper and lower teeth together rhythmically. I have noticed this before though I usually do it quite unconsciously. What's more, it's as though the notes I am imagining are produced by this movement. I believe this may be a very common way of imagining music internally. Of course I can imagine music without moving my teeth too, but in that case the notes are much ghostlier, more blurred and less pronounced." (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 28c, trans. Peter Winch)."

--steven

matmos

I am interested in the live performance of Matmos music. They acknowledge the disconcerting experience of watching "laptop" music live where there is a perceptual disconnect between the physical gestures of the musicians, if any, and what viewers experience aurally. How can live electronic composers and performers address the problems raised by separating sound from its source? Is there room for enaction, haptic feedback, and embodied musical gesture?

questions re: Matmos...

For class:

To what extent does our knowledge or awareness of the duo's process itself limit and/or dictate how we interpret the themes and ideas expressed within the records?

For Matmos:

What are your thoughts regarding the consumption and experience of hearing specific tracks outside the context of the album? And how--if at all--has your approach to creating albums or tracks changed now that iTunes and file-sharing allow and even encourage the purchase and/or distribution of individual tracks, as opposed to entire records?

--steven

Not to jump ahead but...

There's some interesting blog traffic about Doug Aitken's piece that's up at the moma.
A review by Paddy Johnson at http://www.thereeler.com/features/the_trouble_with_sleepwalkers.php

and a responce from Tom Moody at
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/

Both Paddy and Tom have excellent new media blogs, Paddy's regular blog is http://artfagcity.blogspot.com/

Worth checking out I think.