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Matmos: Spin Doctors

Matmos

Matmos presents domestic music, made by a domestic pair, from a single domestic item

Here’s the first thing to know: The album—all of it, every sound on its single 40-minute track—is played on a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II washing machine.

The second thing you need to know is that Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel, the collaborative (and romantic) pair who’ve recorded a series of brainy, witty sample-and-sound compositions under the sobriquet Matmos over nearly two decades, understand with total clarity what a gimmicky project this might sound like, on the merits. But Ultimate Care II was designed from the start to be a less weighty composition than many other Matmos projects—like A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, which used sound samples from surgery clinics as its building blocks, or The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast, whose songs are each dedicated to a gay public figure, often of some controversy—that inspired the duo in some way.

No, Ultimate Care II was, as Schmidt says, “supposed to be banged out quickly. Our last one was so ponderous, and took so long to make, that I wanted to go the other opposite direction. The washing machine is in our basement, with our studio. I could reach it with a mic, I could hit it with a stick, I could rub it with my hand.”

The Baltimore-based Schmidt and Daniel sampled that rubbing and hitting, as well as the washer’s natural programmed wash cycles, then processed them through a variety of tactics and machines, often with collaborative assistance. “(Martin designed it) as an exercise in discipline and focus,” says Daniel. “The goal was to make the domestic sound both familiar and exotic, but also to make something that was musically rich. We wanted to turn those sounds into something that could approximate a whole musical vocabulary.”

The rhythms of the machine afforded the project some dynamism, but the tonality came through innovative methods. After sampling several sounds, for instance, the duo attached a transducer to the washer, turning it into a speaker. And when the recorded sounds of the machine were played through itself, the result was a tonal feedback that provided a static note Schmidt and Daniel could harvest, convert into a sine wave, and shape with synthesis engines into a “playable” tone.

This is clearly gearhead stuff, though not without precedent. As Schmidt and Daniel openly admit, their immediate influences are heavy on musique concrète and tape-music—genres that constitute, it seems fair to assume, an acquired taste for many listeners. But to the question you’re about to ask: Yes, Matmos’ album is tonal, it’s listenable, and it’s musically rewarding.

“I pine for people’s ability to listen to long pieces of music,” says Schmidt. “I do feel like we’re sort of ambassadors for some people between what could be called ‘low’ and ‘high’ music. I dearly wish that people had more of an ability to listen to 25-minute pieces of music.”

“I’m with Martin,” says Daniel. “We wanted it to be really exuberant and over the top. We were pretty fanatical about following a rule and trying to see how far we could take it. We never cracked: ‘Goddammit, let’s just play a trombone!’ I suppose the question is, ‘If someone’s drumming on a washing machine, is that the sound of the machine or the sound of hands drumming?’ So, I guess if we wanted to get really uptight, we could only have used the sound of a washing machine struck by a second washing machine.”

—Eric Waggoner