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Sewage And High Society: Our Night With Matmos

We go backstage at this year's Dia Gala to talk frequency modulation, fine art, and "Everbody Poops" with the synth duo.

This past Monday Dia Art Foundation held Dia Fall Night, an annual gala and after party to benefit its exhibitions, programs, long-term sites, and public and educational programs. As part of the event, electronic duo Matmos performed a new piece commissioned especially for the festivities. We sent one of our music writers, Mike Sugarman, to investigate. 

Image Courtesy of Billy Farrell Agency.

Matmos played for about an hour. The band was scheduled between a formal dinner and a DJ dressed like a guy in a Disaronno commercial who perched his Macbook on a little stand and started with “Get Lucky”. The performance was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation for its annual fall fundraising gala, a yearly opportunity for the foundation to woo patrons en masses with risky and bold art. The piece was entirely comprised of new music, with the duo making collaged music out of sounds collected in Dia's future project space, the same giant, concrete room in which they performed the piece. For this hour, the two sample-happy experimentalists from Baltimore transformed the former marble-cutting factory into an aural funhouse.

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Left to right: Max Eilbacher, M.C. Schmidt, Drew Daniel. Image courtesy of Mike Sugarman.

Image courtesy of Mike Sugarman.

For example, there was a choir of people talking over one another, reciting transcriptions from psychic experiments conducted for Matmos' latest album, Marriage of True Minds. They wore opaque sunglasses and headphones plugged into bootleg iPod minis. With total sensory isolation, some did not stand close enough to the microphones to be heard. The duo and couple--M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel--opened their set by walking down the aisle, blowing duck calls into one another's mouths. Schmidt threw metal rods from a children's xylophone against the wall. Daniel--a Renaissance Literature professor at Johns Hopkins University--had to cancel his Paradise Lost lecture for this performance, which features what both men refer to as a “toilet piece.”

Schmidt throwing rods. Image courtesy of Mike Sugarman.

The toilet piece entailed a $1700 plumbing job which amounted to snaking a camera through a toilet near the stage area to, basically, look at rich people's waste. Almost directly after this point in the performance, one man tried to use this bathroom even though live video of the toilet being dismantled had just been broadcast to the entire audience about 10 minutes prior. The audience was not particularly attentive. There was such a heavy din of schmoozing that video-manipulator Max Eilbacher--whose band Horse Lords used to practice in Schmidt's and Daniel's basement--asked me if the music could be heard over the chatter. I said probably, and quickly switched gears to note my disappointment in not seeing a log in the sewage pipes. Eilbacher and his girlfriend, Kodi Fabricant, came up from Baltimore to help with video for the toilet piece, so he had at least a three-hour car ride to consider this lack. Aptly, he noted that all of the stuff on the walls of the piping was most likely "carnage. But no, no Mr. Hanky or anything."

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I met with Matmos at their dress rehearsal the night prior to chat about the gala performance. Naturally, the toilet piece was the first thing Drew Daniel brought up when he noticed my outmoded portable recorder, which itself has been subjected to some carnage and is something of a turd these days.

Drew Daniel: I love those Zoom recorders.

The Creators Project: Yeah this one is a bit old.
DD: I guess I have a newer one. We used it to get [the sound of] our bathtub. Martin [M.C. Schmidt] was like “we need some more splashing noises for the toilet piece.”

M.C. Schmidt: It did super well.

CP: What's the toilet piece?
DD: We're collaborating with this plumber named Angelo. See that toilet there? We're gonna rip it out and stick a c-snake down the tube and into the sewer and we're going to get a video feed live of the sewers beneath the building. We're gonna explore for about 12, 15 minutes with the c-snake and just keeping shoving it in, see how deep we can go.

Angelo, collaborator.

MS: It was our dearest hope that these would be the toilets the audience was using. They've done an end-run around us where there are now porta-potties. I thought it would be funny. I didn't mean anything totally obnoxious. Of course I think rich people should support the fuckin' arts. But I thought it would be funny.

A fine book once said Everybody Poops). 
DD: It's a great leveler. The plumber was into it. The plumber is into hardcore bands and punk rock so he was down with arty plumbing, which was good because we tried to explain “well you're part of a musical performance.”

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There is also a choral piece, and an electronic performance.
DD: Yeah, we're doing three pieces that are special for the night that we made in this room. We shot video of Martin and myself playing these duck calls into each other's mouths.

MS: It's such a fun trick. Have you ever sung into somebody's mouth?

I have not sung into somebody's mouth.

MS: It's kinda fun!

[They do the duck calls and the singing. They are kind of making out. Martin makes brief eye contact with me.]

Image courtesy of Mike Sugarman.

MS: So you get some frequency modulation.

DD: So we're doing that, and there's videos of us doing duck calls into each other's mouths in this room with this long, cavernous reverb that Martin's manipulated. We're going to play a piece like that, and then a piece that's built out of throwing metal rods at the wall, and then I've sampled that and built this sort of melody out of it. Then Martin sings on top, and you may have some special lyrics about giving.

Image Courtesy of Billy Farrell Agency.

MS: I may.

DD: You know that Salvation Army thing where they're always jingling the bell and it's about getting some dough? And then you think about the context of this event, it sort of locks into that a little bit. That might be why we're going to do that. The chorale is with eight singers that Kelly [Kivland, curator at Dia Art Foundation] found that aren't professional singers. We asked for willing amateurs. They're all going to listen to mp3 players. You know when you're on the subway and someone's singing along to something on their headphones and you're kind of embarrassed for them because they don't know how loud they are?

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MS: It's like eight people!

DD: It's like eight people doing that, but everything that people are singing along to are these structured--it's text but it has a pitch, but they listen and they imitate what they're hearing… It has this odd '80s performance art feeling.

Mosphere, part of the Matmos performance. Photo by Mike Sugarman

MS: I totally grew up with Robert Ashleyand Laurie Anderson.

DD: It's this really strong like homage… What is it Sam Fuller said “Homage is just French for rip-off.” It's kind of this homage to Robert Ashley. But they're singing transcripts of these experiments we did for telepathy from Marriage of True Minds. We haven't done that piece around here yet.

You mean transcripts of what people were saying.

MS: Yeah, the words of what people are sing-talking are just straight transcripts from these psychic sessions.

DD: Sometimes they're really ridiculous.

MS: Some of them are silly, some of them are these beautiful like psychedelic poems. It's fun when they're all on top of each other because you hear sort of snatches. I sort of imagine if you were psychic, if you could hear people's thoughts, if you were in a crowded train or whatever, it would be like this. Like a million, or whatever, twelve voices all talking at the same time.

DD: They say that's what schizophrenia is like. Schizophrenics feel like 12 to 15 people are talking to them all the time.

Image Courtesy of Billy Farrell Agency.

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It sounds like one of the overriding ideas here is cacophony.
DD: The challenge really grew out of this space. There's nothing in this space that makes sound.

[Heater on the ceiling kicks on]

MS: Well except for that goddamn heater.

DD: But [the space] has this long trail of reverberation. We wanted to explore what that resonance was like so we brought a lot of loud things and built them to [sonically] spike, and there's a trail of decay as the sound dies out. Unfortunately now that there's all these hangings and soft surfaces, it's less reverberant.

MS: Yeah, the things they do to make this place nice have actually ruined the thing that we wanted to do. There's a metaphor there somehow.

Mosphere, part of the Matmos performance. Courtesy of Billy Farrell Agency.

DD: It's weird, we make a lot of heavy weather about the concepts that drive the work before the work's done. But when the work is happening, there's a certain amount of intuition and drift and guess work. Martin just had a strong vision of “we've gotta rip out that toilet and see what's down there.” I don't know where it came from but he really wanted to do that.

MS: Well, honestly, when they first asked us to do this, I thought they were like “we want you to do something about the space.” It was just a misapprehension actually.

DD: We wanted something with the Earth Room. But Walter De Maria actually…

MS: What's the Earth Room?

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DD: It's this installation by Walter De Maria in Soho.

MS: It's this apartment on the second floor.

DD: Filled with dirt.

MS: Where there's like 500,000 pounds of dirt.

DD: It's this intense, huge space that's nothing but dirt. We were going to go and record just the sound of that room. But Walter De Maria was very strict about not wanting the room documented. You have to just go.

MS: He's the guy who also built The Lightning Field.

DD: The Dia Foundation is tied to that, and De Maria had just passed away, so the Dia Foundation didn't want to countermand his views. That was fine. So then we thought, alright, let's focus on this room in a really hardcore way. The pieces that we made are the result of that.

Fancy guests. Image Courtesy of Billy Farrell Agency.

So you record stuff in this room, process it, play it back. To what ends?

MS: To amuse people at a party? That is the job! And make it relate to the space. I would by no means claim that these are major works of ours. There was a job and we did it.

DD: I like the experience of austerity and not having much to work with and what can you make out of what's around. I think that's always been the point of our band, and that's always been the point of weird one-off situations like this. It's not a particularly promising environment sonically. But it turns out that if you throw a metal rod at that wall and let it fall, it's a nice sound.

MS: This kind of room, generally, well the friend of mine who's doing sound is like “well, that's a turd.” It's the worst kind of room to play music in possible.

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Big box.
MS: All hard surfaces. Everything hard. It's like a church. Churches are a nightmare too.

DD: They're great for choral music, but they're bad for like fast music or electronic music.

MS: String music, choral music, single people singing-- all great for things you think of as church music.

DD: But that's why the majority of our pieces don't have the fast, tricky edit intensive sound because it wouldn't be good in here. So we have all that bassy drone stuff. Like that toilet piece, it's going to be more like Sunn O))) style, rump-shaking.

Image Courtesy of Billy Farrell Agency.

Maybe you'll hit the brown note with that one.
MS: Yeah yeah, so you see where we're going with this.

I hope you guys find it.
DD: Well, wear Depends if you're coming to the show.

The Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974, is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term, site-specific projects including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer(1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks)(1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all in Manhattan; the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in Quemado, New Mexico. Dia also commissions original artists' projects produced for the web and produces scholarly publications.

Dia currently presents temporary installations, performances, lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in the Chelsea section of New York City, the neighborhood it helped pioneer. 

@suugarm