Matmos on David Lynch, Death, Failed Experiments, and Hesitant Optimism

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

Matmos are absolute legends in the realm of left-field music, very few have done it like them over the years and their exploratory nature has functioned as a true north star for anyone who's ever wanted to take the elements of sound and do something daring and fascinating with them. They just released their latest fascinating album Metallic Life Review on Thrill Jockey, and back in April I had the good fortune of hopping on an hour-long chat with M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel; when we got on the call, the first thing they mentioned to me was the passing of Pere Ubu's David Thomas, effectively breaking the news to me (I hadn't really been online earlier that morning, was probably an Alternate Side Parking day) so we jumped right in on that topic and took it away from there. Check it out:

Pere Ubu was one of those bands where, if you're somebody who's at all interested in left-of-center experimental music, they shifted your brain chemistry a bit. What was your guys' relationship to David's and their music?
Martin: I was in love with this boy in high school—a drummer—who changed my whole life. He loved Pere Ubu, and it was so unlike most of the other stuff that he listened to, which was much more like punk rock. It was so strange, and it really took me many years to wrap my head around what the hell that music was.

On a more personal note, many decades later, I got really drunk with him at one of those pop conferences. I just decided, "He's friendly, we were talking, I'll go drink-for-drink with Dave Thomas." Well, let me tell you: Very shortly I was shit-hammered, and he was the same. He had a lot of very amazingly misogynist things to say, in a sort of hilarious way. My primary argument for him was, it's not women, it's other people. Because I've had all these same exact experiences, but with men. So, you know, maybe don't be so hard on the ladies. It's just people who suck.

Drew: I was in grad school and applying to give a talk at the pop conference, and I wound up on a panel that was Greil Marcus, Dave Thomas, and me. I felt severely outgunned. I'm a fucking schmendrick grad student, and here's Dave Thomas and Greil Marcus. But it was a super fun panel, it was incredible. He gave a talk about Ghoulardi, a horror TV show host that turned out to be the father of Paul Thomas Anderson, and the impact of Ghoulardi on his childhood—a kind of American nostalgia that's extremely warped and charming and relentless. That was kind of the Dave Thomas vibe.

Martin: He's one of those people where I guess they're all just slated to die this year—like David Lynch, who sort of makes me not so ashamed to be American.

Drew: The relationship to American reference points—"What shall we do with the drunken sailor," found American speech and language—gets distorted in Pere Ubu land. American signifiers become perverse and monstrous in David Lynch's work. It's a model of how to deal with the cultural inheritance in a creative way that's personal—not dogmatically, but in a way that's actually excited about the discovery of what's all around you. Maybe that's something I relate to. Pere Ubu is Cleveland, I'm from Kentucky. There's a Midwestern feeling of being outnumbered where you gotta find the weirdos. That element of finding the smaller community within non-coastal areas is something that's very American and always goes overlooked by people who live on the coasts.

As someone who's lived in the coastal Northeast my entire life, there's obviously a rich cultural history in New York City. But sometimes the way scenes and communities rise to prominence here can end up feeling a bit homogenous—whereas I feel like I observe something different when looking into other communities across the country. Do you guys have any insight into why that might be? Am I just off the mark here in general?
Drew: Looking at it from a Baltimore perspective, rent is low, and that often means you can afford to live in different ways—whereas the pressure of Manhattanization produces that homogeneity that you're talking about, where only CVS can afford real estate. That said, Baltimore's not in a sort of golden age moment right now. A lot is collapsed. That's the flip side of poverty: Poverty means desperation. It's not cute, and it's not avant-garde cosplay.

Baltimore has exposed me to a lot of ways of being creative that were not on my radar when I was in San Francisco, and I don't think it's unrelated to the fact that San Francisco is so wealthy that it was just a given that everybody would have laptops and use software, and that would be their their métier. In Baltimore, that's not a given at all. But I don't want to put on airs, as if I'm a dumpster-diving crust punk—I have health care and a bougie professor job. I don't want to do any stolen valor here.

You guys mentioned David Lynch's death, and "The Chrome Reflects Our Image" is dedicated to him. Talk to me more about the impression that he made on you guys as artists.
Martin: My reaction [to his death] sort of surprised me. The whole thing about Americanism is what I think about with him. He had a way of looking at this stupid place and finding the heart in it. The other guy who really started these thoughts about my relationship with the U.S. was Matthew Barney. We were sort of friends with him when we were working with Björk, and he we were on tour in Europe and Asia and had been gone for months, and we were sitting at breakfast and he was like, "I miss the U.S. so much." It was like he slapped me in the face, because I didn't miss the U.S. at all. Bring me another palace! Bring me another temple! How could you miss the United States? But he really loves the United States, and if you think about his work, it makes total sense.

Loving the United States means loving these dark, fucked-up people in motels in rural Missouri. When you think about Wild at Heart and all these people that have these intense interactions in banal places that you know would just rather forget because they're so boring...Lynch has a way of making you see a shitty motel as magical. It's possibly evil magic, but magic and compelling nonetheless.

Drew: My relation came up through my family. Growing up in Kentucky in the '80s, my stepfather ran the artsy movie theater in Louisville called The Vogue, and he showed Eraserhead. He was really excited about it, so I saw Eraserhead when I was very young. My first real date with my girlfriend in high school—Heather Love, who turned out to be a big name in queer theory—she's a lesbian I'm gay, but in high school we were boyfriend-girlfriend, and we snuck into the movie theater that was showing Blue Velvet. We were underage, so we bought a ticket for a different movie and then snuck in to it. That was our first date.

To me, these films are associated strongly with pivotal adolescence moments, as well as the model of an artistic career that involves a relentless persistence. He seems like a best-case scenario for a certain kind of fidelity to your vision—right down to going digital for Inland Empire, which is an incredible movie. We went to see it in the theater when it came out, and the commitment to that long-form, psychedelic, endless cascade of scenes without an implicit clear throughline...Lynch's formal willingness to do things like that is incredibly inspiring.

I will be honest: We'd written the core melody of that song before he died.

Martin: Yeah, it wasn't like we made the song about him.

Drew: What happened is, the melody existed but then Martin wanted a real twangy guitar line—and he was thinking of Twin Peaks when he thought of it. The dimension of the song was already on our minds, and when David Lynch died it was like, "Oh, well, let's definitely dedicate it to him."

Martin: We were ripping him off before he died, is my point.

Drew: The title is taken from a deleted scene from Fire Walk With Me.

Martin: There's another thing that's so David Lynch. It's so odd that he released an entire film of just the outtakes from Fire Walk With Me. It's an entire movie! And it was good that he deleted those scenes—because, David Bowie, he's just not very good as that character. I love David Bowie, I love Twin Peaks, but that wasn't working, and it was good they deleted it. He's so bizarre and brave to be like, "Oh yeah, if you wanted to see all this stuff, here it is." But there's that scene where the little person gets a creepy look and goes, "The chrome reflects my image," and we were like, "Wow, that's the name."

Drew: The phrase having metal in it, and the idea of reflecting upon oneself and of being distorted by the medium that reflects you, here's a lot of poetry in the line. If you think about its implications, that maybe relates to sampling and sound

Martin: And a lot of the stuff we worked with to make this record was chrome!

Drew: Yeah, I was going to say, literally reflective material.

Martin: I'm looking at chrome trash as we speak.

You guys sampled cemetery gates on this record, and there's also contributions from Susan Alcorn before she passed away. It seems like this record, for you guys, is a bit about death. Is that a topic that was on your mind while putting this one together, or has it just been a general concern?
Martin: "Yes" is the short answer. I have fewer years in front of me than I have behind me. That only really just dawned on me, because I'm turning 60 in the next few years. It wasn't so much the number as that I had a weird heart thing which turned out to be nothing. I had high blood pressure, which, medically speaking, was not a big deal, but it just basically alerted me—like, "Oh, now I'm taking pills every day for the rest of my life, and obviously I'm going to take these pills forever now. I will never stop taking these pills." That's definitely a sort of mile marker—like, "You're on your way out, grandpa."

Drew: The comedy of it is that we were in Rome in the summer, and it was like a frying pan. It was so hot, and we were desperate to get cool, and Martin was like, "Ket's go to the underground crypt where Saint Sebastian's remains are kept."

Martin: He's sort of a gay icon. Saint Sebastian, for whatever fucking reason I don't understand, is always this hot and hunky boy tied to a tree, riddled with arrows.

Drew: Homoeroticism is attached to the meaning of Saint Sebastian because there was a Roman centurion, supposedly, that was in love with him—and Sebastian refused the sexual advances because of his Christianity, so he's sort of associated with queer desire. Yukio Mishima's first masturbation experience, apparently, was looking at images of Saint Sebastian. There's a kind of queer sainthood to Saint Sebastian.

Martin: So there was no air conditioning in the shitty hotel that I booked, and we were like, "Where can we go?" I was on Google Maps, and I was like, "The tomb of Saint Sebastian."

Drew: It's underground, and it's really cool. There's a beautiful sculpture from somebody from the Studiolo of Bernini of Saint Sebastian in the church above. But when you go down in the cold, where the crypt is, first of all, you're not sweating anymore. You're comfy. But the actual crypt is protected by this metal gate that had these prongs on it, and Martin plucked one and I was recording it. The pluck had this really incredible, woody "thwock" sound, more like a marimba. It was a beautiful and very unexpected sound. Sonically, it doesn't sound metallic—it sounds wooden, and when you're working with only one material source, you can have a million clinks that all sound like a metallic clink. So when you get a woody "thwock" out of metal, you're like, "Oh my God, this is so exciting, because I can now expand the kind of sonic palette of the record." So the the start of "Metallic Life Review" sounds a little like a marimba, a little like a xylophone—but that's the prong of the Tomb of St. Sebastian. I guess it begs a lot of questions of, "Is that a morbid sound? Is that a sound about death?" Maybe not! The sound itself is kind of fruity.

Martin: It's the discourse that makes the difference.

Drew: Yeah, when I tell you, "This is the sound of a crypt," then you think death, mourning, loss.

Martin: Plus, even before we got old, Drew was just a sad goth.

Drew: Yeah, true. My last academic monograph was about pleasurable scenarios of killing yourself—Joy of the Worm—and it's about scenes where people commit suicide, but there's something comedic or ridiculous about their suicide. Thinking about death—playful ways to imagine death—is certainly on our minds as people. That's very separate from the genuine, terrible loss of Susan. In terms of the meaning of the music, the music is not about the fact of her death. It was a song that I wrote, and then I imagined that we should get someone to play along. We realized that the initial pitch I sampled was a sour pitch—a little bit weird. So when I stacked these chords, in terms of the tuning they were slightly odd. She had to do a ton of labor to transcribe and notate how to play every single chord and arpeggiate everything.

Martin: She did it without even mentioning it until it was all all done. We went over to her house, and the table was covered with these pieces of paper—her interesting, insane charts. We just thought, "She's a professional musician," and she was like, "Well, no, this is what I had to go through."

Drew: We had no idea what a pain in the ass we were. So making that song was quite joyous. She was like, "This sounds like American songbook jazz chords," and when I hear "Changing States" now, sometimes I hear a little bit of "Rainbow Connection," from The Muppet Movie—and then sometimes it kind of sounds like "Pennies from Heaven." I think of that Borges story about the guy that sits down to write a novel, and he rewrites Don Quixote. Maybe that's what I did with "Changing States."

Martin: But don't people get this feeling all the time who write proper music? "Jesus, this is just a sad ripoff of blah blah blah." I mean, there's only 12 notes, for God's sake.

Drew: Well, right—like, isn't that Nirvana riff really a Boston riff? This is why mostly we don't fuck with notes. We start with noises and chopped-up sounds.

Martin: Or why our melodies are so dumb.

Drew: But that song had actual chord changes, which we don't generally do—and that's why we needed Susan. And, she was awesome to play with, but very exacting and precise. She was very concerned that we get what we wanted, and we had a lot of trust in her alongside, frankly, our ignorance. She knows her instrument.

We went to see her play with David Grubbs. They were on a bill together and it was it was a great, beautiful performance. We'd just mixed the song a couple of days later, went to bed, woke up, and saw the news that she died. It was really shocking and very sad. We were crying our guts out, and just it's a terrible loss to Baltimore and to music. What she did with pedal steel, she'd draw these connections across the musical map and kind of see the potential to bring Messiaen or Piazzolla's music into this instrument that is so overloaded with—

Martin: Speedy West.

Drew: She brought a very different energy, made it lyrical, and expanded the repertoire—and yet she could also shred, if she was in an improvising context.

Martin: And she loved Speedy West! She loved all the clichés of pedal steel as well as playing Messiaen on it.

Drew: She had it all, and that was what made her so appealing as a player and why it's such a terrible loss. I'm glad that we collaborated when we did.

Martin: Gather rosebuds while you may.

Drew: You can't treat people like they'll just be there forever. You can't make that assumption you know.

Martin: We were blithely saying, "We're gonna make a record with Peter Christopherson" for years. "We'll get around to that." No, you will not get around to that.

Drew: He was like, "Come to Thailand, let's do something." That was something we always hoped that someday we'd do. You have these pipe dreams, and then people just die. That's what happens. So if you're thinking about something, don't be shy. Go ahead and ask. That's the lesson here.

Obviously, you guys have collaborated with a lot of people over the years, in various ways. Anybody that's surprised you in terms of witnessing their creative processes or artistic mannerisms?
Drew: I would say the weirdest experience of trying to collaborate was the scale of The Consuming Flame, because we invited 97 other people. It was kind of like speed-dating—it was really weird, accommodating the bandwidth of that many people. It was also weird because we didn't interact with them so much.

Martin: Mouse on Mars always fuck with us. We've not done a lot of stuff together, but every time we have, there's something sneaky, like "Heh heh."

Drew: Our only rule was 99 BPM.

Martin: And everything they sent us didn't quite fit—and I could tell it was on purpose. Like, they were fucking with us. "Try to fold this into your stupid little idea." I mean, they were great sounds—and they were obviously really excited about it because they sent us six different things. Some people just sent us one file. It was fine. There's a noise band from Ohio, Mothcock, who just kept sending us shit. They'd send us 18 things and were like, "This is really fun."

Drew: We could have made a whole record with just what they sent. Chuck Bettis sent the stuff that honestly felt like he was trolling us with a parody of what Matmos sounds like like. It sounded more like Matmos than us. That's part of what's weird about this sort of self-other interface of collaborating—you explore, "Can we sound like this?" We've always relied on our friends that have talents that we don't have—someone like Mark Lightcap from Acetone playing guitar. That's a very singular instrument.

Martin: Then it goes the other way—maybe not so well. I think Anhoni was surprised by what bad musicians we were.

Drew: Yeah, when we were in her band, in that opera, I feel like she was expecting—

Martin: Expecting us to understand how to play "real music"—which we don't know how to do. I can't even bullshit it. "It's in G-flat minor in seven." We'd look like possums that you open the trash can lid on.

Drew: I felt like a dog that was trying to walk on its hind legs—and I mean no shade. She had this band of absolutely crack players.

Martin: Yeah, a bunch of hot session musicians who are all super fun and great players—and we were just not on that level.

Drew: We do what we do. We're good at being Matmos, but we aren't plausible people that you can throw into an ensemble and it just works. It's humbling, and the flip side of being very inspiring when you get to work with someone that takes the music in a direction you couldn't do without them. But sometimes you aren't bringing it, and you feel a little like you just showed your ass.

You guys also like working with rules and concepts. I'd heard from someone once that, when Nathan Fielder was making Nathan For You, they'd have to abandon entire concepts near the end of shooting them because it just didn't work out. Have there been any over the years that you've had to abandon for specific reasons?
Martin: What we learned was not to make rules that would be so delimiting that you could end up with a bad result. "Only work with metal"—you can't really go wrong with that. "Only work with plastic," there were definitely weird pains in the ass—and we got sick of the sound of plastic, because it does actually have a sort of a fingerprint to it. I did have this legendarily dumb idea—

Drew: Martin wanted to drag a piano through the desert.

Martin: I wanted to put wheels on a piano, take down the sustain pedal, put microphones on it, and drag it through the desert and record the sound of the strings making a drone. As I describe it, I'm like, "Yeah, that's probably fucking impossible." Maybe if we were Nathan Fielder wtih $335,000 to test this idea—but we had $1,000 to test this idea. We could buy one piano, we could put one set of wheels on it, and I'm begging my friends to come and help drag a piano. The wheels that I put on it were too small—it should've been something larger, like wheelchair wheels, because the whole thing just sounded like a covered wagon.

Drew: It sounded like crap.

Martin: There was no piano in it at all—it was all just wood, jostling, and then it fell over and just tore to pieces in one second. We were just dragging the harp, and we got a recording with the wood sloughed off of it in seconds. It was extremely fun to go out to the desert with all my friends and do something ridiculous.

Drew: Yeah, we had a fun day of it, but when we listened back to the recording, we were like, "Okay, well this isn't going to be an album." We need it to work conceptually, but we also need it to work as sound and as music—and we wouldn't foist it on somebody like, "Well, here's the documentation of an action, take it or leave it."

Martin: Well, we always say that if we did experimental music, we would have put that out. That's a statement, a language. We aren't actually conceptual artists—we're pop musicians, and at the end of the day, we don't put out the bad experiments.

Drew: Also, life is long, and it may be at some point in the future that a project emerges where we need a covered wagon sound—and we've got it in the archive,
a covered wagon with very small wheels. That's also true of this record, which is part of why it's called Metallic Life Review: we're finally using sounds that we've had, in some cases, for decades.

Martin: Yeah, "Norway Doorway"—we made that recording, like, 25 years ago.

Drew: It was a sound in a hallway that just blew our minds when we were loading into the club, and we've had it forever. We love that it sounds like a Miles Davis like trumpet riff. There's something so musical about that door, but we never really had a song for it. Once we committed to a whole album with metal sounds, it was a metal door, and we were like, "Okay, then this is it."

Having Thor Harris was a bonus. He actually wrote to us cold. I'd always admired Swans, and I really like Water Damage, so when I got the letter, I was like, "Well, actually, there is a record we're working on where you would make a lot of sense if you want to join in." We sent him what we'd made, and he drummed along with it on a bunch of metal objects that he'd been saving. He has a hoarder side of collecting things that make cool percussive noises, so it fell into place quite beautifully. Not every Matmos album would have room for him.

Let's talk about the passage of time when it comes to what you guys have witnessed over the years as musicians. What's changed? What's stayed the same?
Drew: The most positive change that I've observe is that there's a lot more awareness about race, gender, and class. I think people talk and think about their art in ways that are much more conscious. When I think back to the '90s there was such an implicit—tacit, never named—whiteness to indie rock and the whole ecosystem that we were in. It was even more problematic if you think about so-called IDM and its relationship to dance music.

As many terrible economic consolidations and eviscerations of entire kind of ways of making a living—the obvious terrible changes, the rise of Spotify, the dumbing-down of ambient—there's a lot of bad things, but one of the good changes is that we now seem to be able to talk about and name the elephant in the room a lot more. I don't know if that materially changes things, but I think it's positive—and, I guess, these days, I'm definitely struggling to notice and remember what is positive about the present, because mostly the present really fucking sucks.

As far as continuity, I feel a through line to work in the '90s around a softening of attachment to genre. That's a process that started in the '90s and is still present, and maybe is even exacerbated now. That's a long process that maybe started when, I don't know, we could say post-rock or shoegaze were examples of this. Opening up to texture, that's positive, and I think that's enduring in formal ticks of the present moment.

I love how fucked up a lot of music sounds now.

I do too.
You know, the super blown-out distorted bass that you hear in like a Cortisa Star track—I would never do that. It's amazing, the formal oddity of the things that happen now. Also, there's genres that you might write off because the center of the genre is gross, but the edges of the genre are actually pretty amazing. Dubstep is a good example of that, where bro-y EDM bangers are often incredibly corny, but the people at the edges of that scene—their ear for timbre, their desire to do very strange things with signal chain and compression, are formally really amazing. I feel like a lot is up for grabs now, and I think that's positive—but, I am desperately looking for something to be positive about, because it just seems like every day is like fresh horrors.

Going back to your point about finally being able to talk about race, class, and gender in music—when I first started out as a music writer, around the age of 19, I was always really shocked to encounter a lot of other music writers—mostly white men—who not only never wanted to have those conversations, but also considered them cringe to even bring up. I was kind of like, "Are you guys really not thinking about this shit like all the time?" I found the pushback from the last six or seven years of how much should we be talking about this stuff to be really interesting as well. Even referring to it as "this stuff," on my part, is ridiculous, because it's what drives modern life and the interesting parts of living, just considering others' experiences. But it's been extremely refreshing to see people have to have conversations that they're not used to having, or just to feel challenged. I think the discomfort is healthy.
Drew: I agree. There was this chokehold of Dylan fandom seamlessly turning into Steve Malkmus fandom, where it was about appreciating a certain lyrics-oriented way of responding to art that was about detachment, or the admiration for detachment. And you can admire all of those. I like Malkmus, and I like Silver Jews. But even if you're going to appreciate David Berman, think of a line like
"Nobody cares about a dead hooker/ Looking like one, standing for many." That's a line of David Berman's lyrics that is about race, gender, and class. If you're going to be adequate to your objects, even at the level of "Let's care about indie songwriting," you need to bring talking about that to bear. If you aren't, you're not even dealing with the art you claim to love so much.