| Matmos | |
|---|---|
left to right: M.C. Schmidt, Dr. Drew Daniel |
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| Background information | |
| Origin | San Francisco, U.S. |
| Genres | Electronic, glitch, ambient techno, post-rock, post-industrial |
| Years active | 1995 - present |
| Labels | Matador |
| Associated acts | Björk The Soft Pink Truth Disc |
| Website | Official Site |
| Members | |
| M.C. Schmidt Drew Daniel |
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Matmos is an experimental electronic music duo originally from San Francisco but now residing in Baltimore signed to the Matador Records label. M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel are the core members, but they frequently include other artists on their records and in their performances, including notably J Lesser. Much of their work could be classified as a pop version of the musique concrète genre. The name Matmos refers to the seething lake of evil slime beneath the city Sogo in the 1968 film Barbarella. The name might also originate from Swedish, literally meaning "mashed food".
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In 1998, Matmos remixed the Björk single Alarm Call. Subsequently, Matmos worked with Björk on her albums Vespertine (2001) and Medúlla (2004), as well as her Vespertine and Greatest Hits tours. In November 2004, Matmos spent 97 hours in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as artists in residence, performing music with friends, musical guests and onlookers. The live album Work, Work, Work, essentially a "best of" collection of the session, was released as a free download from their website.
Matmos gained notoriety for their use of samples including "freshly cut hair" and "the amplified neural activity of crayfish" on their first album [1] and "recorded the snips, clicks, snaps, and squelches of various surgical procedures, then nipped and tucked them into seven remarkably accessible, melodic pieces of experimental techno" for their album A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure.[2]
M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel are also a couple, as stated in an interview in BUTT Magazine.
Schmidt formerly worked as a teacher in the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Daniel has successfully defended his dissertation on the literary cult of Melancholy, directed by Janet Adelman at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. This brought the band to relocate their home base to Baltimore in August 2007. Daniel also has a personal dance music project, The Soft Pink Truth. He is a contributing writer to the online music magazine Pitchfork Media, and wrote an essay about the Throbbing Gristle album 20 Jazz Funk Greats for the Continuum Books series 33 1/3. Both Schmidt and Daniel appeared in the Sagan music film Unseen Forces by Ryan Junell.