Matmos Interview: On Metal, Loss, and the Politics of Sound

Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt reflect on Metallic Life Review, recording live, and honoring Susan Alcorn.

For nearly 30 years, Matmos — Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt — have made music out of the unlikeliest stuff: liposuction suction, telepathy experiments, the synthetic crunch of plastic waste. Their albums shift wildly in tone and method, swinging between rigor and absurdity. A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure sliced up surgical procedures. The brilliant Supreme Balloon floated off into all-analog synth fantasia. Each record resets the terms: new rules, new tools, new questions.

Metallic Life Review keeps that streak alive. Built from bells, scrap metal, glockenspiels, and the eerie swoop of pedal steel, it’s a record that clangs, sways, and glows. There’s tension everywhere — between form and flow, melancholy and play, abstraction and pulse. It’s a loose, searching album that feels both handmade and haunted.

If Plastic Anniversary was tight and synthetic, Metallic Life Review opens up. The 22-minute title track, which takes over side two, was performed live in the studio after being molded over the course of performance and production. Featuring the late Susan Alcorn on pedal steel, it drifts from clangor to shimmer, a piece that lands somewhere between séance and sendoff.

Matmos recently caught up with In Sheep’s Clothing to talk about the new album, the process behind it, and what it means to make experimental music when everything feels like it’s falling apart.

Randall: Whose idea was Metallic Life Review?

Drew Daniel:: I suppose this one was more technically my idea.

MC Schmidt: Had you been storing it up for years? I literally don’t know that.

DD: It’s funny — this is the first time we’ve done an interview and I don’t have a party line about it, so I’m trying to be as honest as I can.

Great.

DD: We’d been gathering metal sounds for decades without necessarily any sense that there was a home for them. You know, there’s a piece by the Art Ensemble of Chicago called The Bell Piece that Martin’s always loved. It’s just this incredible, crazy aviary of bell sounds. And that was something that, every time Matmos would DJ, we would play that track. We’ve just always loved it.

At first, when I was imagining a record, I thought, let’s try to make something gamelan-like — one big piece. And I thought about that for a while, but the pieces really grew into very distinct entities. What ended up happening is that I’d say I’m more in charge of side one and Martin’s more in charge of side two. I don’t know — I mean, we both played equally on everything. Having made Plastic Anniversary, I suppose there was a sense of, “Well, let’s try metal instead.” Metal, of course, is omnipresent just like plastic, but it’s sonically quite different. And I think it was a return to pleasure centers, in a way, for me — because I loved bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept. in high school. The sort of industrial clatter, smacking on things.

We got some of that out of our system on “The Rust Belt.” But as we started to work, it seemed like it needed a counterpoint. And for us, the counterpoint became these melodic ideas. I wrote some chords that I quite liked. More like I came up with a sequence of many chords, like a kind of knotted string of chords in a progression I thought was compelling, and then we had Susan Alcorn play that on pedal steel. Then Martin and I sampled a bunch of glockenspiels and metal celeste-type chimes and tuned that, and then he played a lot of melodic ideas. And that’s where the song “Changing States” came from. And I feel like—

MC: He asked a simple question.

No, my God, please.

DD: “Changing States,” in some ways, was one of the very first songs made for this record. And a lot of what followed was kind of…

MC: Drew’s been lately seduced by real music.

[Laughter] What do you mean?

MC: Chord patterns and notes and stuff. He’s made an album as his alter ego, The Soft Pink Truth, it’s all beautiful orchestral stuff.

DD: That’s not out yet. I’m still working on that.

MC: Nonetheless, it’s been up my ass for the last… [laughter].

DD: I think in some ways our collaborations — it’s become alternately centrifugal and centripetal forces. We come together when we think a song is strong enough to be a Matmos song. But we kind of counter each other. The more I want to play melodies, the more Martin wants to improvise and make noisy musique concrète stuff. And I think you can kind of hear that push-pull in the sort of toe-tapping moments on side one, and the more exploratory, textural stuff on side two.

And side two, you mentioned in the notes, was improvised? Or recorded in one session?

DD: Yeah, it was recorded live, and it is, in fact, the first take. And then we’re folding in parts from Paris of the same piece. Because it’s at the same tempo, we were able to sync them. But yeah, it’s all live in the studio.

MC: But it’s not improvised in the sense of free improv. We’ve never done any of that before. But it was all live in the studio. Neither of us knows how to read music or really memorize music. Drew’s better at it than I am, by far. I sniffed a lot of glue and Drew did not. But we knew what we were going to do and in what order.

DD: It’s a very dense set of layers. Two years ago, we went into Tempo House and recorded a bunch of improvisations with metal objects. Then we chopped up the improvs, made quasi-songs out of them. We toured that and tried out different variations that we liked. Then we went back to the studio and re-recorded what had emerged from touring as a live, one-take, start-to-finish, 22-minute performance. Then we edited that a little. So that adds four layers of time in it: improv, tour, performance, editing. So the music is a kind of dense mixture of being in the moment and being free to fully embrace concrete and change and transformation. And I think that gives the music the flow — it goes from dense to very… you know, people-in-a-room sounds, like throwing bowls on the floor. Really raw sounds. [To MC:] Did I skip a step?

MC: Not at all. It’s definitely a metaphor — or whatever — a reflection of our lives, in that Drew is much more like, “At 8 o’clock we are getting up, at 8:30 we eat breakfast, and 8:45 I put my coat on and at 9 o’clock I walk out the door.” And I’m more like, “What if we didn’t eat breakfast? Can we do something different?” And he’s like, [makes flustered sound] “Oooh god!” Like he’s Frodo and I’m Gandalf.

DD: Frodo? Or is it Bilbo?

MC: Sorry, it’s Bilbo. [laughter] Anyway, so we know what we’re going to do in these things. Describing it as improv is accurate in one way and totally inaccurate in another. I will occasionally — not very often — do something that’s not in the program, like when we’re doing these sets or whatever, and he looks at me with horror.

DD: That’s the love and trust that’s defining of Matmos. I have a stopwatch and a loose sense — okay, we’ll play this part for about seven minutes, move into this for six or seven. He’s…

MC: He’s obsessed when a venue says, “We’re hoping the set’s about 45 minutes.” He’s like, “Forty. Five. Minutes. It must be 45 minutes.” And I’m like, “Jesus Christ, Drew, this is experimental music.” But he’s like, “But they will be very angry.”

They will.

DD: That’s damage from academia, because in that world I lecture at 11, finish at exactly 11:50. It’s my time to do whatever but I don’t go over and I don’t delay. And I think Martin is more about the moment, the vibe, what he hears in the room, what he’s inspired to do. And I guess Matmos is where we meet in the middle between my control-freak side and his more Zen side.

MC: [Whispers in stoner talk] What’s up, man?

The process of recording that piece—side two—that was a new way of working for you?

MC: If we had done it the normal way, we would have recorded each of those little sections in that thing as a song and then glued them together. Instead we were like, “What the fuck, we’ve done it a bunch of times. Let’s go into the studio and record it all at once. It’ll be more organic.”

DD: And I think there was more flow to the assemblage because when we’re playing live, we let patterns stack and build and then we take form apart and there’s a sort of drift into another form, something else emerges. In our studio approach, we don’t usually allow that kind of breathing room. We sort of did on The Consuming Flame, because of the nature of how it was created, but in general, we don’t really have that approach, so this felt new. It was weird to go to the studio and play live in the studio.

Our model is kind of Throbbing Gristle, Heathen Earth. People get mystical about first takes — we did four takes and we really loved the first one, so we edited what we didn’t like, or where we wanted to change some aspects of it, but it is a first take. I’m really glad we stuck with that. It flows in a way it wouldn’t if we were fussy at home.

Susan Alcorn performs on some of these pieces and passed not long after you worked with her. Can you talk about her and your collaborations with her?

DD: It was a terrible loss—a very sudden loss. You know, I had not — I mean, we had just seen her, like, five days before she died, and she had seemed quite strong and quite together, you know, so it made us sad. Sad for the loss, for her partner David, for the whole Baltimore community. So, you know, we were really grateful that we had the chance to make some music with her. And it’s kind of a thing where, when there’s people you admire and you say, “We should do some music together,” like, when you’re young and strong and you think you’ll live forever, you’re kind of like, “Yeah, I’ll get around to it,” you know. 

A little bit before, Sleazy from Coil had said, “You should come and visit me in Thailand,” like, “Maybe we should work on something,” and we had said, “Yeah, we should really do that.” And then Sleazy died. You should connect and speak up and not be shy if there’s something that you want in life, because it’s not promised, you know? So it’s a very bittersweet thing, because I don’t think this music at all is about death or sadness, you know. The song — Susan’s response when we first played it for her was like, “Well, it really sounds like the American Songbook.” I don’t know if I was subconsciously plagiarizing “Pennies from Heaven,” but I kind of hear it in the chords a little bit. So the song isn’t about loss, but when she died we dedicated it to her. She’s on “Steel Tongues” at the end, doing this very scary, floating, kind sour, mysterious chord — that’s her in the last 45 seconds.

I mean, the pedal steel as an instrument already has a little bit of a swoon to it. The kind of singing that makes people cry has a little waver in it. It’s called a Pajatura. There’s something about the tremble. I think that the swoops in pedal pteel playing is part of why it has that strange kind of tearjerker force. There’s something about a pitch swelling. You can hear it in violin glissandos. For us, what’s weird is that, I wonder if I had sampled something a little less difficult to play along with if we would have collaborated with her or not. You know, it may have been that original tuning fork sample being so strange was what sent the whole song in that direction towards her. I’m glad it worked out the way that it did for the song. I just wish she was still alive.

I just have a couple more questions.

DD: We’re new to this, so that’s why all our answers are so long.

No, it’s all good. Believe me, you’re better than Stephen Merritt at interviews.

DD: [laughs] Yeah, but he’s probably deeper, so he sounds amazing.

MC: Wait, does he mumble? 

There are long pauses where you’re not sure if he’s insulted by your question or thinking. Like, unusually long ones. Actually, here’s my last question. It’s based on something Drew posted the other day about feeling strange promoting music right now. How do you square a release with the political chaos occurring right now.

DD: There has been over the last 25 years a kind of downgrade in the cultural centrality of musical culture as such. That is because of a zero-sum game conflict with social media, the rise of social media and new ways that people identify and connect. And, you know, maybe it’s an even longer process. Maybe it’s a 50-year process. I do think there’s still a global community of people that are very passionate about music, about talking about music, about sharing new music, and about advocating for what is possible. I don’t think that music is sort of over or has been superseded.

MC: Except perhaps in the marketplace, which is not the way to gauge the value of things. People forget that a lot.

DD: You could bring up the gaming industry, too, not just social media. But that’s separate from being in the middle of a slide into fascism, the collapse of checks and balances we naïvely thought would restrict Trump. It just feels weirdly selfish to try and make a bunch of people focus on your creative labor at at time when people are being disappeared without due process. Everybody might turn to that Brecht poem about, “Did you write poetry? Yeah, we wrote poetry about the bad times.” It would be very misleading to drape this music in some kind of mantle of response to Trump, but I do think there’s a way of caring for American traditional landscapes — musical environments and instrumental traditions that are American but don’t necessarily collapse into some  macho, racist, genocidal imagery.

MC: It’s hard not to think about the phrase, “Living well is the best revenge.” Why would we stop doing the things that? I don’t mean to suck my own dick by saying what we do is “the good,” but it’s hard not to think about it that way if you’re me. Why would I stop doing the good things and cease cultural activity? Fuck, I don’t know, maybe it is necessary if we’re going to devote all of our time to resistance, to fighting the power.

DD: We dedicated a song to David Lynch because he passed while we were finishing the album and there was a very kind of twangy guitar line that Martin heard in his head that he asked Jason Willett to play, and that’s on the song “The Chrome Reflects Our Image.” We picked that title because it’s a line from Fire Walk With Me, and because David Lynch represented, I think, a way of relating to American culture and its past that doesn’t look away from what’s horrible about it, but has a strange kind of affection for everyday American-ness.

And I think in the moment of Trump, like, we’re deeply at risk of allowing people to collapse together and presume to speak for and about what America is. I don’t know. I’m stumbling myself because I’m not sure how to describe the mixed emotions that I feel. I’m proud of the music that we made and I want to share it with people, and I hope they like it. And I do know that for my own mental well-being, going to small shows and concerts and just remaining connected to people in my community has been one of the best emotional lifelines as I watch, you know, our sad national slide.

I mean, one can always allegorize art and you can say, well, the Iron Age was distinguished from the Golden Age. The Golden Age was this time of plenitude and happiness. I’m talking about a sort of ancient Greek mythological era, not the robber-baron Golden Age. That’s contrasted with the Iron Age, which is supposedly an age of competition and scarcity and cruelty. And it definitely feels like that, like we are living in a new Iron Age. We’re living in an Iron Age that our fascist leader wants to pretend is a new golden age. But it’s not.