Matmos bandmates Drew Daniels and M.C. Schmidt discuss their decade-long relationship and the unconventional instrumention used on their new album The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast.

By Lawrence Ferber
Photos by lissa ive tiegel

Some artists use paint to color their portraits. But Matmos, aka Drew Daniels and M.C. Schmidt, use less typical materials -- semen, snails, an inflated cow uterus, and burning human flesh.

To explain: on their latest album, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, the San Francisco-based partners in music and life created musical portraits of queers they admire including philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, beat author William Burroughs, Paradise Garage DJ legend Larry Levan, feminist-gone-awry and attempted Warhol assasin Valerie Solanas, and Pink Narcissus director James Bidgood. As with their previous albums, they did so by creating unconventional sound samples, from ejaculation to lasers being shot through snails to Daniels' being burned by a cigarette, and manipulating them into electronica ditties that range from funky disco to jazzy to experimental.

Both doctors' sons, Daniel and Schmidt first met in a San Francisco bar where the former worked as an underwear-clad go-go boy. Confessed audiophiles, finding joys in everyday sounds most of us don't notice, the pair immersed themselves in sampling and experimenting with a diverse and unlikely barrage of subjects, activities, and materials. Matmos' eponymous 1997 debut first exposed listeners to their expertly tweaked, sampled sounds (drawn from crayfish neural tissue, hair, and bowls of water, among other things). 1998's Quasi-Objects and 1999's The West followed, earning them remix gigs with the likes of Bjork, who enlisted them as collaborators and tour partners on 2001's Vespertine. Their own 2001 effort, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, utilized the sounds of elective plastic surgery -- liposuction, laser eye correction, and rhinoplasty amongst them -- while 2003's The Civil War utilized old time Americana instruments.

Bjork appears on their new album's track “The Rose Has Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein” -- reading from Wittgenstein's “Philosophical Investigations.” Artists including Ghost World's Daniel Clowes and Jason Mecier were commissioned to provide visual portraits that accompany the tracks (which will be part of a downloadable digital booklet on the iTunes version).

IN: How did you go about choosing the people you made portraits of?

M.C. Schmidt: It didn't start out to be like a gay thing. It started with Wittgenstein and Burroughs. And then we were like, “How about Patricia Highsmith?” “How about Boyd McDonald?” and realized oh, they're all…

Drew Daniels: Fags and dykes!

M: This is a perfect application of the word queer! These people for the most part were not rainbow flag-waving gay. They were more perverts. Just freaks and their sexuality was part of the festivities.

Could you talk about making “Germs Burn for Darby Crash,” which is dedicated to the former frontsman of The Germs who committed suicide in 1980?

D: I love the Germs and wanted to make a track about Darby. At first we made this really shitty, wannabe electronic punk, bad Nine Inch Nails rip-off song. Then we thought this doesn't work. There's no way you can do justice to the music of the Germs by imitating them. So we had to try again and I thought why don't we make a track of me getting a “Germs burn?” If you're a big fan you get a cigarette burn on your inner left wrist. But it's only really a “Germs burn” if you get it from a member of The Germs. So we got to know Don, the drummer, a hilarious guy, and asked if he would burn me and he was cool.

M: He was enthusiastic, possibly.

D: We went to L.A. and shot video of him burning my wrist with a cigarette and then the song is built around the amplified, manipulated sound of the flesh burning and my crying out in pain.

M: Honestly, he didn't hold [the cigarette] down hard. With age we all soften and he didn't really grind it into Drew's wrist enough. I was like, aw, come on! He was like, “I didn't want to hurt him!”

Did many people know Darby was gay while he was alive?

D: The people he was fucking knew he was gay. But most of the straight fans and even band mates didn't know until after his death. He's kind of an example of the tragic cost of the closet. Obviously there were other things going on too, fading stardom, and heroin addiction, but his [being in the closet] was a big part of his despair.

I love that you did a track for Bavaria's King Ludwig II, a king who rather would sink his kingdom's money into resplendent homes and pretty things instead of wars.

M: That is a fabulous king. Have you seen the Visconti movie? And Visconti, being a big homo himself, there's some great debauchery in it.

D: Like the alpine boys in lederhosen drinking mead out of horns and carousing with Ludwig and lots of eye-rolling.

What's the story behind the samples on “Public Sex for Boyd McDonald?”

D: I was recording a bunch of bears during International Bear Weekend at Blow Buddies. The hard thing about secret recording in sex clubs is they play all that really bad house music all the time, so I had to go outside to the outdoor sex maze in order to isolate just the sound of sucking and fucking. I tried to be really low-key and wore these baggy cargo pants to hide the minidisk recorder in my pocket. I would just sidle up if two guys were inside a stall and reach my hand under the stall with the microphone while they were going at it and pray they didn't notice this weird, intruding hand.

I love the crazy titles of the stories in Boyd's anthologies. Do you have favorites?

M: Yeah. “That Sailor Was Wild as Hell.”

D: “Priest Loves Cock, Archbishop Doesn't.” Or “The Love That Dare Not Speak its Name: Asslicking.” The man had a gift.

You used an inflated cow uterus on “Tract For Valerie Solanas.” How did that come about?

D: It kind of snuck up on us. We get signed up for weird shit in the mail and one of the things was a farm supply catalog. They were selling this preserved cow uterus ,vagina and reproductive tract. Man, this thing reeked, it smelled so bad. Weird, dead pickled stench. We inflated the uterus with air by sticking our vacuum cleaner inside and reversing the flow so it was sort of pumped-up with air. You squeeze it and can make these saxophone-like noises. We built the track out of that.

I wonder what Valerie would think.

D: When listing the people she hates and ought to be killed [in The SCUM Manifesto], in that list are lousy musicians. I wouldn't want to hedge my bets about what side of the fence we'd be on. It's Valerie's call.

How did you procure the audio sample of semen for “Semen Song For James Bidgood?”

D: I'm not sure if you know this but if you grasp your penis and rhythmically tug it while thinking about very good things… What I did was lay out a big sheet of paper and put contact microphones on it and watch [Bidgood's film] Pink Narcissus and jerk off and recorded the sound of the semen striking the paper. It made a kind of impact fluid noise that had a fairly juicy rhythmic heft to it, shall we say. That got turned up and manipulated and built into the main rhythm of our song.

Speaking of love, you two have been together for over 10 years now. Is everything going well? Is the magic still there?

M: We have an unusual problem with our relationship in that we literally spend too much time together. Most people have different jobs and it’s like, “I never see my boyfriend because he's always at work.” We're literally together 24 fucking hours a day, seven days a week.

D: I guess what we've got going is a folie a deux situation. It's like a shared madness of two people.

Sex, burns, surgery. Is anything too creepy or disturbing to record or sample?

D: There are recordings we've stumbled onto where you wonder is it uncool to do this? I had a friend who stole a cassette from his mother while she was doing this psychological course and it's all these field recordings from mental hospitals of really disturbed people. They're amazing recordings, but you have this “maybe I'm being a little predatory here” feeling. I felt the same way about the Cops: Too Hot For TV video. You have to take a shower after you watch that thing.

For more information, see brainwashed.com/matmos.