BARCELONA – The electronically-generated music that is the nervous system of this past weekend's Sónar Music Festival may seem to reside on the coolest edge of tomorrow’s sounds, but most of it owes its elasticity and legitimacy to pioneers of the last century. Blouin ARTINFO sat down in Barcelona with Matmos, a duo that has been working at it for some 20 years (alone or with other musicians, most notably Björk), and they are very smart about to whom they owe debts. Co-composer Drew Daniel, a Shakespeare professor at Johns Hopkins University in a parallel life, cites a litany of forefathers — from the noise-to-music “Moses figure” of John Cage and the cut-and-paste sonorities of William Burroughs to the Musique Concrète tradition of the Groupe de Récherches Musicales, to the esoteric Oulipo literary movement of George Perec and Raymond Queneau. Tzara, Pythagoras and others not often invoked at music fests blithely tumble forth as they explain their game.
Deferential to their roots they may be, but Matmos are fearless in their willingness to tread new ground, and gleefully grab onto unique, sometimes outlandish sources of sound for their hyper-collage experiments. In a recent piece, they used a track comprised almost entirely of a recorded liposuction procedure — not despite the anxiety it caused, but to exploit it (“We like to play with hearing in an estranged way”). The quarrelsome byplay between Drew and his partner (in music and in life), Martin Schmidt, suggests that it is as much artist-ego friction that powers their art as any harmony they can muster between them. In fact, Daniel, a master of the pungent metaphor, nails their peers’ art and its tendency towards nerdish solitude by mentally drawing a Venn diagram between “electronic music” and “autism”.
At their Sónar performance, they played mostly new material — avoiding “calcifying” is a serious matter for them — including a piece based on a chapter by Christian Bok in which “o” was the only vowel used. Perversely constrained, but very Matmos.
Watch our ARTINFO video highlighting ten acts at Sónar 2014, HERE.
