The Strange Sound of Music
On Sunday, Nov. 17, an anxious crowd waited in a line starting from Science Center D—and extending into Oxford Street—before the people were told they had to leave. The disappointed pack, many of whom had traveled from all over Boston to see electronic sound artists Matmos (a.k.a. Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt) perform that night, missed the premier event in the Office for the Arts’ latest Learning From Performers program.
Filled to the brim with eager Matmos fans, the small auditorium had been transformed from a dreary review session cave into an impromptu audiovisual showcase, with the room’s projector screen looming above racks of mixers, keyboards and laptops. Stranger sounds probably never emerged from Science Center D. Guest artist Keith Fullerton Whitman, best known as glitchcore renegade Hrvatski, began his half-hour set with lo-fi guitar twangs that quickly dissolved into a hypnotic ocean of swirling sonic detritus, electronic squalls, static bombs, gurgles and crackles.
Yet it was Matmos who stole the show with their dynamic and visually arresting performance, which often felt like a sample orchestra of two. With Daniel micromanaging the elaborate groove architectures and Schmidt “playing” various objects including bells, whistles, a creaky box and a set of plastic balls that he ran through his mouth, the boredom that often accompanies live electronic shows was nowhere to be found. The pair, who are well known for using sounds as diverse as inflating balloons, liposuction surgery and amplified crayfish nerve tissue as musical elements, used the projector screen to lift their music out of the anonymous studio.
One piece created especially for the show used chopped-up footage of piano strings being plucked in sync with the audio, while another composition featured a buzzing acupuncture point detector that was pressed against various points of Schmidt’s body and enlarged for the audience with a live video feed. Captivating and thoroughly enjoyable, the duo’s vivid imagery and even more vivid music bridged performance and process, recreating the act of composition onstage and refashioning the link between sound and equipment that often gets lost amidst the technology.
As this year’s Peter Ivers Visiting Artists, Daniel and Schmidt continued the week with their insights on the nature of electronic music in a series of low-key workshops and discussions. “I was excited to have a chance to stretch out in time something that I’m used to doing in thirty minutes,” Daniel told FM, referring to the presentations they often give at art colleges.
Matmos kicked off the first of three workshops, attended by a handful of Harvard students, with a lecture on the history of musique concrete, the avant-garde movement that used spliced tape loops to restructure found sounds into full-length compositions. “I wanted some way to respond to the class with sound, but you can only go so far without it becoming a bit gimmicky,” Daniel said. The talk was bolstered by listening to the duo’s favorite recordings, which ranged from former Cabaret Voltaire member Chris Watson’s work as a BBC nature recording engineer to composer Pierre Henry’s “Variations for a Door and a Sigh,” a 45-minute work made from the creak of a door and a gasp.
Though Daniel and Schmidt were ambivalent about their newfound role as teachers (“We’re not equipped nor educated in teaching people to be sound artists in general,” Schmidt said), the listening sessions offered a rare glimpse into the artists that helped shape the Matmos sound, which has reached unsuspecting ears worldwide in the form of production work on Bjork’s album Vespertine.
“I think I was perhaps intimidated by Harvard and gave our seminar an academic armor-clad shape,” said Daniel. The two preferred the casual give-and-take atmosphere of their informal presentations, given at Adams and Quincy Houses and in Lecturer Heather Love’s Literature 114: “Friendship” seminar. At Adams House, conversation topics ranged from the duo’s experiences gaining a foothold in the music world and working in the porn industry as soundtrack composers to their thoughts on the interaction between academic discourse and experimental art.
“I could write a theoretical account of what we do and include it in our liner notes, bombard people with claims that ‘in seeking to amplify the object I’m participating in the Western philosophical tradition of searching for the ding an sich,’ but I don’t think it would make the beats any funkier or the song any better,” Daniel later reiterated.
Daniel and Schmidt said they felt most positive about the guidance they gave to Harvard students who are interested in making electronic music. In the second workshop, the duo (along with Whitman) demonstrated several software packages and presented different approaches for composing with them. To conclude, they presented the class with a new piece they had composed using sounds sampled directly from the students. “If we see these on Ebay, you’re dead,” Daniel joked. It was a satisfying conclusion to the duo’s weeklong residency. “It was a fair amount of work, but it was worth it to me,” said Tom Lee, the Program Manager for Learning From Performers. “This has been so gratifying in retrospect that I’d really like to bring in more artists like them.”