Matmos, Electronica's Clamor Couple

Duo Finds a Pulse, and Other Sounds, in the Abstract Genre

BALTIMORE -- It's a packed night at the Red Room, the tiny, no-frills performance space in a sketchy part of town where you go if you're hunting for the music of the future. There's barely room to move, but people keep squeezing in, navigating the tangle of cables that spreads across the floor, finding a seat wherever they can. A couple of guitars are tilted against the wall, and there's a small arsenal of synthesizers, amplifiers, mixing boards and MacBooks at one end of the room. In a dim corner, two musicians are intently miking something that seems almost comically out of place: four bouquets of roses.

Suddenly the lights go down, and two other musicians pick up the roses and start beating out a rhythm. Petals fly through the air, and soon other noises join the fray: squawking geese, the clatter of human teeth, phrases from a tract by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The sounds are all recognizable, but they've been electronically twisted into strange, wild new versions of themselves. The sounds devolve into beats, then form into rhythms and build into a massive torrent of music. And when the flowers are finally beaten to shreds, their rustling whispers now reduced to a rattle of stems, the song quietly ends -- leaving only the heady scent of roses in its wake.

The crowd roars -- for this is Matmos, which is emerging as perhaps the most inventive, uninhibited and engaging electronic music group on the planet. Made up of Drew Daniel, 36, and Martin Schmidt, 43, the duo has spent the last decade creating smart and oddly beguiling music from a range of improbable sources: liposuction surgery, slowed-down kisses, the uterus of a cow. They've stuck their microphones into crayfish nerve tissue, recorded the sound of burning flesh, even worked with an Enigma code-breaking machine, sampling the sounds and building them into everything from surf rock party music to Civil War ballads. It's vivid, witty and intensely physical music, and it's giving the abstract and bloodless genre of electronic music something it's needed for a long time -- a living pulse.

"The world of electronic music is sort of po-faced and self-serious," says Daniel, "rehashing a lot of abstract gestures from the 1950s. But our songs are about something. They're about rhinoplasty, or the shape of a hurdy-gurdy -- they're about material things in the world."

Matmos's approach is quickly pushing them to the center of the experimental music world. Straddling pop and academic electronica, they've toured and recorded with Bjork, performed in Lincoln Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art, given seminars at Harvard and worked with some of the top musicians in the classical world. They're collaborating with the Kronos Quartet and composer Terry Riley, the city of Verona commissioned a rethink of Verdi's "Aida" from them last summer, and they're now readying a new work for the prestigious Group de Recherches Musicales in Paris.

The performance in Paris will be especially significant, since it's the "spiritual home," as Daniel puts it, of musique concrete: Music made from recorded sounds. Noise music dates back almost a hundred years -- the futurist Luigi Russolo issued a manifesto called "The Art of Noises" in 1913 -- and in the 1950s French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry pioneered the use of tape recorders in music.

While "concrete" thrived in the laboratory, though, it didn't last long in the real world; abstracted and theorized to death, it left most listeners cold. But Matmos grounds its music firmly in the everyday world, using sound in ways as theatrical as they are musical.

"It's fascinating, what they're doing," says David Harrington, founder and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet, who commissioned a piece from Matmos after hearing one of their early recordings. "They invent these incredibly beautiful, thought-provoking sounds, and bring them together in ways that seem totally unique and natural. And there's nothing precious about it; there's a kind of openness about their music that attracted me immediately."

Now based in Baltimore (where Daniel is an assistant professor of Renaissance literature at Johns Hopkins University), Matmos got its start in 1989 in an unlikely place: a gay bar in San Francisco. Daniel was a go-go dancer there, and an admiring Schmidt (then playing in a cult industrial band) offered to show him how to edit sound on a computer.

"Amazingly enough, I wasn't met with total rejection," Schmidt says, laughing. "Our musical and romantic tracks sort of dovetailed," Daniel adds. "We've always been a couple making music together."

Neither had much formal musical training. Growing up in Kentucky, Daniel played in punk bands and sang in a gospel choir ("I was the only chorister with green hair," he says), while Schmidt took piano lessons to the ripe age of 12. But by the 1990s, advances in technology had put sophisticated and powerful electronic music tools in the hands of anyone with a laptop, and the field was open. Noise music, industrial culture and techno were all starting to converge, and audiences were looking for something more sophisticated. "People were asking: 'What is there that doesn't just go boom, boom, boom?' " Schmidt says.

The two began hunting for new sounds, applying microphones to balloons, latex fetish clothing and whatever else wandered into earshot. They played techno in clubs, scored porn films and composed music for pinball machines to make money. In 1998 they released their first discs, "Matmos" and "Quasi-Objects" -- just a thousand copies of each were made, and they prepared to watch them sink into obscurity.

"I had come happily to the conclusion," says Schmidt, "that no one would ever care."

But somehow a copy of "Quasi-Objects" ended up in the hands of the Icelandic superstar Bjork, long known for her pop experimentation. She enlisted Matmos to tour with her in 2001 and to record on her albums "Vespertine" and "Medulla," rocketing them into the pop stratosphere virtually overnight. But it wasn't an easy ride.

"Bjork likes the idea of 'concrete' sources for pop rhythms," says Daniel, "and she liked the slapstick quality of what we do. But we really had no familiarity with pop song form. We weren't used to structures that had choruses. Matmos songs are a kind of free-associative list -- one damn thing after another. But our music changed after working with Bjork. It became more traditionally musical."

It also became more daring. In 2001 they put out "A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure," from sounds they'd recorded during surgery, including bones breaking and fat being suctioned out of the body. The result, strangely, is light, almost lyrical techno-pop that evokes a visceral response.

"The body is such a rich source of sound," Daniel says. "And electronic music is usually taken as disembodied and abstract, so this seemed like a good way to bridge that gap -- by making electronic music entirely out of the body."

But it was 2006's "The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast" that may be Matmos's most accomplished work to date. It's a series of portraits of 10 gay icons they admired, from King Ludwig II of Bavaria to the punk rocker Darby Crash, built from sounds from objects associated with each of them. A tour de force of esoterica -- snails are used at one point to manipulate a theremin -- it's all tied together with organic musical logic. Critics complained that it was unintelligible unless you studied the background materials, but Daniel insists that it's only music itself that matters.

"Some people think it's all about the liner notes for us, but that's not true -- the music really has to be compelling in the moment of performance," he says. "The discourse can't rescue boring sounds."

Matmos has just finished recording its latest disc, an entirely synthesized recording that uses no real-life sounds at all. "We wanted to tie our hands behind our back," Daniel explains, "and be forced to think about the basics of what electronic music is." But the group's most intriguing project may be yet to come: music written for the profoundly deaf, who can hear only with cochlear implants that stimulate the auditory nerve and create a simulacrum of sound.

"I'm fascinated with what people with cochlear implants 'hear,' since what they're hearing is purely technological," Schmidt says. "We want to make a piece that's played directly into the brain."

"But we'll never know what they hear," Daniel says.

"No," Schmidt adds. "But it could be amazing."

Matmos will perform at Floristree in Baltimore on Feb. 9 at 9 p.m.