So for the next question I'm going to pass it to Drew.

SFBG: How is it going?

Drew Daniel: Very well. We had a very fun show last night in Seattle. The day before that we improvised on the radio, so it seems like juices are flowing on the US path of this two-month tour we’re doing.

SFBG: What's the current show like?

DD: It's been a challenge because pushing off from Supreme Balloon, we didn’t want to repeat ourselves. The tour for The Rose Had Teeth involved a lot of objects, playing roses, playing ice, a lot of things that were quite theatrical and spectacular for us, I guess - it's not the Roman games or the Cirque du Soleil, but we try.

But in this case trying to play electronic music in way that feels live for the audience is difficult. How do you make it gestural? How do you make it something that includes them, so they just don’t stare at the word Korg or Roland for an hour? One thing we sort of thought about was ways to start out treating sounds that’s a little bit mysterious. We start with a piece where we playing flashlights. But I don’t want to explain exactly how we turn flashlights into sound. Don’t want to give everything away. But suffice to say there are some moments that are genuinely confusing to people.

SFBG: So it's not an all-synthesizer performance like the new record?

DD: No, no, no, by all means. One of the cool things is that we have J Lesser in the band for this tour. And J is one of the first people we toured with back when we lived in San Francisco. Our first tour was with J Lesser, and shortly after that tour we had this record called The West. Its just been reissued, so having J in the band means we can come back and play songs from 10 years ago that we never played live. We came up with arrangements of that material and we’ve been playing that as well.

One piece sort of involves Bo Diddley's music as well, and that’s something we figured out we wanted to do before he died. But it felt a little apt given his death. So theres a little bit of Wendy Carlos, a little bit of Bo Diddley. All your faves. We’re a cover band basically.


Matmos at Festival Villette Sonique in Paris, June 24, 2006.

SFBG: So how has it been moving to Baltimore and working at John Hopkins?

DD: Yeah, we left San Francisco to go to Baltimore, and that was really strange. When I would meet people the first week I was there and I told them I just moved from San Francisco, pretty much everyone universally would say, "Why?!" with a look of horror. Like, why the hell would you ever leave San Francisco for Baltimore.

But the truth is I really love being a professor. I love my job. And I've been learning to love Baltimore - there's such a wild-ass prickly noise scene in Baltimore that’s been really friendly to us. So I think we seem possibly a bit bourgie and a bit gay for Baltimore, but y'know, they're reaching out. We’re playing Whartscape – this guy Dan Deacon invited us to play at the Wham City festival in Baltimore this summer. And that’s on my birthday - I'll be turning 37 onstage. That’s a show with Nautical Almanac who are sort of the grandparents of the whole Baltimore circuit-bending noise scene. So I feel very welcomed by things like that, y'know. That they would invite us.

SFBG: Most professors I know don't seem to have much time to do more than...profess. Write, research, teach, get tenure. How do you work being in a band in there?

DD: That’s something I have to actively figure out, y'know. I'm only a year into this job, and I'm realizing to do it at the level that it needs to be done, if I'm going to be worth their time, it takes all of your resources. So I have to be very strategic about what I say yes to and what I say no to. We get a lot of juicy offers: "Come to Brazil and play a few shows and lay out in the sun." But I have to say no because I have to grade 18-year-old's essays about Macbeth, so it’s a matter of priorities. I think the scary thing is that my colleagues will be working on their books this summer, while I'm swanning around Slovenia doing noise shows. So we’ll see. We’ll see how it does affect productivity. I was able to publish the book in first semester: the Throbbing Gristle book. So I feel like there has to be a way to do this and I'm figuring out how that works.

SFBG: Would you say your academic approach plays into the music at all? The last album was yours, right?

DD: The Rose Had Teeth was mine. The reason I don’t see a conflict between two sides in my life is I know for a first-hand experience that research is creative. That these divisions of, well, some things are scholarly and historical and some stuff is about art-making... I know all kinds of creative decisions are made when you decide what's relevant and what isn’t when you decide to tell the story of something. That’s a creative act.

I'm not saying that scholarship and music aren’t different - there are huge differences - but for me, the conceptual, research-based orientation in creating a record like The Rose Had Teeth is also driven by the same thing that gives me a lot of joy when I'm trying to gather elements of 16th century literature that I care about into an argument worth making. In both cases you have a duty to the past - when you're making biographical songs about real people, you have a certain kind of obligation to them but you also have an obligation to your art to make something that’s your own and is valid now. I think the same anxieties about reuse of found material or anachronism - like a lot of the sensibilities that I like in renaissance writing - are also perhaps present in the records that we make. Maybe that’s a pretentious thing to say - so I don’t know.

SFBG: Your dissertation was on Renaissance literature?

DD: Yes, I wrote a dissertation on melancholy in 16th century literature and painting and medical writing.

SFBG: Since this is Martin's record, what did you bring to it?

DD: Well, I think I took the idea that I couldn’t use found sounds or found recordings - and often I was starting with things that were tones - as my opportunity to go back to music camp, and figure out what are notes and cords, anyway. Something I pretty much blithely ignore when I'm just chopping up the sound of human fat! I just assume if you stack things in octaves, then harmonics will take care of itself.

We were doing a family thing going through Nevada City and bought a little book there, Your Guide to the Chords of a Piano, and I proceeded to figure out what chords were and wrote some Mac patches that were basically like autoharp. I could just control with a Nintendo game controller, every chord progression, so that’s how the song "Polychords" was created. I guess that’s my main contribution to the album. It’s a solo track I made myself while Martin was away. I just got really into the idea of chords as blocks you could string together, and the result was sort of the opposite of what Matmos generally is. I guess generally we have primitive melodies and quite elaborate rhythms, and on purpose "Polychords" was made to be a really boring, basic, military marching beat and really florid, ridiculous melody. So it was totally fun for me, y'know.

SFBG: What inspired the title?

DD: There's a little sound into light and sound and color correspondence riff going on in a lot of the titles of this record. Like "Rainbow Flag" was a reference to the spectrum of pitches going up and down, and "Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band" is based on samples of optical sound, like drawing on the optical track of film because that can create pitches. So the idea of light becoming sound and sound becoming light was in my mind and when I thought about polychromatic as a word referring to rainbows, I just thought of polychord as the chord rainbow. Some people represent the circle of fifth as a color spectrum, and with some of my Mac patches, I use the color picker, the swathe of colors, as a way to generate frequencies, because that software is really easy to turn visual things into sound and vice versa. So that was kind of hiding in the background of a lot of this music.

SFBG: What about "Supreme Balloon"?

DD: Oh, "Supreme Balloon" is Martin's fault so I'm gong to pass it back to him.

SFBG: So, 23 minutes, eh?

MS: Y'know, we jammed it out, man! And it was long, and I like in the long run that it makes a thing that has nothing to do with iTunes. It's just the opposite of the kind of song that you could listen to 30 seconds of and know whether you liked it or not. But it wasn’t that we made it on purpose for that reason, but I like that byproduct. You could listen to the first 30 seconds of it and have no idea what was coming.

But let's see, the name, we were stuck for a name for this. We wanted something buoyant. I mean it sounds absurd but we really did. I bought one of those Taschen books of advertising from the '30s, and there was a Firestone ad – when tires had inner tubes, and it was the name of one of their inner tube products, and it was called the Supreme Balloon, and there was this fantastic, florid advertisement for this thing. So we owe it to some ad copywriter from the 1930s.

SFBG: You've collected plenty of synthesizers over years?

MS: I have. I've been doing this stuff since, oh, god, 1986 or something. I don’t know how I originally got into synthesizers - I think because all my other friends were rockers and I wanted to balance it. So I was like, "Oh, I'll be keyboard nerd." I think at the time I had no better reason than I had piano lessons when I was 11 or 12, and they all played bass and drums and so on. It just stuck and now I'm a grownup with an income and stuff, it's all synthesizer crazy. It's not like when I was a kid when I would just have wet dreams about them. Now I can actually buy them if I want them. And that is good.

SFBG: There's been such a revival in them.

MS: Definitely. The '90s were the peak of it. Unfortunately the keyboard companies have only in the last few years really gotten the idea that what people wanted was…a lot of knobs. And I think the peak of it has died out. Now all the keyboard companies are all making crazy, million-knob machines, and well, I'm very happy. I love all the new designs. There's a resurgence in interest in all the analog modular synthesizers, too. There's all these garage-based mom and pop synthesizer companies now. it’s a beautiful thing.

SFBG: What was the most unusual synthesizer used for the album?

MS: We have one from 1971, called an ARP 2600 - it has no keyboard, so it's really not like a musical instrument so much - you can hook a keyboard up to it but it still fights back. And Drew uses a brand new machine called the Flame - it's made by a small German company that only works with speech synthesis chips, and god knows, I can't figure that thing out. It's responsible for all the sort of talking sounds that are in the last quarter of Supreme Balloon. Absolutely no microphones were used in the making of this album! We like that idea because it’s the opposite of...remember Queen used to write on their albums, "No synthesizers were used in the making of this album"? I like that absolutely no microphones were used on this album.

SFBG: What do you have against microphones?

MS: Oh, nothing. I think we loved them too much, was the problem. We’re clean and sober now. Oh, it's not true. We will go back to our sampling antics for the next one, for sure.

SFBG: What are you doing in Baltimore these days?

MS: Y'know, [Drew] makes enough money now so that I'm a homemaker. And I really try to do it. I try to cook at least two meals a day. He wears nice clothes every day, so I iron and sew and wash. Because of the financial difference between San Francisco and Baltimore, for same price we were paying for a one-bedroom apartment, we have a four-bedroom house in Baltimore with a front yard and back yard. It's amazing, and it is actually, like, work to keep it clean.

SFBG: So you're happy about the move.

MS: I'm pretty happy. I think my biggest fear was winter - I lived in SF for 22 years. And, well, we don’t have much of a winter there. What I didn’t realize was that houses in places other than San Francisco are actually built to withstand weather. Y'know in our SF apartment we had a window that was painted open - just permanently. And in the winter, it was like, "Oh, a little chilly." If you had that in Baltimore you'd die! So the house has double-paned glass and all these things that in SF at least we never had. Winter wasn’t so bad. It was kind of fun.

SFBG: The album wasn't a product of the move, going toward older musics, older parts of the country?

MS: Honestly we started that record in SF. We really just finished it in Baltimore - it’s an SF and Baltimore hybrid.

But yeah, I do feel evil. I spent years maligning the East Coast, and well, there I live now. I'll tell you, the food doesn’t hold a candle. Baltimore is so poor that theres pretty much no immigrant population, because there aren’t any jobs. I mean, there are really no jobs. So there isn’t the amazing food that a South American immigrant population brings. No Chinese food. Some Korean – it's OK. The poor people are still stuck General Cho’s chicken level of Chinese food, I'm sorry to say. It breaks my heart daily, I tell you.

SFBG: What else is going on?

MS: Golly, our next album is based on psychic research. Drew is in charge of it so it's an insanely elaborate concept album. We’re reproducing the Ganzfeld psychic experiment, where Drew sits in another room, and the recipient test subject is in yet a separate room and they have ping-pong balls on their eyes, they're listening to white noise, and they're instructed to speak out loud any visions or sounds they make, see, or hear. And then I think the idea, is we’ll reproduce what they describe, of what they have psychically picked up.

I think he's riffing on the idea on “concept,” like it will really be sheerly a concept album. It will be made only out of concepts.

SFBG: Why did you include your new Baltimore address on the album?

MS: Oh, we always tried to put our SF address on the other ones. We like it when we have people write us letters and send us weird things.

SFBG: Do you get many stalkers?

MS: When we worked with Bjork we had a couple come over and literally – it's so sad – knock on our door and say, "Is Bjork there?" You're like, "No, actually, she's not over at the moment."

We had some kids come over some time that were doing a photo project for school and they were taking pictures of musicians' hands. That was cool.

I don’t think we’re famous at the level of stalkers. Possibly, if anyone tries to stalk us we bore them to death. We repel stalkers by being more creepy than them.

SFBG: On that note...

MS: On that note, I apologize for everything I said!

MATMOS
With Wobbly
Sat/12, 8 p.m., $17
Great American Music Hall
859 O'Farrell, SF
www.gamh.com