Sample-centric duo Matmos chat to Danny Turner about their latest project to cull sounds from the famous Smithsonian Folkways back catalogue
Throughout their 30-year career, Baltimorebased experimental electronic music couple Matmos have gained notoriety for their unconventional use of sampling. Across 14 albums, dating back to their 1997 self-titled debut, M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel have, amongst other things, recorded the sounds of surgical procedures, washing machines and freshly cut hair to create various forms of melodic techno, glitch, IDM and post-industrial music.
For their latest album, Return to Archive, the duo was commissioned by the Smithsonian Folkways record label to record an album in honour of its 75th anniversary. Founded in 1948 by Moses Asch, Folkway’s self-proclaimed mandate was to record the sounds of the entire world and commit them to vinyl. Thus, in their typically unique way, Matmos re-contextualise the sound of American frogs, larynxes, satellites, junk yards and the mud-dauber wasp, inviting the age-old musique concrète question – is this music or noise?
Since Matmos’ debut album in 1997, you’ve always been fascinated by the art of sampling. Where did this interest in using found sounds derive from?
Drew Daniel: “My first instrument was a mono tape recorder. I’d make recordings of my voice, and because the microphone was always distorting, I thought it was amazing that, through pause-editing, I could go from being this wimpy, powerless child to sounding like a scary monster. The next piece of gear was a delay pedal with a trigger mode, and then once I got a four-track I started chopping breaks and making very primitive hip-hop loops. As an adolescent, reading William S. Burroughs’ cut-up novels, using a tape recorder and listening to pop music, hip-hop and breakdancing became part of my queer response to the world. I wasn’t listening to Pierre Henry when I was 15 years old – that would come four or five years later.”
What was your first sampler? DD:“My
first boyfriend, Doug, owned a house and set up a layaway plan for me to purchase a Roland W-30 sampler, which blew my mind. I spent hours and hours making sounds, but didn’t understand anything about sequencing MIDI. It was only when I met M.C. that he taught me that I could plug these things into other things and talk to a computer that I realised I could control these shapes in a totally different way.”
M.C. Schmidt: “I’m seven years older than Drew and got my first sampler in 1987. Samplers were the cool new thing, and I got the Ensoniq Mirage despite not knowing anything about it. I’d use the strings and that awful saxophone preset that the Mirage was so famous for, but I was using real sound, not synthesised sound. Before that, I’d been using synths like the Juno-60, JX-3P, SH-101 and a Sequential Prophet 10, which happened to be
