Band apart: Jan Tumlir on Matmos

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Jan Tumlir

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Undergirding the new album is an urgent concern for historical knowledge, which makes perfect sense in these increasingly amnesiac times. To what extent does this knowledge reside within historical artifacts, in things as opposed to dematerialized information? Can it be accessed "firsthand," as it were, or must one always fall prey to the distortions of our political system and its monopolized media? By treating their archaic instruments as they would any other objects--that is, by not playing them "properly"--Matmos submit them to a kind of inquiry as political as it is aesthetic. More than ever before, their strategic instrumental ineptitude opens up a distinctly Foucauldian dimension. Bypassing the official, foregrounded musical texts in favor of those traditionally supporting and background, they begin to expose a context, a whole musical epistemology.

The psalteries that initiated The Civil War project date back to the time of the American Civil War, while the hurdy-gurdy is more tied to a spirit of pastoral British medievalism. As Daniel explained to David Toop in a recent issue of The Wire, "The [album] title is meant to suture the English Civil War of 1640 with the American Civil War of 1865 with the domestic civil war between us as boyfriends and bandmates with the current civil war in America between those who support Bush and those who despise him as the spineless usurper that he is." The American instruments pull the album in one direction, the English ones in another, and then there is the play between diverse popular idioms that the band "curated" via a whole retinue of guest musicians. For instance, Mark Lightcap, formerly of Acetone, does his patented ambient-country guitar twang, while Jim Putnam of Radar Brothers puts in his best West Coast effort to resurrect the spirit of UK Canterbury psychedelic folk-pop. These various elements are forced together as though in a great musical summit meeting, underscored by a consistent electronic presence that has itself been greatly expanded for the occasion. Thanks to a recent visiting-artist stint at Harvard, Matmos had access to the university's Studio for Electroacoustic Composition, where they were able to experiment with such "classical" pieces of equipment as the Buchla Box and the Serge synthesizers, all of which find their way onto this record as well.

The provocatively titled "Regicide" starts things off on a tone of cautious celebration, introducing the medieval round-dance motif that will be carried through to the end. Soon enough it is assailed by a skittering junglelike beat, the looping structure of contemporary electronica synching up seamlessly with the distant sound of the country festival and goading it toward a swirling, buzzing crescendo that undergoes one last breakdown on the way out. The point of it all is neither exactly to synthesize these parts nor, conversely, to separate and categorize them. Matmos's compositions drift along, drawing us through one sound-space after another, disassembling and reassembling. They do not pursue any sort of resolution, any sort of ultimately disinterested knowledge of history "as such," since at any given moment several distinct time frames are being anachronistically juggled and/or overlaid. Nevertheless, the band always remains attentive to the particular demands of the present, even if this present itself is becoming ever more temporally skewed. "You're always playing with time," claims Daniel. "You're always implying a kind of immediate collision, like a hand fingering a human skull or someone reaching for the scalpel in the operating room, but then you're also sort of imaging the, let's say, on-screen time in which that moment can get played over and over and over again, becoming mutated and ossified in the studio."