Matmos' mind games

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Louisville native Drew Daniel and his partner M.C. Schmidt founded experimental electronic duo Matmos in the mid-1990s, and they’ve become known for their high-concept works, like an album of music made from the sounds of surgical procedures.

Matmos released a new EP last month, The Ganzfeld EP. It’s their first release for Chicago’s Louisville-friendly Thrill Jockey label and serves as a teaser for a follow-up full-length album, The Marriage of True Minds, due on Feb. 19. The release of Ganzfeld celebrates the 20th anniversary of both the label and the couple.

Both recordings are based upon the concept of telepathy. Matmos subjected strangers and friends to the ganzfeld (“entire field” in German) experiment, which tests for ESP.

“Our work is almost always described as ‘conceptual,’ and our albums are always described as ‘concept albums,’” Daniel says. “I decided to try to push that logic as far as I possibly could and wanted to create a situation where a concept was somehow causally responsible for actions in the world.”

A telepathy experiment seemed to make sense, so over a four-year period, the duo filmed subjects who were isolated in rooms, lying down on a mattress with their eyes covered and white noise-filled headphones on their ears — “basic sensory deprivation,” Daniel notes cheerfully.

“We would be in another room, either adjacent or beneath them, send a signal out, and attempt to transmit the concept of a Matmos record into their minds,” he continues. “They were encouraged to relax and empty their mind, and just try to describe out loud anything they were seeing or hearing. We would record this, and then turn the transcripts into songs.

“Of course, there’s a tremendous amount of leeway about how you turn it into a piece of music, so, far from being constrained by what they generated, we found it really helpful.”

Though both electronic and experimental music are often seen as overly serious, Daniel — a professor of Shakespeare by day who has written a book-length essay about the British industrial music group Throbbing Gristle — saw the exercise as being “like a great sort of parody of artistic communication and of conceptual creation. It seemed like a nice way to isolate the thought and the mind of artists, and to send up the idea that that is what is creating music.”

Their subjects ranged from a teen to a 70-something, and by nature of their world, included some music people (a Pitchfork contributor, a death metal bassist and more). “That helps in some ways,” Daniel says, “because they already know how to describe something in musical terms. It’s bad, too, because you can feel like, ‘Oh, they’re just feeding me something that they know I want.’ So it’s not authentic, it’s somebody going, ‘Oh, an ostinato.’ Inside-baseball stuff.”

Instead, he hopes it works as “a wonderful return to a lack of control in that distance between what I hope people will get out of it versus the conditions in which they might actually listen to it.”

In an era where people treat music like files to be downloaded, Matmos’ response is to include moments that are raw, spontaneous and unable to ever truly be re-created. A tour planned for next year will incorporate onstage ganzfeld experiments at each stop, as the musicians play along.

Daniel returned to his hometown in September to speak at the memorial service for his late friend and collaborator, Jason Noble. (Noble’s group, Rachel’s, released a split record with Matmos in 2000.)

“Yeah, that was a really powerful day … So many people, I thought, rose to the occasion.” Daniel was glad so many paid tribute to how funny and grounded Noble was without sacrificing the integrity of his memory.

“I was definitely nervous about the risk of pretentious, over-inflated language, because funerals can make us want language to become sublime, to confront our terror about loss. I was really glad that people resisted that and instead kept the focus on Jason as a person. That was an amazing day. A really sad day, too, because the more we were reminded of Jason, the more we were reminded of the person that’s gone.

“It’s hard to talk about, because I get upset. I get angry.”

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

album review: Scott Staidle

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Scott Staidle
Nuts for the Holidays
SELF-RELEASED

You know those cheesy horror movies from the ’80s that show up on cable when it’s late at night, you can’t sleep, and infomercials are screaming at you but there’s nothing else — not even a “Law & Order” rerun — to watch? You know the ones with an evil Santa? Well, imagine that on top of a “Grand Theft Auto” Christmas edition (Is there one? How could there not be?), and you’ve already got its soundtrack. You’re probably wondering, do I need another Christmas CD? Of course you don’t. There’re 30,000 of them already, mostly horrible. Is this horrible? No. But it sounds like something to ice skate to, and impressive as it is that Staidle performs 10 of the 12 instruments heard here, the end result is as underwhelming as Grandma’s fruitcake on Jan. 2.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

L.A. punks in living color

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‘We Got Power!: Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California’ By David Markey & Jordan Schwartz. Bazillion Points Books; 288 pgs., $39.95.

In 1981, David Markey and Jordan Schwartz were teenagers in the right place at the right time. Los Angeles had become ground zero as punk evolved into hardcore, led by Black Flag and dozens of others who, while unknown to the mainstream at the time, would influence two generations of musicians and fans.

The duo began photographing the early Reagan-era scene, taking shots of bands like the Minutemen, the Descendents, Suicidal Tendencies, and Social Distortion. More than 400 of their best fill the book, originally published in their homemade zine “We Got Power!” In 1983, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening (then a little-known L.A. Weekly cartoonist) called the zine “Essential reading … the funniest of the local mags.”

All six issues of the zine are reprinted in the book, which also includes essays from others who were there, including Black Flag’s Henry Rollins, Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks, and SST Records’ Chuck Dukowski.

“The culture of fanzines was interesting — how information spread, and how it was interpreted,” Markey says. “There was no other way to get that information out. What you did with it was entirely up to you.”

It’s funny to look back at Reagan now, he says, after the various Bush eras and after Paul Ryan revealed himself to be a Rage Against the Machine fan. “Reagan seems like a warm, fuzzy memory in retrospect. I think Ronald Reagan really made hardcore happen, nationally. It was sort of a call-to-arms, something that everyone could agree on.”

Putting the book together has put Markey, who turns 49 in a couple of weeks, back in the mindset of himself as a 17-year-old, getting into music and learning about the world. “I’m totally filled with gratitude about getting to witness all of that. It really set me up for the future, in a lot of ways,” he laughs. “At the same time, nothing has ever really matched that. I’m not trying to recreate that — or that I only live in that era, at all. But I know that I’ll probably never get to see that kind of scene again.

“I wasn’t looking 30 years into the future back then,” laughs Markey, now a filmmaker who recently directed a Circle Jerks documentary, “My Career as a Jerk.” “I probably didn’t even anticipate there being a future back then.”

In the summer of 1991, he followed Nirvana and their friends around the festival circuit, capturing the band just before they became international stars. His documentary, “1991: The Year Punk Broke,” has become a music-movie classic. “Witnessing their whole massive overnight explosion, that was a trip, too. That came 10 years after, for me, from ’81 to ’91. I got to witness both things happening, and see just how different the outcome was.”

Before Nirvana, before the Internet, underground bands stayed underground. “If you sold 50,000-100,000 records, you were basically the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones, of punk,” Markey notes. The bands seen in “We Got Power!” paved the way for today’s independent bands, sonically and in the way bands on that level are able to tour.

In the early ’80s, zines spread the word about bands too punk for mainstream magazines to have an interest in and helped grow that audience. “Rolling Stone? Forget about it!” he exclaims. “The whole generation that all came out of the ’60s counterculture — by the time the late ’70s and early ’80s came around, that counterculture had totally flipped. That had become the mainstream. It got just as conservative as the Woodstock generation turned into yuppies.”

All that festered for a long decade until Nirvana brought in a new era, followed quickly by Democrat Bill Clinton presiding over a so-called Alternative Nation.

Today, he cites the Russian group Pussy Riot as an heir to punk’s legacy, but asks otherwise, “Where’s the outrage? I don’t think this generation knows where to begin, or even has a clue as to what the hell’s going on.”

Perhaps forgetting about the Arab Spring, he continues, “I think now people are just really self-involved, and there’s no looking out. Everyone’s in front of a touch-screen. There’s this great tool that we have with the Internet — it should be an age of enlightenment. But you realize, there’s never been more corporate control.”

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Positive thinking

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Tom Boone is “61, and trying to act like a teenager.” He grew up in Louisville (DeSales High, since you’re wondering), lives in Lebanon Junction now, and didn’t start playing publicly until he was 50, which is about as old as he looks today. “Everyone always judges my age wrong,” he laughs. “I love that.”

Boone started playing the Hideaway Saloon six years ago, and he can be seen there every Monday night with his band, the Back Porch Pickers. His new album, Getting Back to the Old Time Ways, includes a theme song, “Hideaway Song.”

“I’m not good with fiction,” he’s learned. “If I write about what I know, what I’ve lived, most of the time it flows pretty good.”

His songs are mostly drawn from his life, though not entirely. “You got to make it a story,” he says. Boone discusses one song, “Ain’t Gonna Let It Bug Me,” inspired by a man he encountered who had a visible anger management problem. “I always tell everybody, the 11th Commandment is ‘Thou shalt not go through life pissed off.’” He didn’t think the guy deserved a song, but it inspired him.

Boone decided to pursue songwriting after listening to his favorites — Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne — for years. A Sam Bush concert inspired him to push past the stage fright he had been experiencing. “He had family there and a lot of friends, and everybody — the audience — was having a good time. That was my turning point. ‘If you’re gonna do this, have fun and forget about it.’”

Boone celebrates with a record release show at the Hideaway on Saturday. He’s been writing new songs for the next album. “This one took about three years, pecking at it a little here, a little there,” in between performing, working during the days and taking care of his mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. “I’m hoping this time it won’t be another three years in the making.”

Look up “Tom Boone and the Back Porch Pickers” on Facebook to learn more.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly