In his recent book The Other Paris, Luc Sante describes an annual ritual of the city's laundresses, who numbered close to 100,000 by the end of the 19th century: "Every lavoir would elect a queen and all the employees would parade, merrily borrowing the finest accoutrements that had been left with them for cleaning." Nobody outside of detergent commercials dances up to a washing machine. We sweat through clothes on Saturday night; we reluctantly clean them Sunday afternoon. But the ambient sounds at a laundromat, those wetly spiraling colors, the unconscious motions of loading and folding and wringing—are they so easy to divide away from clubbing? Not according to Matmos, whose new album Ultimate Care II was entirely generated by the Whirlpool washing machine of the same name. They hit the appliance, massaged it, processed it, and jolted it with samples of its own noise.
It's not such a strange instrument for Matmos. Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, partners in all things, have wrung electronic music out of surgical tools, a cigarette burn, Björk reciting Wittgenstein, and quivering crayfish. Lots of it you can even dance to. Their practice became more abstract in recent years: Supreme Balloon only used synthesizers, while 2013's The Marriage of True Minds was determined by a series of parapsychological experiments. "High-concept" is the wrong phrase for something so tactile, but the new album does take inspiration, in classic Matmos style, from a deadpan joke: Ultimate Care II is the machine, and the machine is Ultimate Care II. (It could also be the name of a monthly rave circa 1989.) Daniel and Schmidt have always been fascinated by texture, and here they focus on it intently, exploring dozens of ways that water can fall, slosh, churn, or hiss. During calmer interludes, drones move past as if floating through an amniotic sac.
Like Manuel Göttsching's techno opening E2-E4, Matmos sequenced Ultimate Care II as a single 38-minute-long track, elaborating on itself over the length of a standard cycle. The first moments are relatively straightforward, considering that we're talking about an album recorded from a washing machine: Somebody turns the dial, and the chamber floods. Polyrhythmic drumming slowly intensifies, before subsiding into amphibian breathing noises. There's this coarse timbre that resembles a wildly overblown saxophone—fingers rubbing the chassis, sensuality experienced as agony. For long minutes rhythm fades away, leaving a reverie of computer signals inside the machine's brain, and then returns to deluge them, seizing up briefly with a muffled conk. What follows must be the first piece of music braiding together free jazz and the sewer level from "Sonic the Hedgehog 3."
Ultimate Care II ends in thrilling panic, a squall of rapid percussion moving over glitchy effects: drum-and-bass that's hard and wet, like the misted breakbeats on A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology. But the real un-climax comes just before that, when Matmos allow the rinse cycle to run through with only minimal filtering. It lasts for four minutes yet feels boundless. I thought of Virginia Woolf's The Waves: "The spray, leaping high, spattered the walls of a cave that had been dry before, and left pools inland, where some fish, stranded, lashed its tail as the wave drew back." Time seems to leak out everywhere, as if you looked away from Matmos' knotted loop to find, feet slickly adrift, that the machine had sprouted a river.
John Cage realized there was no such thing as silence when he visited an anechoic chamber insulated from the rest of Harvard and heard two sounds, one high and one low: the pulse of his nervous system and the circulation of his blood. "There is always something to see," he said later on, "something to hear." (It was probably actually tinnitus, but that makes the omnipresence of music even clearer.) I imagine Matmos glancing around their laundry room and deciding that any space could hold a dancefloor, or a DIY noise show—a basement is a basement, after all. Caressing obsolete technology, they've parodied labor's drudgeries as play. Ultimate Care II is a daydream of domesticity, a chore ignored. Call it the revolutions of everyday life.
