Matmos lugged a rat cage to a recent Whitney concert so they could play "For Felix (and all the Rats)". Afterward, Drew Daniel mentioned it increased shipping costs exponentially. So then, why bring it? Well, it's a lovely piece. Plus, people are almost as interested in how the San Francisco duo create its sound as what it sounds like: A bowed-cage as symphony offers a sumptuous visual. Using anything from a crayfish's nerve tissue to a cow's reproductive tract, Daniel (who is, we must add, a staff writer for this website) and M.C. Schmidt utilize digital-age musique concrète to create tunefully fractured electronic music.
After giving nose jobs on A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure and providing backbeats to the war between the States on The Civil War, Matmos returns with their fifth, most-engaging full-length, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. These 10 works are described as biographical "sound portraits" of historically and culturally important gay figures, which incorporate details relevant to a particular person's life or practice. Displaying a continued mastery of their craft, the songs not only live up to the concepts behind them, they could easily exist without them. But because the theme is there, elaborate packaging offers a different cover image for each icon: Visual portraits of the subjects drawn, sketched, constructed, or painted by Dan Clowes, Jason Mecier, graphic designer Rex Ray, Michael Bernard Loggins, and others.
How's it all work? Well, consider "Rag for William S. Burroughs". The author's family accrued its wealth from the Burroughs Adding Machine Company (later, the Burroughs Corporation), based around his grandfather's invention. After grandpa's death, the company introduced the Burroughs typewriter. Various machines also show up as a central image in Burroughs' work; most famously, typewriters in the nonlinear, hallucinogenic masterpiece, Naked Lunch. The track swivels on a percussive adding machine and the clickity-clack of typists. The ragtime vibe? Burroughs was born in St. Louis, where Scott Joplin, the "father of ragtime," wrote a few of his most famous compositions. At just under 14 minutes, its Mugwump stylings go from Futurist machinations to swingy, piano-based saloon ramble, and then psyched-out hand-drummed raga. A question remains: What are the typists spelling?
Each track is just as thematically tight-- scored and curated to the smallest detail. "Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith" uses the mystery writer's snail obsession-- she supposedly kept hundreds of them as pets, and she wrote about them in works like the short story, "The Snail-Watcher"-- as the slimy composers of that piece. The technique: A laser was pointed at a light-sensitive theremin; snails were let loose within the theremin's range, fucking with its pitch. The result is an ominous, hard-boiled brushed jazz piece accented with what sounds like a harpsichord flourish. It eventually turns into a bleakly paranoid theremin landscape as the snails frolic in slow motion.
One of the poppier productions is "Solo Buttons For Joe Meek", a crisp 1960s surf-rock anthem on which the Kronos Quartet add a layer of melancholic strings to the song's space-age bachelor joyousness. By track's end, summertime fun recedes in favor of the elegantly funereal. Joe Meek? He was a tone deaf, dyslexic 60s British record producer known in part for his quirky, deftly produced instrumental works-- sometimes fleshed out with space-age effects. He killed his landlady and then himself in 1967; the track manages to score the entire trajectory of his too-brief life.
The scraping, mechanical "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" is the most traditional bit of musique concrète here. Perhaps the oddest (most obviously brainy) tracks on the album, it's offered up to the complex Austrian philosopher, focusing on a conundrum paragraph from his "Philosophical Investigations" read by Björk and the composers Laetitia Sonami and Marcus Schmickler, among others. Wittgenstein sets it up more elegantly, but after stating that "A new-born child has no teeth. A goose has no teeth. A rose has no teeth," he supposes what would happen if a cow shit on a rose. Fittingly, the percussion is played with roses. There's also a goose honk, cow sounds, and manure is incorporated (somehow), etc. The final noise blast is pure industrial spillage. Well, philosophy homework was never quite like this.
Another piece based primarily around a written text is "Tract For Valerie Solanas". The same way Sunn 0))) was nailed for recording Xasthur in a coffin, Matmos will get a lot of column space for playing a cow uterus and vagina as tribute to the woman best known for shooting Andy Warhol. Sunn 0))) was aiming for claustrophobia and positioning Xasthur as cryptic solo artist; in a similarly smart way, the moo parts are a great pun on both the cow's goods (its reproductive tract) and Solanas's S.C.U.M. Manifesto (a feminist tract). Score.
Other standouts include "Semen Song For James Bidgood", a haunting, trance-style piano-based ballad which features Zeena Parkins on harp and Antony on vocals, "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan", a rump-shaking disco mutation in honor of the Paradise Garage DJ, and the funkified "Public Sex For Boyd McDonald", which incorporates whispery, quivvery recordings made at the San Francisco sex club Blow Buddies.
There are a few moments when the concept's cooler than the result, but in general The Rose Has Teeth's experiments result in frenetic dance tracks doubling as reading lists. Throughout, Matmos smartly mix high-culture icons, underground heroes, and cult legends, consuming objects and texts that transform everyday items (and lives) into something beautiful and strange. All said, the two are lucky the album doesn't stink: If it had, Wittgenstein's defecating cow would've offered a pretty great metaphorical diss.
