Currently based in Baltimore, the duo formed in San Francisco in the mid 1990s, and self-released their debut album in 1997. Marrying the conceptual tactics and noisy textures of object-based musique concrete to rhythmic electronic pop music, the two quickly became known for their highly unusual sound sources: the pages of bibles turning, water hitting copper plates, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, contact microphones on human hair, rat cages… These raw materials are manipulated into surprisingly accessible forms, and often accompanied by traditional musical instruments played by the group’s large circle of friends and collaborators. The result is a model of electronic composition that provides the listener with entry points into sometimes densely allusive.
Since their debut, MATMOS have released close to ten albums, including “Quasi-Objects” (1998), “The West” (1998), “A Chance to Cut Is A Chance to Cure” (2001), “The Civil War” (2003), “The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of A Beast” (2006) and “Supreme Balloon” (2008). Their next album, “The Marriage of True Minds”, will be released in 2013 by Thrill Jockey Records. It will be their first electronic album to start with tap dancing and end with doom metal, and the only album on which members of Nautical Almanac and the Arditti String Quartet rub shoulders. Comprising stomping techno, eerie synth jams, musique concrete, Latin rhythms, and Ethiopian music, at once at home in the academy, the art gallery, the nightclub and the noise warehouse, the dizzyingly diverse assemblage which is “The Marriage of True Minds” is driven by a tightly unified conceptual agenda: telepathy.
Since their debut, MATMOS have released close to ten albums, including “Quasi-Objects” (1998), “The West” (1998), “A Chance to Cut Is A Chance to Cure” (2001), “The Civil War” (2003), “The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of A Beast” (2006) and “Supreme Balloon” (2008). Their next album, “The Marriage of True Minds”, will be released in 2013 by Thrill Jockey Records. It will be their first electronic album to start with tap dancing and end with doom metal, and the only album on which members of Nautical Almanac and the Arditti String Quartet rub shoulders. Comprising stomping techno, eerie synth jams, musique concrete, Latin rhythms, and Ethiopian music, at once at home in the academy, the art gallery, the nightclub and the noise warehouse, the dizzyingly diverse assemblage which is “The Marriage of True Minds” is driven by a tightly unified conceptual agenda: telepathy.