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Rbt. Sps. interviews Matmos' Drew Daniel for the Kentucky Voice,
September 2007

What musician first attracted you to electronic music? What was
the first electronic instrument you experimented with?

I remember liking the noise part in the middle of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" when I was nine years old. I listened to a lot of classic rock radio while playing with Legos as a child. I guess the first instrument that I experimented with was a tape recorder that I owned that had a defective microphone in it. Everything I recorded was distorted and I loved the sound that it made.

Have you ever built your own theremin?

Nope. I have soldered together primitive circuits and made some simple speaker set ups but nothing elaborate. I'm not a kit builder (yet).

What are your thoughts on Iannis Xenakis?

Xenakis' sheer bloodyminded persistence in the face of exile from his homeland, a maiming wartime injury, intellectual theft of his ideas by Le Corbusier, and other setbacks ought to be inspiring to everyone. His work emanates a fierce suspicion of easy pleasures. The standard he set for truly multimedia achievement (the polytope as a space within which his musique concrete work would be played) has rarely been equaled since.

What is Bjork's favorite non-alcoholic beverage?

I'm going to go with tea.

How do you feel about the mashup? How long do you think it will be popular?

Sticking things on top of other things (in cooking, in collage, in sound, in superimposing images) will never die. However, the "mashup" as a specific pop song mutation practice seems pretty convservative to me. It feels like stealth oldies for hipsters, it hinges on a canon that I don't usually care about, and it tends to have a noxious race/gender politics behind it: it's only hilarious to hitch R&B divas and hip hop MCs to rock riffs if you believe that black people and women don't "belong" with (white) guitars.

Have you used the reactable yet? Do you like it?

Martin and I were invited onstage to play it during a Bjork set at Roskilde by a friendly and inclusive Damian Taylor. I had a ball fucking around with it, but I can't say that I've spent enough time with it to get a sound that couldn't also be made by a chipmunk scampering by and randomly agitating the control objects.

Do you own any cylindrical records?

No, but I have some cylindrical artwork that requires a mirror in order to resolve its perspective.

 

.......for more on Matmos and Drew Daniel please visit matmos.com

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