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Matmos, "The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast"
With their sixth full-length album, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt once again approach their music from the conceptual level, hitting upon a brilliant idea and elaborating it perfectly. The ten "audio portraits" that comprise the album evidence a precision of concept and working method that is almost fetishistic in its exactness, but nonetheless provides an engaging, humorous and often illuminating listening experience.
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The theme of the album is audio portraiture, each track named in honor of a favored personage. Where another more traditional group might pay homage in song by penning lyrics that reference the subject directly, Matmos utilize their signature strategy of object sampling, approaching the challenge obliquely and ingeniously. For each subject, a series of appropriate objects (and sometimes texts) are chosen, then sampled, mutated and molded into a song whose genre roughly corresponds to the chosen subject's aesthetic. In the case of "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan," for instance, the club music pioneer is evoked with samples of hissing steam vents and sequins being affixed to fabric, which are magically transformed into exactly the kind of infectious mutant disco white-label side that might have been produced by Levan, Walter Gibbons or Arthur Russell back in the Paradise Garage heyday.
Though this working method undoubtedly results in a series of audio portraits that are wholly overdetermined by their subject (who couldn't have guessed that Joe Meek would be memorialized with a heavily phased, reverb-drenched rock instrumental?), I was nevertheless surprised by the many left turns and counterintuitive choices made by Matmos. Also, because nearly all of the subjects chosen by Matmos were confirmed or rumored to be homosexual (or sexually ambivalent), the album seems also to function as a kind of alternative "queer positive" historical thread running through the past 150 years of Western culture. By placing such maligned, misunderstood figures as "Mad King Ludwig" II of Bavaria and Valerie "I Shot Andy Warhol" Solanas in the same company as esteemed writers and philosophers (Wittgenstein, William S. Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith), Matmos create a broad category of uniquely eccentric queer cultural pioneers, suggesting that perhaps the originality that these figures displayed was part in parcel of their unorthodox sexuality.
All conceptual trappings aside, the music on The Rose Has Teeth is frequently brilliant, and would seem so even to a listener entirely ignorant of each track's subject or source material. The album's title is taken from its opening track, a particularly whimsical bit of text drawn from Wittgenstein's influential and inscrutable "Philosophical Investigations," the peculiar linguistic twists of logic being read aloud by Bjork and Marcus Schmickler of Pluramon, among others, while samples of roses and teeth are processed into the kind of crunchy, bottom-heavy psychedelic techno that has become the group's signature sound.
"Public Sex for Boyd McDonald" samples surreptitiously recorded anonymous sex acts, forming a haunting and sleazy funk track redolent of bus station bathrooms, video booths and pay-by-the-hour sex motels. The perversity continues, in a less seamy and more fantasmatical form with "Semen Song for James Bidgood," a tribute to the famous photographer and director of Pink Narcissus, which samples the dripping semen of Drew Daniel, the stereo-phased vocals of Antony and the lovely harp playing of Zeena Parkins. The track is the most hypnotic and ravishing on the album, a gauzey and hallucinatory boudoir fantasy raised to the solemn dignity of a funereal ode. The music of Coil is an obvious touchstone here, and it would not be hard to read this as a dual tribute to Jhonn Balance as well as Bidgood.
The longest track on the album is, not surprisingly, also the most conceptually daunting. How best to memorialize transgressive writer William S. Burroughs, whose life and work does not immediately bring to mind a specific musical genre? In his film adaptation of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg opted for Middle Eastern-inflected cool jazz soundtrack featuring the playing of Ornette Coleman. Eschewing such easy formalism, Matmos instead create an epic 13-minute track that travels seamlessly through several different possibilities: from ragtime piano noodling, to percussive solos on adding machines and printing presses, through to full-blown Moroccan joujouka, and all the steps in-between. It's a masterful track that more than justifies its extended length.
In many ways, this is the most consistently musical album Matmos have yet created. There are very few extended passages of willfully arrhythmic electronica or noise, and in their place are fully fleshed-out songs with rigidly determined themes, that nonetheless miraculously transcend their digital precision, frequently laying bare the passion and interest that the duo undoubtedly feel towards their subjects. This enthusiasm and adventurousness is quite infectious, and endless pleasure can be derived through the examination and deconstruction of the concept behind each track, making this unreservedly my favorite Matmos album to date.
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