February 8, 2007
Matmos on the Re-Dematerialization of the Art Object
Continuing our discussion from last semester, thinking about both textual and musical form, Matmos, a local (SF) post-rock band will be “speaking” as part of the 10th Anniversary Bash for the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium
(a series which has included the likes of Martin Jay, Hubert Dreyfus, and Bruno Latour). You can check out their self-description at: http://atc.berkeley.edu/bio/Matmos/. Like us, they seem to be searching for a way to bring objects and concepts into relation through explorations of form, although I’m not sure that we share the same directionality… Something to discuss, perhaps.
see also: http://www.matadorrecords.com/matmos/ (check out the song “Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein”)
I didn’t take notes or anything, so I can’t really provide a summary of events, but I can provide the following quotation from the evening. It’s from a discussion of one of their songs, inspired by an author whose name I forget but who just happened to love snails so much she traveled with them–oftetimes storing them in her bra. The two members of Matmos created a piece where snails crawled out of a glass aquarium, and in so doing were forced to walk (slide?) through a laser beam that was itself hooked up to a light-sensitive theramin. Surprisingly, the snails didn’t just walk across the beam of light, but first explored it with their antennae. The result, sped up several times, was something akin to a rock guitar solo. When asked about the piece by an audience member, one of Matmos’ members replied:
“I wouldn’t really call it a collage. In a world where our everyday lives depend on “cutting” and “pasting” in Word documents, the term as a kind of subversiveness that doesn’t seem appropriate anymore. I’d call it an assemblage. In a way, it was actually a wierd laser/snail collaboration.”