Spotlight on … Drew Daniel All Sound is Queer (2011) *

* (restored)

‘Drew Daniel, along with his partner Martin Schmidt, compose the recording and performing unit Matmos. Matmos can be said to have begun when Daniel, now 37, was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley and making some money as a go-go dancer in a gay bar. One night, Schmidt approached Daniel and offered to teach him how to edit sound on a computer, which he concedes is about as lame as pickup lines get. But it worked. The pair shared an interest in experimental forms of music such as glitch, noise music, and musique concrète. Soon they began messing around with computer music gear — a sampler, a sequencer, a laptop equipped with music software — and eventually created a bit of dance music that people seemed to like. That emboldened Daniel and Schmidt to compose more, until they had enough material in 1998 to produce their own CD, Matmos, a reference to the kitschy science fiction film Barbarella. They pressed 1,000 copies, figuring they might end up with 800 of them stashed in the basement, but sold them all and had to press another thousand. A decade later, Matmos has issued numerous recordings, toured the United States and Europe multiple times, played at Lincoln Center and other of the world’s great venues, and performed around the world and on record with the pop superstar Bjork. Daniel is also an assistant professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. Daniel also has a personal dance music project, The Soft Pink Truth. He is a contributing writer to the online music magazine Pitchfork Media, and wrote an essay about the Throbbing Gristle album 20 Jazz Funk Greats for the Continuum Books series 33 1/3.’ — collaged

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Further

DREW “GHOSTLY SHRIEKING” DANIEL @ Twitter
Matmos @ bandcamp
The Soft Pink Truth @ bandcamp
Re: Drew Daniel’s ‘Can Art and Politics Be Thought?’ conference</a >
all sound is queer: A list by ouija_fade
Why Do the Heathen Rage?
Matmos Official Website
Matmos @ Thrill Jockey
‘Ultimate Concept: Deconstructing Matmos’
Matmos interviewed @ Aural States
Matmos interviewed @ Butt Magazine
Download ‘All Sound Is Queer’ here

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Under discussion

Lil’ Louis ‘French Kiss’

from ‘Shall We Dance’ w/ Fred Astaire

Einsturzende Neubauten ‘Kollaps’

Annie Gosfield ‘Flying Sparks and Heavy Machinery’

John Duncan ‘Blind Date’

Led Zeppelin ‘Whole Lotta Love’

Donna Summer ‘Love to Love You Baby’

Throbbing Gristle ‘Catholic Sex’

Venetian Snares & Hecate ‘Nymphomatriarch’

from Josef von Sternberg ‘Blue Angel’

from Chris Watson ‘Outside the Circle’

from Douglas Quin ‘Antartica’

from Luc Ferrari ‘Presque Rien’

from Hildegard Westerkamp ‘Cricket Voice’

Lil’ Louis & The World ‘Club Lonely’

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Interview

You’ve mentioned you were a hardcore kid. At what point did you get into dance music, and how?

I think if you have the American experience then there’s this ambiguity about the relationship between hip-hop and dance music. To me, in my culture, hip-hop is our dance music. That’s what you play at parties that makes everybody dance. We don’t have this giant machine of the techno, house, festival, rave context. Obviously house is American, obviously there are micro-scenes. But for me, when I was in seventh grade – before I was into hardcore and punk – I was into rap, and I would breakdance to Run-D.M.C., and I had like parachute pants and bandanas, and I was drawing invisible boxes with my hands.

When was this, the ‘80s?

Yeah, I was born in ‘71, so I’m talking about ‘83 to ‘86. And then I got into punk and hardcore in like ‘85, ‘86. And the racial divide was very apparent. There was all the kids at school who loved Prince. Then there was the kid who loved Black Flag and Minor Threat and hated Prince. And we were like, ‘what, there’s a human being that hates Prince!? That’s insane! What kinda asshole hates Prince?’ I like the punk spirit of refusal, but I also think it’s a totally false choice. Obviously there’s aspects of Prince that are punk as fuck, you know? And there’s aspects of punk that are insanely square and stiff.

Was there a point where you stepped over that divide?

Yeah I think there was. I think part of becoming hardcore was a militant attitude. I mean think about the name, ‘hardcore’ – the very name of the genre is about militant fanaticism, it’s about saying there’s this other despised and accursed herd who are not true, who are fake, who are weak. And that had a lot to do with the closet, that had a lot to do with Kentucky – that I was in a very redneck, racist context, and so hardcore was a lifeline because there was this set of freaks that would pull together. And I thought that that included my own queerness.

But then you start to go to punk shows and there are straight-edge hardcore kids who are talking about how, ‘yeah, let’s fuckin’ nuke Iran, yay Reagan.’ And you suddenly realise, ‘ew… this isn’t actually as freaky as they think it is.’ But my first musical productions, I had tape decks and I was reading Burroughs, so I would do cutups. Then I got a delay pedal which I would use as a sampler, and I made a couple of hip-hop tracks, and then started making beats for this hip-hop crew in Louisville called King G and the J Crew, that was all like arty white kids that went on to be in that band The Rachels. They had a hip-hop skeleton in their indie closet. And so do I, because I was Deadly D.

Was there a point, coming out the other side of hardcore, and being old enough to go to clubs, when you rediscovered dance music?

Well what happened is I got into punk and hardcore and that led me to industrial and noise. Once you’re interested in noise and cutups and you’re listening to musique concrete, you suddenly think, ‘well, what’s the music with the most hyper-insane edits and cuts?’ And that’s when your remember, like, ‘oh, actually that Art of Noise stuff that I was breakdancing to, that was part of a cutup continuum – of an attitude towards aggressive editing’. So a lot of my love of breakbeat techno, like Sons Of A Loop Da Loop Era, Kaotic Chemistry – that moment with Suburban Base and Moving Shadow, where those records were incredibly obnoxious about what they were doing to their samples – that really impressed me from a noise and industrial perspective. I don’t think I understood, really, the kind of minimalist heritage of Plus 8 Records and Cybersonic and geeking out about 808 drum machines or whatever. I didn’t relate to that step-sequencer programming world. I was about sampling and the cutup. That was really my jam, you know?

And how about specifically dancing? I understand you were a go-go dancer for a while?

[laughs] Yeah, I think being a punk rocker I didn’t have a lot of context for it. But then I went to Berkeley and I was suddenly in the Bay Area, came out of the closet, started taking LSD and going to raves. And my first boyfriend was a party promoter who threw illegal parties – he threw this thing called Party Out of Bounds where he would just roll up with a PA in an underpass and do a queer dance party. And it was before we were calling it raves, and the music wasn’t necessarily rave – it was B-52’s and James Brown and Public Enemy.

When was this?

‘89, ‘90.

Martin: I was also employed by the same gentleman…

Yeah, my boyfriend Martin was an employee of my first boyfriend Doug… a little bit shady. Um, and I started go-go dancing in clubs. And go-go dancing… when you’re in a jockstrap in front of a roomful of total strangers, you wanna feel like you have some power, right? And you wanna feel like you have some right to be there. Gay men can be very cutting and quick to let you know if you’re not their type, you know? So I wouldn’t necessary call it the most welcoming environment or the most life-affirming job ever. But mostly it gives you a lot of time to think about the structure of dance music. ‘Cause you’re up there and everyone’s watching you dance, so you’d better think about it. And I think that’s when I started to count and listen to dance music for the frameworks of what – of how it was being constructed.

So you learnt something about dance music through the process of having to dance to it. Is that a relationship that carried on? Are you somebody who enjoys going out dancing?

I love to dance, yeah. I mean I love that feeling of people losing their minds on the dancefloor and yelling and sweating, and you keep telling yourself, ‘oh, I should really go pee’, but you can’t leave because the way that one pattern is cascading into another pattern is cascading into another pattern, that endless, you know, ‘Lost In Music’, Sister Sledge-like feeling, you know? I do believe in that. I’ve had times in my life when I was being really catalysed by the dancefloor. A club like Club Uranus or Clubstitute in San Francisco, or Trade or VFM in London. The things that I heard – The Mover, you know that guy Marc Acardipane? – the things that I heard him play were just so insane that it just… I think everybody that comes up through clubbing has stories like that, of like, ‘oh my god, that one night when so and so played such and such’. And perhaps it’s interchangeable, because perhaps it’s about the emotional release that you want rather than this pattern versus that pattern. But I still, when I’m making Soft Pink Truth, do think about the dancefloor, and I think about utility and functionality, and I don’t spit on those terms.

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Matmos

No Concept

Ultimate Care II Excerpt Nine

Very Large Green Triangles

Breaking Bread

Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band

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It

‘Drew Daniel, in his critical essay ‘All Sound Is Queer’, argues that sound ‘can let us hear what is not yet locatable on the available maps of identity’, and that sound is ‘shared and shareable, and thus makes possible a certain kind of collectivity’. Hence, if queers participate in a collective environment like a nightclub or cruising alley, the associated and familiar sounds become part of the collective subcultural experience. The loss of sonic environments represents an irreparable loss of histories and communities as well. As preservation of lost, dissipated sound relies upon the link between audition and memory, the result is often a fantasia of times past, a dislocation of time and recognition. It is at this point that the memory becomes less shared, and more individual. At the moment of shared audition, the experience may be relatively uniform across the collective; as time passes, the subjectivities of individual memory come into play. Communications scholar Jeff Smith, in commentary on the work of David McRaney, notes that if ‘our faulty reconstruction of memories makes us the unreliable narrators of our own lives, then it would seem that the very notion of collective or cultural memory becomes a very messy concept, insofar as each individual’s reconstruction of memory is likely to be wrong in ways that may be vastly different from other participants in the original experience.’ Nevertheless, as Drew Daniel argues, shared sound makes possible a collectivity that, even if imperfect, is still part of subcultural identity. Its truths and fictions become part of the myth and mystique of subcultural histories.’ — Jack Curtis Dubowsky

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Excerpt

*

p.s. RIP Sylvere Lotringer. ** David, Definitely sounds like a page turner. Dude, the State Tax Board of California removed all of the money I have from my bank account two days ago, unfairly and by mistake, and the person in charge won’t return my calls, and I’m living on loose change I can find around my apartment, and I’m fucked, but I do laugh now and then to save my sanity, true. So, yes, agreed. ** L@rst, I found it. Yeah, a little strange about the total absence of Yule in the interviews, not to mention no mention of that fifth, admittedly weak post-Reed Velvet Underground album that only got released in Japan or somewhere. But still … Morning, man! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, it was very long time ago when I had that Advent calendar. Literally I think I was 18 or 19 at the time. And I must’ve taken the daily drug, but I have no memory of doing that, which may tell you something. Luckily, Lewis’s profile text was just interesting enough to squeak into the next escorts post. Well, if it hadn’t been, I’m sure I would have found a way to edit it into something worthy, let’s face it. My Loev thanks you very much for the sweater. Due to his dyslexia, he thinks it says ‘FCUK EM’, and I don’t have the heart to correct him, so I hope he gets home in one piece tonight. Love removing the curse on my bank account and me this instant! (See my comment to David), G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, cool. Yeah, awesome track, no? Great about the new pill taking regimen. What is the specific intended effect expected from this pill, if you want to say? Your new class starts tonight, doesn’t it? Have big fun, if I’m right. ** David Ehrenstein, Very true statement there, obviously. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Happy that much of the gig was interesting and a pleaser. Some good stuff lately. I’ve gotten quite addicted to that Injury Reserve EP. The Gendron album sounds particularly good to my current tastes. Thank you for the pass along. No, the Advent calendar was when my friend and I were still teens, although he probably did think it was art, come to think of it. I think he went on to become an airline pilot, if I remember correctly. Which makes a strange kind of sense. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Maria Speth’s documentary film MR. BACHMANN AND HIS CLASS here. ** Bill, Hi. Yes, I couldn’t make hide nor hair of that age restricted thing either. Oh, I know some of Antoine d’Agata’s photography, yes. There was an exhibit of his photos here not so long ago. Some of it seemed quite strong and great. I haven’t seen his films, I don’t think. In fact, I should do a post about him maybe or at least put his stuff in a post. Huh. I’ll do that. Do you like his work? ** Okay. Normally the blog’s spotlight is reserved for books, but one time on my murdered blog I directed it at an essay by Drew Daniel, best known as half of the experimental music unit Matmos, and it still seems like a good move on my part. So there you go. You can download the full essay for free using the link at the bottom of the Further section if you like. See you tomorrow.