Here’s the first thing to know: The album—all of it, every sound on its single 40-minute track—is played on a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II washing machine. The second thing you need to know is that Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel, who’ve recorded a series of brainy, witty sample-and-sound compositions under the sobriquet Matmos over nearly two decades, understand with total clarity what a gimmicky project this might sound like, on the merits. But Ultimate Care II was designed from the start to be a less weighty composition than many other Matmos projects—like A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, which used sound samples from surgery clinics as its building blocks, or The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast, whose songs are each dedicated to a gay public figure, often of some controversy—that inspired the duo in some way. Schmidt and Daniel will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Matmos feature.
Daniel: When is a picture a word? How can pictograms in sequence become a narrative? How hard or is easy is it to hold a memory of symbols in your mind? These are the questions that will enthrall, irritate or consume you as you make your way across the terrain of artist Xu Bing’s confoudingly singular Book From The Ground, a novel written entirely in tiny pictograms and emojis. If you follow Cher on Twitter (and you should) then you might already be pretty good at interpreting long uninterrupted strings of emojis as if they were already intelligible speech. (And they are.) So maybe do that for a few weeks before you step up to Xu Bing’s Book From The Ground.
Video after the jump.
