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From The Desk Of Matmos: Data Analysis Of Wall-Punching

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.

WallPunch

Daniel: How many American people punch their meathooks into walls in a given year? How old are they? In which months of the year do American punch their sweaty, enraged fists into helpless, defenseless walls the most? What’s the gender breakdown of wall-punchers looking like these days? What other things besides walls get punched and lead to embarrassed/triumphant trips to the hospital? This article is a beautiful example of journalism that is driven by data but on behalf of a humanely comic sensibility. (Hat top to my mathematician friend Jordan for hipping me to this one). Read this article and reflect upon whether your anger drives you to do harm to objects, and perhaps think about other things you might do to deal with your anger instead. Or just think about all the ways that information can become poetry, and poetry can serve demographic surveillance.

Video after the jump.