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: Here’s an internet rabbit hole in which to disappear for a long, long time: It’s 187,000 images from the archives of the New York Public Library, complete with a snappy visualization tool that lets you thumb swiftly across hundreds of images within seconds. Each image is tagged, so they’re searchable, and they can also be sorted by century (great for me as I work on Renaissance literature and culture), type of document (do you want to look at sheet music? How about stereoscopes of natural places? Are you looking for photographs of opera singers only? How about illuminated manuscripts?) or, most beguilingly of all, color (want to look at thousands of red things? Want to collapse into an ocean of brown? Feeling black?). If you make collages out of visual material, this is your one stop shop now, because each image is downloadable in multiple formats and they’re all public domain too. So, it’s been nice knowing you, but I have to disappear now into the archive.
Video after the jump.
