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: Odwalla88 is Flan & Chloe doing their thing. They lived in Baltimore, and now they don’t, but wherever they are, they bring something pretty special and you should seek out the opportunity to find out first hand just how confounding/beguiling they are for yourself. There’s an album that they put out, the Lilly 23 Jump Drive, which is a USB album in which “tracks” can be jpegs (a drawing of a spider web). Or a .mov file of them saying the words “today my best friend saved my life” followed by “yesterday my best friend poisoned me.” Or a song like “a_fucked_part” that chops up spoken word, noise and strange riffs into something halfway between Dada and a digital form of grunge-era aesthetics. It radiates an intense “private world” aura and yet is completely welcoming. No one is like them.
Video after the jump.
