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.
Schmidt: A miracle of philosophical reflections about family, long-term partnerships, colonialization, death and aging packaged in a fast-paced cartoon about super science. This could lead me to talk about the crazy cultural importance (in North America/U.S., anyway) of Adult Swim right now as one of the best funders of art-for-people and the question of the importance/impotence of teenage boys and the 30-51 (my age) “teenage boys” that the programming is aimed at. Is comedy philosophy? Do funny things actually change the way anyone thinks about things? Did a combination of first-person shooters and South Park and its nightmare mutant anti-intellectual offspring Family Guy teach a nihilism smugness-in-ignorance to teenage boys that has caused mass murder and a sense of despair that will cripple our nation for years to come? Should I wear a tinfoil hat to keep out bad influences? Maybe.
Video after the jump
