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: This is Japanese animation about middle-school girls who are guns? This is very hard to explain, as I don’t understand it myself. Really has to be watched to be believed, or … Anyway, I take a great joy and hope in the complete otherness of cultures different from my own. A sort of armchair/used video-store tourism that can’t be beat.
Video after the jump. Mind you, this English version has some of the more raw, looking-up-skirts stuff cut out, because … well, there’s more of that thing for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZD_xHuYT4
