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: I don’t know about your life, but mine is filled with lots and lots and lots of writing deadlines. And nothing makes the words flow like the sonic illusion that I am a Federation functionary buried deep inside the metallic hull of a starship hanging in the void of space, toiling away on the final frontier, probably in some kind of clingy jumpsuit. Put this YouTube clip on and share that productivity-enhancing illusion with thousands of others who are living in the same endless late-capitalist content farm. Seriously, this clip will give you just enough sound so that you aren’t driven mad by the sound of your own breathing, but not so much sound that it will distract you from your labors. The low throb and subtle grey ashy hum it gives off can be used for meditative drift or mind-focusing task completion. It goes with everything!
Video after the jump.
