Matmos
A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure

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Hold on tight: this album can create panic (and it's no joke...). But let's go in order: M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, the masterminds behind the Matmos project, released in 2001 their masterpiece after the equally valid Quasi object: A chance to cut is a chance to cure. Our two relentless experimenters (both children of doctors and perhaps it's no coincidence!), this time use starting material sourced from operating rooms, medical studies, laboratories: a journey around and inside the body, a crazy and hallucinatory project worthy of J. Verne but one that no musician had yet embarked upon. A journey that retraces, with increasing urgency, what literature (post-modernism and cyberpunk), painting (Bacon), photography (Serrano), and cinema (Cronenberg and Greenaway) have shown us since the postwar era to today: the beauty of Flesh, the poetics of Organs, Blood as a fetish. A conceptual work therefore, but no less enjoyable for it. The electronic duo gathers the material in the operating room, but it is in the domestic quiet that they begin a cut and sew job dear to Burroughs and Gysin, transforming it into something scarcely recognizable, and perhaps for this reason, more accessible.

The album is articulated in seven fragments (songs? tracks? open-heart interventions?):
- LIPOSTUDIO...AND SO ON.
The piece is constructed using sounds recorded during a liposuction operation. To lighten the otherwise morbid atmosphere, guitars played in various ways, voices, and samples intervene.
- L.A.S.I.K.
The starting material is recorded during a Laser eye surgery. Perhaps the least accomplished track of the album, the sounds often blend and confuse, giving a sensation of white noise that is difficult to define as pleasant.
- SPONDEE-Dante.
The obsessive repetition of spondee words (i.e., with the same accent on the first and second syllable), accompanied by a pulsating bass, indeed urges us to pump up
the volume and, alas, become a bit more deaf!
- UR TCHUN TAN TSE QI-
Here Zen melds with the art of electronics. This time, the electrodes of an acupuncture detector are the source of inspiration for S.&D.'s electronics. The melodies are modulated on Martin's skin by his lover's hands moving the detector's pins along his body's meridians.
- FOR FELIX (AND ALL THE RATS).
The masterpiece within the masterpiece. S.&D. write an elegy for their dead rat using his now-empty cage as an instrument. The introductory melodies are broad and enveloping, dreamy: the idea of playing the cage with a bow is genius, not even Sigur Ros has been this engaging. The track then takes shape, becoming more and more frenzied, leading to the angry final catharsis.
- MEMENTO MORI.
A sonata for human skull, goat spine, connective tissue, and false teeth: it brings to mind the percussionist skeletons of many Disney cartoons: we all have to die, but why not laugh about it?
- CALIFORNIA RHINOPLASTY.
Recordings of nose jobs in all their variants form the basis of the track that closes the album, to which is added, not without irony, a melody played with a nose flute.

In short, one must hold on tight and above all give credit to these two crazy experimenters capable of blending the most advanced research with electronic/dancefloor atmospheres, seamlessly moving from one to the other without disrupting the sense of their work. A very original album recommended for those with insatiable ears for novelty but who also crave rhythm and a certain enjoyment of approach. Not recommended for those who enjoy easy-peasy jingles from Radio DeeJ and for those who hate... hospitals, dentists, and such.