Who would have imagined that a Hopkins professor would moonlight as part of a popular electronic/performance art outfit that plays sold-out shows from coast to coast? I'd heard rumblings of Professor Drew Daniel and his band Matmos. There were rumors flying around campus that their music was composed of recordings of surgical sounds, bodily fluids and other bizarre effects. Most of the attendees at their Floristree show on Saturday arrived on the tails of similar rumors, driven by pure curiosity.
The show was thrown as a benefit for the Fifth Annual Transmodern Festival in April. The festival celebrates the outlandish and avant garde side of art with a massive list of shows including Anna Oxygen, Spoon Popkin and Katastrophe.
The benefit on Saturday was $10 and sold $2 cups of Resurrection, of which I had many. Matmos was set up onstage with an array of strange objects and a projection screen. Since the band migrated from San Francisco to Baltimore, a trail of stories has arrived in their wake. One of my friends talked about seeing them play a rat cage with a bow. Their Web site lists a plethora of "instruments" including but not limited to amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, liposuction surgery, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, Polish trains, insects, ukuleles, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room and the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun. I approached the show with a clean palate, having not listened to any of their music beforehand.
What I encountered in my hour at the Floristree was an entertaining show of complex music that was almost overshadowed by stage gimmicks. There were men beating trunks with bouquets of roses and the common ritual of sacrificing an audience member's coif to the devices of an electric razor taped to a microphone. Behind all of this though was music. Not dancy music, not really melodic, but noise that had a rhythm and a beat just the same. Their stream-of-consciousness lyrics broke through the noise during one song in what sounded like a "how to" guide to homosexuality. Psychedelic and often imperceptible images were projected behind them, yet one more factor that detracted from the music.
At one point a video was shown of someone being burned by a cigarette, a homage to the Germs, and as you watched the burn fester and swell you realized that the grunts of pain from the burn victim are making up the chorus of the song. It's scary and beautiful at the same time. It is noise art that works despite the visual distractions.
