Matmos

Since the electronic duo’s inception in San Francisco in 1995, Matmos have seemingly made music out of everything and anything. Indeed, the vast array of sounds M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel have sampled and deployed in their songs includes the amplified brainwaves of crayfish—as heard on their 1997 self-titled debut—and the noises of surgical procedures on 2001’s A Chance To Cut Is a Chance To Cure. On 2019’s Plastic Anniversary, they even demonstrated the little-known musical properties of silicone breast implants when used as percussion devices. Yet that album’s underlying theme about plastic’s environmental impact points to the political and social commentary that’s always an element of the pair’s witty, inventive, and often surprisingly melodic musical experiments. Their collaborations with Björk on her albums Vespertine (2001) and Medulla (2004) and Daniel’s music as The Soft Pink Truth are equally vivid showcases of the duo’s reliably unique sensibility.