A great Molly Sheridan interview with the duo Matmos from the American Music Center’s New Music Box. There is a nice video over there as well. Great band, hilarious dudes.

MS: …in the end you guys make pretty sophisticated music. You just picked that up while living together and record shopping?

M. C. Schmidt: I’m not sure. Do we? Like the relationships between the pitches in what we do? I don’t know; we’re pretty one-four-five, sort of–or less.

Their response about the writing process:

Drew Daniel: I could describe one of the songs there that might walk you through the process. We were making a biographical portrait of the writer Patricia Highsmith. The first thing that we did–which is quite corny, but I think it produced something good–was I simply took all of her books, laid them out on the table, and Martin slowly caressed them with jazz brushes. We were literally stroking and rubbing her books. That produced a kind of shuffling, noir-like jazz rhythm which was, period-wise, appropriate to when her fiction started. She published her first novel in ’53. From that we had a tempo, and we had a kind of vague genre–jazz. It didn’t come from thinking, oh, jazz is perfect. It came from literally just encountering the object.