Daiana Feuer on December 16th, 2015

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There is music in everything. In the rustling of trees, the pitter-patter of rain, even the thumping of a washing machine, as evidenced by the newest Matmos album. “Ultimate Care II” was made entirely out of the sounds of a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II in the Baltimore basement where Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt of Matmos reside. It sounds like a joke, but we should come to expect this sort of thing from Matmos, who believe in the audiovisual potential of all things, and have previously made music using the uterus and reproductive tract of a cow, helium canisters, and John Cage’s personal collection of conch shells, in addition to their many electronic albums over the last twenty years. For their current endeavor, the duo meticulously spliced and sequenced samples out of their washing machine’s endless clatter, and rather than just go all-out for collage, they found melody and song. In addition the guys invited some friends to play their washing machine. Dan Deacon, Max Eilbacher and Sam Haberman of Horse Lords, Jason Willett of Half Japanese and Needle Gun’s Duncan Moore either literally played the machine like a drum, or contributed some electronic manipulation of its sounds.

“Ultimate Care II” will be released Feb. 19 through Thrill Jockey Records, and San Francisco motion graphics firm L-inc, who previously created the “Very Large Green Triangles” video for Matmos, are working on a video for the whole album. And while it might seem impossible to perform live, Matmos plans to tour with their washing machine this spring. In the meantime, we have the video for “Excerpt Five” from the album, created by friends Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) & Peter Knight, who combined footage of the washing machine itself with other washing machine footage from the Internet, particularly Rick Prelinger’s archives. They said: “Having many times visited the Matmos laundry room, sorry, studio, we were delighted to hear that the two elements of the room had been combined for this artistic venture.”

||| Watch: “Excerpt Five”