CD: Sound surgeons
Authors: G. Yamey
Journal: BMJ (2001)

Gavin Yamey meets the musical duo Matmos, whose new album uses bodily sounds to comment on modern medicine

  For doctors, the noises made by the body—the heart, breath, and bowel sounds—are clues to its health or sickness. But for the electronic “sound artists” Matmos, the San Francisco based duo Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, these noises are music itself: notes, rhythms, and even whole melodies.

Listen to their new album, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, and you'll hear the sounds of the body, and its surgical manipulation, sampled from clinics and operating theatres and fused with electronic beats to form a fascinating musical collage.

It was, explained Drew, a “delicate process” building up the trust of the surgeons who eventually let the pair, and their digital recording equipment, into the operating rooms. The litigious United States environment, the fear of compromising the sterility of the surgery, and the thought of having a “couple of kids” messing around in theatre made the doctors wary of the duo's intentions.

But Matmos are serious artists, who performed recently at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and these “high art credentials,” said Drew, “legitimised us in the eyes of the surgeons.” What's more, they are both doctors' sons, which gave them even greater credibility.

It would have been easy to take the resulting recordings of surgical instruments slicing, breaking, and sucking the human body and turn them into a gore-fest high in shock value but low in musical complexity. But Matmos were keen to avoid this approach. Instead, they weaved the recordings into a kind of social commentary that captures some of the wonder, and the controversy, of modern medicine.

“California Rhinoplasty,” for example, the seventh track on the album, is a multilayered symphony of nose jobs, forehead lifts, and chin implants played out over the gentle hum of tissue being cauterised. In a cheeky jibe at cosmetic surgery, a jaunty melody from a nose flute meanders over the grim sound of bone being crushed. The satire continues in the upbeat funk of “Lipostudio (and so on),” which samples the slurps and squelches of liposuction.

These “bouncy and optimistic” tracks, said Drew, are a form of criticism, not only of the human obsession with appearance, but also of the strict genres to which musicians are expected to conform. Matmos are unusual among electronic artists because they fit no easy category; instead, they throw the unexpected into the musical stew—the noise of a laser cutting into an eye, of an acupuncture point detector moving over Martin's skin, and of the clashing together of a skull, spine, and teeth.

This ear for the offbeat stemmed from being brought up around doctors. Drew has powerful memories of visiting his father, a plastic surgeon, at the hospital or in an animal research lab. His stepmother is also a surgeon, who likes to operate while listening to Elvis. Martin's dad is a family doctor with a taste for Wagner.

For Drew, there was something Oedipal about making the record, since it allowed him to enact “the fantasy of putting on my dad's clothes and reconstructing what he does in my own terms.” On one of the tracks, “For Felix (and all the Rats),” composed by plucking and bowing the cage of the duo's dead pet rat, Drew comes to terms with his childhood experiences of vivisection. The track begins as a tranquil concerto, but builds slowly to a jarring and discordant improvisation. “Sadness at the loss of our pet,” says the album's sleeve notes, “is put in perspective by the fact that a laboratory animal dies every second in the United States.”

Ethical questioning was clearly important to Matmos at all stages of making the album, particularly in working out how to involve patients without exploiting them or sabotaging their confidentiality. The limits of what was acceptable to patients, explained Drew, had to be worked out “on a case by case basis.” 

For patients undergoing general anaesthesia, the recording allowed them to hear what went on during their operation. It allowed them, said Drew, “to return to something that they weren't there to appreciate.” Those who were awake during medical procedures found the recording process a valuable distraction, a kind of anaesthesia in itself.

Doctors, say Matmos, should listen to the album as if looking at photographs. They'll get a fleeting impression that will hopefully give way to a whole range of feelings and thoughts. One doctor at least loves the record—Drew's father, who plays it while operating. The image is almost too good to be true—the plastic surgeon cutting away while listening to a musical critique of his actions. Drew and Martin would surely approve of the irony.