The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast is the new record by San Francisco duo Matmos. It is a series of “sound portraits” of a pantheon of people that they admire. A musical attempt at biography, i’ts loose in some places and very literal in others; taken as a suite of stylistically disparate songs, you get a kind of fractured family album, a historical pageant. It’s at once Matmos’s most melodic and most conceptual record.

Title (genre) 1. Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein (conceptual musique concrete) 2. Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan (mutant disco) 3. Tract for Valerie Solanas (booty bass) 4. Public Sex for Boyd McDonald (porn funk) 5. Semen Song for James Bidgood (weepy elegy) 6. Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith (jazz noir) 7. Germs Burn for Darby Crash (power electronics) 8. Solo Buttons for Joe Meek (surf twang) 9. Rag for William S. Burroughs (Arabic ragtime psychedelia) 10. Banquet for King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Wagnerian slapstick) (full credits of each song available on request)

Matmos read their biographies and re-enacted events from their lives, making songs out of the sounds of the re-enactments. They gathered objects that were important to these people, made noises with them, and built melodies out of the noises. Sometimes the songs are just a tight focus on one detail (the Wittgenstein song is just an exploded view of a single paragraph from his text “Philosophical Investigations”) and sometimes they revisit one event from their life (the King Ludwig II song re-enacts the incident in which he ordered dinner to be served to his favorite horse inside his castle’s Hall of Mirrors with disastrous results). Sometimes they depict their subject abstractly: the Darby Crash song is dark electronics made out of the sound of Drew Daniel crying out in pain getting burned by the Germs’ Don Bolles, combined with the noise of M.C. Schmidt shaving his head. The Patricia Highsmith song was made as a collaboration with her favorite animal, the snail (they aimed a laser at a light sensitive theremin, and then got snails to crawl across the path of the laser, triggering changes in the theremin’s pitch).

Voices are more prominent on this record; there are guest vocals and cameo speeches by Antony, Kalonica McQuesten, Laetitia Sonami, Maja Ratjke, Bjork, and others.

The album features Matmos’s most extremist and gutsy sound design (the sound of semen, burning flesh, and the embalmed reproductive tract of a cow are all featured) but rubbed up against the most lyrical, heart-on-sleeve music they’ve ever written (check out Antony’s voice on “Semen Song for James Bidgood” or the Kronos Quartet’s funereal strings on “Solo Buttons for Joe Meek”). French horns, tuba, strings, harp, darbuka, voice, guitar, drums and synths are chopped into tricky rhythmic patterns and melodic motifs. It’s a funkier, funnier affair than their last album, The Civil War (a hallucinatory blend of medieval English folk and 19th century Americana), but also a darker one.

The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast is accompanied by ten specially commissioned works of portraiture by such visual artists as Dan Clowes, Jason Mecier, and Michael Bernard Loggins, that depict the subjects of each song.

Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. They make music out of the sounds of objects, animals, people, and actions. They have collaborated with Rachel’s, So Percussion, Jay Lesser, Alter Ego, People Like Us, Kronos Quartet and Bjork. They have shared stages with Slint and Wolf Eyes, remixed Foetus and Erase Errata (and many others), taught seminars on sound art at Harvard University and the San Francisco Art Institute, and DJed at proms for homeless teenagers. They have had pieces in the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, did a 17-day live performance at the Yerba Buena Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, and have scored the soundtracks for five gay porn films, one pinball machine, and one NASCAR television commercial.