STRIPPING FOR RENT
Matmos's Teabagging Days
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Drew go-go dancing. Photo by Tyler Ingolia.
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Matmos are the cuddly face of concept-y electronic music. Their last album was all based around the actual sounds of plastic surgery and liposuction and it still wasn’t annoying—it was funny, smart, and beautiful. On their brand-new one, The Civil War, they graft Americana like “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and fife and drum music onto stutter-step SoundEdit 16 glitchery. The result is an album that’s so seditiously patriotic it will make Toby Keith furtively masturbate on his tour bus.
Drew and Martin are Matmos, and boy have they been down and out. Martin spent a good portion of his wayward youth auditing classes at Cal Arts, living in his car, and taking acid, while Drew used to make money at that good old standby of cute fag jobs: go-go dancing. In fact, that is how Martin first laid eyes on him: prancing around nude at the Club Uranus in San Francisco. It was intelligent dance music at first sight, and they’ve been boyfriends ever since.
VICE: Drew, tell me about your situation when you were dancing.
Drew: When I was 18, I was stripping for cash. I remember selling my underwear to weird 40-year-old letch dudes. I used to shove my genitals into this plastic fish and then the tail would come out of my ass. I’ll send you a picture!
Martin: I can vouch for this outfit being amazing.
VICE: What was the lowest point of your go-go career?
Drew: I would make all these precarious jockstrap contraptions to dance in. One day, I shook this Joe Camel–head off my cock and suddenly I was naked. When you’re go-go dancing, you don’t have a hard-on. You’re just scanning the crowd for the good tippers.
Martin: Didn’t some old queen heckle you for that?
Drew: Some snaggletoothed hag shouted, “Better luck next time, honey!”
Martin: But the grossest was the fish thing. All his sweat would collect in it, and if he moved a certain way it would spill out of the fish’s mouth.
VICE: Like the spit trap in a trombone.
Martin: Yep. But I was like, “The guy in the fish—he’s hot!”
JEN NUZZI
The Civil War is out now on Matador, and Matmos are currently performing with Björk (since they do all of her best backing music on her albums).
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