Matmos’ Drew Daniel on Schneider TM’s Construction Sounds

Electronic music, especially rhythmically predictable, warm, analogue sounding electronic music, has become a way to keep everybody working. You put a record on to push back the sounds of the outside so that you’re able to focus. Whether that record is Burial, Andy Stott or Pye Corner Audio, it doesn’t actually matter; the point is that there’s a nice and predictable structure that serves to increase your workflow. In contrast, Schneider TM’s Construction Sounds effectively functions as a critique of this modern, functional and occasionally mindless way of listening. Choosing to have the sounds of manual labor, the sounds you usually try to blot out, be the noise coming out of your speakers subverts the very idea of music as buffer against the real world. It refuses to offer the listener a shortcut to feeling “contemporary” while avoiding real issues. In fact, you could argue that it makes real world issues the point of focus, and it’s a coolly critical thing for Dirk Dresselhaus to attempt. That doesn’t mean that Construction Sounds isn’t beautiful or complex. I was reminded of the record Sleeper Awakes at the Edge of the Abyss by Merzbow and Christoph Heemann, where Heemann sculpts these new age melodies underneath Merzbow’s collosal wall of noise. You have to listen through the noise to find another layer that taps into a very different emotion. Having this turbulent feeling buried deep within and somehow obfuscated by the real world is actually a Romantic trope, and by using melody as a counterpoint to the grating sounds of industry, as on “Grinder in the Sky” or “Container”, Dresselhaus takes the listener to a similar emotional plane. I see it as a strategy for producing a certain kind of longing, similar to how My Bloody Valentine would bury their drums almost beyond perception—the direct result being an almost unplaceable sense of yearning stirred up within the listener. Dresselhaus has also thought a lot about tuning because there’s something strangely harmonious about the interlock that’s hap- pening. Indeed, many machines are based on the same kind of cycle. In the US anything that’s electrical—fans, fluorescent lights, you name it—have their hum tuned to B-flat. This makes me curious as to whether engine cycles also emit the same tone. Certainly, Dresselhaus exploits the innate musicality of those sonic by-products that we refuse to categorize as musical.