“These digital-age surrealists have birthed a musical hybrid all their own.” (Alternative Press)

The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast is the 2006 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, it’s 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.
1. Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein
(conceptual musique concrète)
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)
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 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).