Recombinant Media Labs & Gray Area Present: Matmos with Dick Slessig Combo — Performance @ Gray Area

Art Bae Event Link duo Matmos returns to Gray Area, transforming everyday sounds into wildly inventive, immersive sonic landscapes. Opening performance by Jerod S. Rivera with visuals by Jesse Austin Step into the shimmering, clattering world of Matmos as they bring Metallic Life Review to life on stage. Their latest album forged entirely from the sounds of metal, everyday objects become instruments describing a lifetime of rhythm, melody, and memory. Fast-forward through decades of collected sound. At once playful and profound, Metallic Life Review resonates with echoes of memory, mortality, and connection, transforming cold materials into something unexpectedly warm, intimate, and luminous. Matmos Based in Baltimore, Matmos is Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt . The two have been making music as Matmos since 1997, first in San Francisco, and then relocating to Baltimore in 2007 when Daniel began to teach at Johns Hopkins University. They are respected, innovative auteurs in the world of electronic music and sampling culture whose very first album was hailed as “entering electronics Valhalla” by the WIRE magazine for sampling highly unusual sound sources such as the amplified nerve tissue of crayfish. Ever since, they have made music out a wildly heterogeneous set of objects and sources, including the sound of the pages of bibles turning, water hitting copper plates, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, rat cages, tanks of helium, a cow uterus, human skulls, snails, cigarettes, cards shuffling, laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions, balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones, Polish trains, insects, life support systems, inflatable blankets, rock salt, solid gold coins, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal, snails interrupting the path of a laser and altering the pitch of a light sensitive theremin, a PVC police riot shield, silicon breast implants, and their own washing machine. These raw materials are manipulated into surprisingly accessible forms, and often supplemented by traditional musical instruments played by internationally celebrated guest musicians from their circle of friends and collaborators. The result is a model of electronic composition as a relational network that connects sources and outcomes together; information about the process of creation activates the listening experience, providing the listener with entry points into sometimes densely allusive, baroque recordings that have the direct sensory immediacy of pop music. Their latest album Metallic Life Review was released on June 20th, 2025 by Thrill Jockey. Dick Slessig Combo Since their 1990 debut at a loft party in downtown Los Angeles, where a version of The Sandals' Theme From The Endless Summer spontaneously mushroomed into a 90 minute exercise in self mesmerism, the Dick Slessig Combo has stupefied audiences worldwide with their pseudo-structuralist approach to the interpretation of popular song. Drawing on influences ranging from Chet Atkins to Terry Riley, Isaac Hayes, Javanese Gamelan, skipping records, and 70s disco, their music is simultaneously expansive and reductive, filtered through a decidedly ramshackle garage-rock sensibility. In his 2019 book The Wichita Lineman, Dylan Jones describes Slessig's 2002 recording of that song as "the longest version of any song you've ever heard, elongated and slowed down so that it sounds even more like a lament, with a hyphen of silence between each note". Likewise, Griel Marcus recalls in his 2010 book When That Rough God Goes Riding, his response to a Dick Slessig performance at the Portland Art Museum in 2000 of a rendition of George McRae's Rock Your Baby "I could listen to that forever''. Jerod S. Rivera Jerod S. Rivera is a musician based in Oakland, California, with a focus on modular synthesis and electronics. With a background in drums and experimental composition, Rivera approaches his work in a do…