Big Ears 09: Even More on Matmos

An e-mail from Drew Daniel, which disputes the most common description of the footage in question:

This weekend we were set to perform at the Square Room in Knoxville,
TN as part of the Big Ears Festival. We were setting up in the venue
with the sound and video crew, who were really friendly and nice
people. All was going swimmingly, until we were asked by a video tech
person about the content of our video. We told him that it ran the
gamut from squiggly psychedelic abstraction to heavily tweeked and
digitally manipulated but non-pornographic footage sourced from
damaged VHS tapes of gay porn. The piece in question, the video for
our song "Public Sex for Boyd McDonald" is mostly a flurry of
snowy-looking format glitches and unintelligible signal, but it does
contain about three seconds of full frontal male nudity as a young man
named "Buster" takes off his clothes and gets in a hot tub. We
explained the piece and continued with our sound check in a
professional manner, under the impression that everything was fine.
The room looks and sounds great, and we were excited to play. A few
hours later we were told that there was "a problem"?but not from the
Square Room itself. Apparently (and here my information is second
hand, admittedly) the owner of the building that houses the Square
Room is a hard-line fundamentalist religious conservative, and when
the Square Room entered the space they were asked to pledge not to
present material that is any way "indecent" or "immoral", or words to
that effect. We were given to understand that we could perform in the
Square Room if we would agree not to play "Public Sex for Boyd
McDonald", and apparently someone (the owner?) had looked at YouTube
clips of us playing this concert in other cities (London, Paris, etc.-
cities which have so far managed to endure our queer porn onslaught
and emerge unscathed) and decided that that piece was artistically
and/or morally bankrupt and that we were beyond the pale. Martin and I
try not to take what we do too seriously, but we are serious about our
work when the chips are down, and there was no question for us of
altering our show to fit someone else's standards. Sadly, this kind of
resistance to a sexual minority on the part of the landlord for the
Square Room, if that is what it is, confirmed the worst stereotypes
about a bigoted, narrow, and, if I may be blunt, culturally retarded
and backwards mindset that snobby coastal types tend to think pervades
the Deep South; it was exactly the sort of thing that surely this
festival, with its inclusive programming of Antony and other queer
voices, so beautifully counteracted. But luckily, the owner of the
Square Room does not speak for Knoxville. The Big Ears people were
completely supportive and understanding and the show was moved to the
Catalyst, where a loud and large audience took in the show and voiced
their strong support of what we were doing. The Catalyst venue
welcomed us when we were in a tight spot, and the result was a really
hectic Round Robin with Dan Deacon afterwards, and a fun and positive
crowd. So we left Knoxville happy in the knowledge that, thanks to Big
Ears, we were able to play the show we wanted to play, to a roomful of
grownups and hipster kids who are not going to be psychologically
scalded by seeing a penis for three seconds on a video screen. The
people at the Square Room are not the villains here, but I worry that
they have painted themselves into a corner in which they have to
filter what they present on behalf of their landlord's dubious agenda.

Happily, the evidence of our concert amply demonstrates that
fundamentalists don't speak for Knoxville.

In this interview with Andrew Clayman that we ran to preview the festival, Daniel said one of his motivations for taking part in Big Ears was to resist big-city stereotypes about the South:

"I think the shear incongruity of that kind of music in that part of the country appealed to me," Daniel explains. "I grew up in Louisville, Ky., so to me, that part of the country is not a place I'm suspicious of or condescending towards in the way I think a lot of people are.

"I think a lot of people who are in New York or L.A. kind of pooh-pooh the rest of the country and don't really assume that people there have any curiosity about experimental work. But my experience, growing up in Louisville, is that I was totally famished for it, and really intrigued by the examples of it I saw around me."