Finding music in unusual places

The small matter that snails are as silent as snow did not deter Matmos when the duo determined it needed to record a musical collaboration with the glutinous mollusks last year.

The snail association makes perfect sense given that Matmos has spent the past nine years collecting sounds from wince-inducing sources, ranging from the blubbery gurgle of fat being removed from a patient during liposuction surgery to the amplified flow of blood coursing through a carotid artery. The pair then builds these noises into full electronic songs that have somehow found an audience outside the tech-geek-laden realm of experimental music. As Drew Daniel, one-half of Matmos, explains, the snails were an important detail because Matmos was recording a musical tribute to notoriously prickly suspense author Patricia Highsmith. And, as every zealous reader of her ''Ripley" series should know, the author kept snails as pets.

''The only way a snail makes a sound is if you step on it," says Daniel. ''But that's not a terribly exciting sound, nor is it a very nice thing to do."

Matmos's solution to the silent snail dilemma involved a light-sensitive Theremin, a laser beam, and a glass cylinder filled with snails. The glass cylinder was placed between the laser beam and the Theremin, and when the snails moved, they interrupted the flow of the laser, causing the Theremin to change pitch. The otherworldly Theremin noise was sped up (''Because the snails don't move very fast," Daniel explains) and a very squiggly-sounding snail solo was born. The Highsmith tribute appears on the duo's forthcoming album, ''The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast."

Daniel and partner M.C. Schmidt, who are playing selections from ''Rose" at the Museum of Fine Arts on Sunday, have been dabbling in this brand of creepy sound-sample-as-modern-musical-art since their first noise-gathering outing in the late '90s, when they stumbled onto an exhibit at a children's science museum of crayfish nerve tissue that was charged with an electric current.

''It was creating this weird electrical noise -- a sound that we sampled and built into a base line for a song on our first record," says Schmidt. ''When we explained what we did in the liner notes, it seemed to catch on like wildfire. It's become the defining gesture of what we do."

Since then, Matmos has recorded the sounds of rhinoplasty surgery; an angry, screaming rat; and Daniel's sizzling flesh as it was burnt by a cigarette. The field recordings determine the direction of a Matmos song. The noises produced from a goat's spine, a smoothie, and a random voice may be distilled through a laptop and come out on the other end as an ambient pop song or a fragmented dance track. The band's breakthrough 2001 album, the medical-themed ''A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure," can cause a grown man to blanch when the source of the songs is explained. But if those origins are not known, then it is simply a beautiful, at times unsettling, electronic instrumental record.

Daniel and Schmidt don't mind if you call their methods gimmicky -- partly because they could easily be San Francisco's most self-deprecating, deadpanning, laptop band -- but they are also careful to explain that their obsessive love of collecting sounds has a purpose.

''Most electronic music really suffers from a lazy sort of abstraction, where there's no way in for people who aren't already acolytes," Daniel says. ''It's kind of forbidding and meaningless."

''Not everybody has made music with laptops and samplers, but everybody has played with a balloon at a birthday party," adds Schmidt. ''So if you can ground the sound into something that's tactile and based on an object that a lot of people can relate to or have thought about, you have a way in."

In this case, a way in not only meant finding an audience for Matmos's music, but an opportunity to work with an international superstar who possesses a fondness for the same style of melodious bedlam. Bjork saw Matmos performing in New York and appreciated the sight of a man plucking the bars of a rat cage to create music. She enlisted the band to open for her on tour, and also serve as her backing band onstage. After the tour she asked the band to contribute sounds and texture to her ''Vespertine" album.

''One day we played the Coachella Festival with her, and we were sipping champagne in the lobby of the fanciest hotel of Palm Springs," Schmidt says. ''The next day I was mopping a floor of a classroom at the [California] Art Institute wondering if I had enough soap in the bucket and thinking 'Was that real?' It was such a surreal experience."

Sipping the bubbly with the world's best-known electronic songstress may appear to be the apex of success for a band that produces songs based around sounds collected from a cow's reproductive tract and LASIK surgery, but Matmos says its idea of success has always been making art that lasts.

Despite success as musicians, both have lives outside of Matmos. Schmidt, 41, is a professor at the California Art Institute, while Daniel, 34, is a graduate student in the English department at the University of California at Berkeley.

''They left themselves space to grow and change," says New York tastemaker and manager of Mondo Kim's record store, Craig Willingham. ''They're serious artists instead of just another group of folks tinkering away on laptops. "

The growing and changing extends to careers as well. When the two met, Daniel was working as a go-go dancer at a gay bar, while Schmidt was playing in a ''semi-satanic" hardcore band. More than 15 years later, the two are collaborating with superstars and playing sold-out shows at museums.

''Martin and I feel insanely lucky that based on what we do we're able to perform and make records," says Daniel. ''Why should the world be receptive to sound collages of sucking fat and rats trapped in cages? It really shouldn't be."

Matmos is at the Museum of Fine Arts Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets $20, $16 members, seniors, and students. Call 617-369-3306 or visit www.mfa.org.

Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com.