Matmos—Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt—have found a sort of fame as Björk’s backup band, creating the clatterings and blips behind many of her songs. On their own, they’ve forged a snakier path, including albums of material created from various surgical and medical sounds—A Chance To Cut Is a Chance to Cure—and their latest full-length, The Civil War, which throws medieval instruments and marching bands into their chewy laptop stew. I live near a record store, and on two separate occasions people have left my home to head directly to the store to buy The Civil War after hearing it on my stereo. Recently I’ve seen Matmos categorized as IDM, or intelligent dance music, which bugs me, because you can’t dance to their stuff at all, and “intelligent” seems like a not-very-subtle way of saying “difficult and arty,” when so much of their stuff is hilarious and instantly engaging. Maybe we should just call it M.

We did the interview at my house, and made it into an ice-cream social by blind-sampling several different kinds of Mitchell’s Ice Cream. Mitchell’s Ice Cream—located at 688 San Jose Avenue, at Twenty-ninth Street—has no commercial stake in this interview or in the Believer, but I’d like to say that they make the best damn ice cream in the whole wide world. If you live in San Francisco, you should go. If you don’t, you should come to San Francisco, and then go.

—Daniel Handler

I. “WE’RE DAIRY MUSIC, BASICALLY.”

THE BELIEVER: OK.This is the first ice-cream flavor.

[Spoons clinking, general ice-cream-eating noises]

M. C. SCHMIDT: Ooooh.

BLVR:What do you think?

DREW DANIEL: Is it involving coconut?

MCS:Yeah, it’s coconut.

BLVR: But it’s not a standard, run-of-the-mill coconut.

MCS: It’s baby coconut.

BLVR: It is. It is baby coconut. You have a skilled tongue.

DD: [Laughs] Oh, yes.

BLVR: You’ve been told you have a skilled tongue before?

MCS: My smug expression won’t make it to the tape.

BLVR:This is my favorite flavor from Mitchell’s.

DD: Have you tried them all?

BLVR: No, I haven’t tried every flavor, but I’ve tried all the ones that seem worth trying.This one seemed to me to be the most Matmos-like, because it has a very homemade quality to it.

DD: Okay.

MCS: What’s the difference between a coconut and a baby coconut?

BLVR: I don’t know.

DD: Maturity, wisdom, being around the block a few times…

BLVR: I’ve always wondered that about all baby vegetables, actually. Like baby corn isn’t baby corn, right? Anyway, I was wondering if you might be interested in talking about the homemade quality of Matmos’s music.

DD:We’re...