Matmosis better than most things in current music, and it’s been a good minute since the duo’s surfaced with new material. Most recently, it was a collaboration with New York new-music explorers So Percussion in 2010 and, before that, the synth opusSupreme Balloon. Matmos the concept artists have been rather less present sinceThe Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, one of the most conceptually dense records ever — homages to punks and transgressives by way of radical sound sourcing delivered as delirious freeform pop — but here we go: the new Matmos record,The Ganzfeld EP(due in October on Thrill Jockey), is all about parapsychological experiments (based on theGanzfeld experiment) the band has been conducting over the past four years. Yep, experimental music indeed.
Basically, the experiments, conducted at the Baltimore home of band principles Drew Daniel (who doubles as an English professor at John’s Hopkins University) and MC Schmidt as well as Oxford University, goes like this: the subject lies down in a sort of sensory deprivation state, blindfolded and with white noise-blasting earphones on. At which point Daniel attempts to psychically transmit “the concept of the new Matmos record” into the brain of the subject, who was asked to reply with anything they saw or heard “with their minds.” That translated to melodies, collage ideas, instruments, arrangements, and so on. The news comes with the boast that the new record is “the most conceptually elaborate yet weirdly poppy record of their career.”We’re still waiting on a new track to post, but in the meantime, enjoy this episode of Electric Independence we did last year on Matmos.
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