Matmos - The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form

[The Mollusk]

Just one year after "Plastic Anniversary" and only a couple months after The Soft Pink Truth's most recent album, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt are right back in the saddle with another new release. What is it? Well, the whole thing's 99bpm, collaborating with 99 artists, spanning 44 tracks across its 3hr runtime. A fucking massively ambitious project, and yet somehow, as with almost everything Matmos have ever done, it works wonders.

Matmos are one of my favourite electronic acts, constantly pushing boundaries and bursting with ideas that toe a practically seamless line between chin-stroking experimentation and goofy science classroom fun. On paper, a lot of their work (like an album made entirely of sounds recorded from a washing machine and conceptually simulating said machine's basic wash cycle) could come across as pretentious or even limited or boring, but everything they create is engaging on some level, be it beautiful, catchy, silly, beat-driven or just plain intriguing. Often, it's all that rolled into one.

This album has some great names involved, including Yo La Tengo, Oneohtrix Point Never, Mouse On Mars, Giant Swan, clipping., Matthew Herbert and Pig Destroyer. I'm about halfway through it now and it's fucking GREAT. If you're familiar with Schmidt and Daniel, it's pretty much exactly how you'd expect a hugely-collaborative 3hr Matmos album to sound: less immediate than their other work, with far greater room for the music to breathe. It's groovy, it's clicky and squelchy, it's jazzy, it's fucking weird.

Gawd, they're amazing. Do you like Matmos?

[Inspector Norse]

Yes but more in a distant, coldly objective way than a heartwarming regular-listening way. They're rarely uninteresting though; put on a good live show back when.

[The Mollusk]

Loads more info on this fascinating project here:

http://www.thrilljockey.com/products/the-consuming-flame-open-exercises-in-group-form

Yes but more in a distant, coldly objective way than a heartwarming regular-listening way. They're rarely uninteresting though; put on a good live show back when.

If cold objectivity's your game then this could well be an album for you, my friend. As this whole thing moves along at 99bpm, it could easily be listened to in the background. I've had the whole thing on this afternoon whilst doing other stuff and it's been a great experience. More detail on this vibe is given in the above link, quoted here for simplicity:

The length is not meant to be exhausting or pompous, but instead to shift the listener's attention repeatedly along a path, and to deliberately refuse to hold in one place, style, mood, genre or level of density for too long, in order to induce a sensation of drift within forward movement. The album moves beyond the confines of established longform genres like drone and ambient as well as traditional song structures. Rather, The Consuming Flame is comparable to a train journey; as Schmidt puts it: "The album is very much like a train ride at an amusement park: the tempo is the train that pulls you through a lot of different fantastic scenes and locations. Sometimes you listen to the sound of the train tracks and sometimes you are immersed in a space."

[sevendaughters]

really liked the Soft Pink Truth record from this year, whilst Matmos are hit and miss for me - which an optimist might say is a good reason to check this one out!

[The Mollusk]

Sat here and listened to the whole thing in one go. Fuckin great experience, thoroughly enjoyed it. Was properly busting for a piss in the last 15 mins but when you've committed to something for that long there's no way you can just leave the room during the home stretch.

I ordered a physical copy of it because it was £13 including postage and it comes with a big 2x3ft poster with a timeline detailing exactly where each collaborator shows up. Get in.