Matmos at the Media Club, Vancouver, Feb 21 2013. Kirk Chantraine photo.
Photos – Matmos at the Media Club, Vancouver, Feb 21 2013
– photos by Kirk Chantraine
Matmos played the Media Club Thursday night in support of its first new album in five years, The Marriage of True Minds. Thrill Jockey released the record just a couple of days before, on Feb. 19. A concept album about telepathy, it even includes a cover of the Buzzcocks‘ “ESP”.
Matmos is Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt. The Baltimore duo “is known for making toe-tapping rhythmic pop out of odd and unusual sound sources,” says a press release.
“Comprising stomping techno, eerie synth jams, musique concrete, Latin rhythms, and Ethiopian music, the dizzyingly diverse assemblage which is The Marriage of True Minds is driven by a tightly unified conceptual agenda: telepathy. For the past four years the band have been conducting parapsychological experiments based upon the classic Ganzfeld experiment. They used the resulting transcripts as poetic and conceptual scores to generate the nine songs on this album. On The Marriage of True Minds, guest musicians including Dan Deacon, Dominique Leone, DJ Dog Dick, Leslie Weiner and Holger Hiller (Palais Schaumberg), Jason Willett (Half Japanese), Angel Deradoorian, Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak) and more all go under the digital editing knife as they are chopped into tight, surprisingly listenable songs which, for the first time in Matmos’ work, prominently feature vocalists and voices. The album features an array of sonic tactics, and a broad swathe of musical styles, but this diversity is joined together with a common purpose: the translation of this archive of psychic experiments into a delirious hybrid of conceptual noise and electronic pop.”
Reviewing the Media Club show in Exclaim!, Alan Ranta raved that “Matmos constantly evolved the organizational and sonic structure of their compositions, serving a naked lunch of aural and visual stimulus wrapped up in a cultish package, blending the experimental and the groovy in perfect balance. Their music and style is utterly fustigating, fostering a tripped-out absorption to the point of losing the plot. Matmos is a rare kind of genius.”
More Matmos Vancouver photos:
