Another wacko idea from Matmos

Loved Matmos' new Marriage of True Minds even before I knew anything about how they made it. But how they made it is bizarre and fascinating and so takes up most of the head-space in this interview...up today at BLurt.


MIND MELD Matmos
Feb 26, 2013

That nagging itchy sensation you feel in the lower left-hand corner of your head? It's the Baltimore duo's ongoing experiments in telepathy. Be very, very afraid.



BY JENNIFER KELLY


"I love that moment in composition when you're trying to get something going and you've got this emptiness and then suddenly from out of nowhere it forms," says Drew Daniel of the experimental electronic duo Matmos, explaining the appeal of the telepathy experiments that formed the basis for this year's A Marriage of True Minds. "It seemed like doing these experiments was a way of having that moment again and again."



He and his partner, Martin Schmidt, have been making strange, beautiful music out of the oddest elements for 20 years now, but they have, arguably, never done anything as unusual as these Ganzfeld-style parapsychological experiments. The two of them led roughly 50 sessions in Baltimore and Oxford, England, in which participants laid down on a mattress, put noise-cancelling headphones over their ears and halved ping pong balls over their eyes.


Daniel, meanwhile, in an adjoining room attempted to convey the theme of A Marriage of True Minds telepathically to them, and the subjects described the images, sounds and idea fragments that came to them as they lay there, blind and deaf. Their impressions were recorded on a video tape, and once they were finished, Schmidt escorted them out of the room - without any discussion of what had happened. Later, Daniel and Schmidt used the video tapes as the basis for music, sometimes literally, interspersing the words and recreating the sounds suggested by the tapes, and other times more liberally, as a prompt for more open-ended composition.

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Hey, in other, completely unrelated news, my son Sean got into his first auditioned theater BFA program...at Savannah College of Arts & Design. he auditioned as a walk-in at the Unifieds earlier this month. Yay, Sean! hope there's a couple more.

Carlton Melton meets Buckminster Fuller

Yeah, about time I had another review up...I was about to do a surly little blog piece on Man Chest Hair, the Finder's Keeper comp of hirsute northern UK bands from the 1970s who wanted to sound like Blood Sweat & Tears and Jethro Tull. (It's not enough to be rare, right? It also has to be good?)

So anyway, I have this Blurt review of a very good, very drone-y album by Carlton Melton, published today.

CARLTON MELTON
Photos of Photos
(Agitated)

Photos of Photos was recorded in a geodesic dome, that aging symbol of futurism that delivers the maximum possible amount of interior space per unit of surface covering. The album - four tracks on the vinyl, an additional two on the expanded CD - was laid down in three days of musical excess, laid down in single takes filtered through omnidirectional mics. There were no overdubs, no pitch shifting, no edits, no manipulations, no vocals, no very overt song structures. This is as close as you can come to standing in a swirling sonic vortex, buffeted by tangible waves of sound, pushed this way and that, by careering howls of guitar, swollen surges of synthesizer, woozy thunders of drum and bass.

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Here they are playing an extended live set.

I'm doing two interviews today, one at 2 p.m. with Matmos on their new telepathy-inspired Marriage of True Minds, the other at 8 p.m. with Matt Korvette from Pissed Jeans. Kind of nervous about both, but in different ways, Matmos because they're probably smarter than I am and Korvette because he's so much louder...

anyway, busy day, more soon...