Matmos’ Latest A Challenging Listen
As Soft Pink Truth, Drew Daniel offers warm, hopeful note
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Matmos’ “The Conusming
Flame:
Open Exercises in
Group Form” is a paradox.
A triple album, its CD incarnation
contains three hour-long
compositions with no breaks. The
streaming version is sequenced
differently, divided into 44 songs.
This is demanding music, made to
get absorbed in. It’s also jumpy as
a bottle of Dexedrine, moving from
genre to genre and sound to sound,
even within songs, in a manner
that’s Extremely Online. Minute
to minute, the album feels made
for people with frazzled attention
spans, but as an entire project it’s
time-consuming and ambitious to
a degree that’s rare now.
Matmos consist of Drew Daniel
and M.C. Schmidt, a gay couple
who’ve been making music under
the name for 25 years. Many Matmos
albums have been built around
conceptual restrictions and unusual
sample sources. Their 2019
“Plastic Anniversary” manipulated
sounds taken from various plastic
objects, with barbed political commentary
contained in their choice
of song titles, especially “Thermoplastic
Riot Shield.”
On “The Consuming Flame,”
Matmos invited 99 musicians to
contribute anything they wanted
to, as long as it was 99 beats per
minute. Daniel and Schmidt then
assembled everyone’s selections
into a semi-cohesive whole. “The
Consuming Flame” questions the
idea of the group’s identity. By
building most of the album around
sounds made by other artists
without Matmos’ appeal, are they
making an album from a different
source of samples yet again? And
when is the inevitable remix album
coming out?
“I’m Fine I’m Fine” stands out
by being based around recognizable
vocals. It layers spoken word,
which refl ects a couple’s argument
but is phrased in near-random
words (“I’m on the team”), over
Dixieland jazz. “Goodnight Loving
Bose Ikard” takes a whistle
Matmos’ “The Conusming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form” is available on August 21.
and guitar line reminiscent of
Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western
soundtracks but sounds like
a mash-up, placing it on top of a
dance beat. “Athens New Guinea
Gas Can Japan” introduces nonmusical
buzzing and scraping.
The highest-profi le guest here is
Daveed Diggs, who played Thomas
Jefferson in “Hamilton” and is the
vocalist for the hip-hop group clipping.
But when Diggs pops up on
“Circle of Swords,” he’s edited to
sound like a skipping record. His
voice is unrecognizable. Instead of
turning into hip-hop, the song closes
with spoken word samples over
a voice loop. “I, Voxelman” features
sped-up and distorted vocals, recalling
the Residents. Elements of
songs bleed into one another, but
the beat from one might play out
over a very different melody and
then get replaced after 45 seconds.
Faust’s “The Faust Tapes,” a suite
of fragmentary art-rock songs released
in 1973, and Laurie Anderson’s
experimental pop hover over
the album, but it’s hard to pick out
any consistent tone or theme.
“The Consuming Flame” is an album
that is more engaging to think
about than listen to. But does that
MUSIC
have something to do with my own
limitations? Right now, expecting
an audience to sink into a triple
album that can’t be easily divided
into individual songs is a dare. But
the dare doesn’t seem worth the effort
when Drew Daniel’s solo project
the Soft Pink Truth released
a much better album this past
spring.
The Soft Pink Truth had specialized
in paying tribute to anarchist
punk and queering macho genres
like hardcore and black metal by
taking them to the dance club. But
Daniel’s latest album, “Shall We
Go On Sinning So That Grace May
Increase?,” went into a much different
direction. Responding to the
psychic damage done by Trumpism,
its warmth suggests a meditative
regimen. Daniel worked with
opera-pop composer Colin Self
MATMOS
➤ MATMOS, continued on p.25
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