Time to Experiment
Music has been much too normal lately, hasn’t it? For several years, the musical duo known as Matmos has been striving to remedy this problem. The musicians, M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, are two of the most progressive thinkers in music today. They’re currently hard at work in their Baltimore laboratory, manipulating sounds with a maniac sense of musical philosophy as you’ll see on The Ganzfeld EP. The duo has collaborated multiple times with Björk, and their past records included samples of sounds as varied and unexpected as plucked rat cages and plastic surgery. Every record brings a new vision and musical aesthetic, and The Ganzfeld EP is a kind of sneak peak at what’s to come next. The record gets its name from a classic parapsychology experiment into the mysteries of telepathy. In brief, Matmos is building their latest efforts on transcriptions from their own recreations of this experiment.
Ganzfeld opens with “Very Large Green Triangles,” a track that is equal parts dance anthem and introspective psychedelia. To make this song, Schmidt and Daniel attempted to telepathically beam the concept for their next album into the minds of sensory deprived test subjects. The subjects’ reactions to the experiment were transcribed, crafted into melodies, and set to an infectious beat that cuts off just a bit too soon. Things really start to get weird on “Just Waves,” the final track of The Ganzfeld EP. Some of those aforementioned telepathic transcripts are sung by several different vocalists, each employing a slightly different monotone. The opposing vocal tracks coalesce into melodies over 13 minutes, allowing plenty of time to think about exactly what is happening to you. What results is the feeling a mind reader must get in the middle of Times Square – relentless bombardment from indecipherable invading thoughts. Waves upon waves of consciousness streaming at once.
Matmos is too creative to ignore. This is music that is as much about the process as it is about the result, and both are equally impressive. Take a peek into the mind of two psychically linked mad scientists. If The Ganzfeld EP is any indication of what to expect from Matmos in the near future, this will be a kind of telepathic portal into the musicians’ heads. Take a step into the weird.
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