Baltimore based experimental electronic duo Matmos have announced their new concept album titled The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form. The concept behind the album calls for features from 99 different artists who were instructed by the duo to play anything they wanted, as long as it was to the tempo of 99 beats per minute.

The resulting album clocks in at over three hours, and spans across a wide variety of different moods, genres and styles. Each section of the album is broken up into three distinct movements, making up three songs, each about an hour each. The artists involved in the album range from near strangers to Matmos to longtime collaborators. Some of the artists involved include J. Lesser, Jon “Wobbly” Leidecker, Mark Lightcap, Josh Quillen of So Percussion, Vicki Bennett, Blake Harrison of Pig Destroyer, Kevin Gan Yuen of Sutekh Hexen, Terence Hannum of Locrian and many more.

“The album is very much like a train ride at an amusement park,” describes one half of Matmos M.C. Schmidt. “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.” To ease the listening experience, the three hour album has been divided into three separate discs, and a fold-out poster that schematically displays the timeline of the full work and the specific locations of all 99 guest musicians, pictured below:

The Consuming Flame will be Matmos’ first project since their 2019 album Plastic Anniversary. The experimental album featured sounds made entirely from objects made of plastic, and mxdwn’s Ines Lalonde notes that the album, “establishes Matmos as an innovator in the experimental electronic genre. A truly powerful and stimulating record, somehow, they manage to outdo themselves once again.”

Check out the cover art and track list for Matmos’ The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form, as well as a sample of the album, below:

The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form track list:

A Doughnut in the Sky
I’m on the Team
Extraterrestrial Masters