Supreme Balloon
(Matador)
Matmos—the production duo of Martin Schmidt and Drew
Daniel—carved their reputation, almost literally, sampling the
sound of liposuctions and LASIK surgeries on 2001’s A Chance to Cut
Is a Chance to Cure, using laptops to digitally pit and pile tonal
thromboses. Always fans of concept albums, the duo then whittled
Appalachian folk on 2003’s The Civil War; they followed up with
2006’s The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, a
collection of 10 tributes to historical gay/lesbian performers,
composers, authors, philosophers, and poets (including Joe Meek, Larry
Levan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Valerie Solanas, and Darby Crash). Now,
with Supreme Balloon, Matmos have foregone arterial or martial
rhythms for something simultaneously more and less organic: a “concept
album” composed solely of rare analog synthesizers.
Operating on a wavelength similar to contemporary Matthew Herbert’s
Around the House and Bodily Functions, or Venetian Snares
and Hecate’s Nymphomatriarch, Matmos’s albums were always at
least two-thirds chin stroker, leaving listeners to wonder what else
might have been stroked to craft each timbre. On previous albums,
Matmos may well have recorded insemination to ultrasounds to afterbirth
if it suited the project. But Supreme Balloon was conceived in
vitro. A self-imposed microphone-free effort, Supreme Balloon eschews field recording for modular patches, gradual rather than
granular distention, making it closer in spirit to Daniel’s Soft Pink
Truth side project, only without the 4/4 anchor. The problem is that
even though this album is their least surgical, it’s somewhat
antiseptic, and its closed patch-bay loops make it the most hermetic
Matmos effort to date.
For all the hyperaware, meticulously edited minutiae of the previous
three Matmos releases, those records still played out far less
insularly than do parts of Supreme Balloon. Sure, Matmos
sometimes playfully scrunch and gate these analog textures, as on the
album’s titular epic, an ambitious 24-minute Tangerine Dream/Vangelis
team-up that never was. But just as often, it can feel as though they
simply threw their new old gear in the petri-dish agar and let it
evolve—it screams for further twists. Supreme Balloon almost too faithfully orbits a single big picture, even if it is 70 mm
and celestial. Their command of kosmische oscillations is commendable,
inspiring positive descriptors such as “glissando” and “raga.” But it
boils down to the sound of vintage tones done with vintage technique,
rather than the duo’s usual forward-thinking processing.
Supreme Balloon‘s peaks and valleys offer a catchy survey of
the canon of fractal synth topography, a contemporary echo from a
historical continuum, and that’s the concept. But this chin, for one,
gets more vigorously stroked imaging how Matmos might have approached
the same material in the digital realm, taking vintage recordings and
bruising the edges, dodging the exposure, letting a more hybrid
ambition balloon.
Matmos play Mon July 7, Triple Door, 8 pm, $20, all ages.