Music Review: Matmos, The Marriage of True Minds

Published on February 21st, 2013 in: Current Faves, Music, Music Reviews, Reviews |

By Hanna

matmos-marriage-review-header-graphic

One of the best things about Matmos is their enduring sense of the wacky. It’s rare to find truly challenging and avant garde music, but rarer still to find some with a sense of humor. One of the ways that expresses itself is in their penchant for bizarre—almost gimmicky—methods of making music and collecting sounds.

This time this is focused less on the use of weird noises, but on the entire way of making the album. The buzzword for The Marriage of True Minds is telepathy, continuing from The Ganzfeld EP from last year (review). Both works were made using ganzfeld experiments; a pseudoscientific method of tapping into the psychic senses by limiting regular sensory perception and creating a ganzfeld effect; an effect similar to sensory deprivation. It’s characterized by the halved ping pong balls placed over the eyes, like the beginnings of a Crow from MST3K cosplay. By carrying out ganzfeld experiments on their friends over the years and recording the results, the basic structure of this album was formed.

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Music Review: Matmos, The Ganzfeld EP

Published on October 30th, 2012 in: Current Faves, Music, Music Reviews, New Music Tuesday, Reviews |

By Jemiah Jefferson

the ganzfield ep cover

In their 20-year history of making music together, Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt have collaborated on some delightfully weird compositions, unusual instrumentations, and intimate, fun, and often frankly erotic live performances. The intervening years seem not to have blunted the drive towards innovation both in concept and result, even if The Ganzfeld EP contains two of the most straightforwardly danceable tracks Matmos has ever produced. There’s still plenty of experimental oddness and scientific detachment to go around, but the youthful provocation shows signs of approachable mellowing.

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MoogFest 2010: If You Build A Synth Fest, They Will Come

Published on September 23rd, 2010 in: Conventions/Expos, Music, Upcoming Events |

By Less Lee Moore

about moogfest

MoogFest 2010 is an extraordinary three-day festival which takes place Halloween weekend (October 29-31) in Asheville, NC. MoogFest will celebrate the innovative spirit of sonic pioneer Robert Moog, who developed the Moog synthesizer in the 1960s.

A Moog (pronounced “mohg”) is actually a series of “modular voltage-controlled analog synthesizer systems,” which has been utilized to create a lot of awesome music by the likes of Perrey & Kingsley, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Hot Butter (of “Popcorn” fame), Giorgio Moroder, Gary Numan, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and Brian Kehew of The Moog Cookbook, and way more musicians than can be listed in this article.
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