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Avg: 3.5 (97 ratings)
- Date Released: May 6, 2008
- Genre: Electronic
- Label: Matador
Dropping the samples and picking up old synths, the beloved experimental electronic duo gets back to basics — their way.
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We Say...
This has to be one of the most oddly configured back-to-basics albums ever made. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, a.k.a. the electronic duo Matmos, have probably sampled your mom. Why not? They've sampled everything else: a cow's uterus, shuffled cards, latex fetishwear, stepped-on rock salt and semen hitting paper, to limit it to five. Daniel and Schmidt, a couple in real life as in music, moved to Baltimore (where Daniel teaches English at Johns Hopkins), a city with no shortage of lively experimental music, not long before the issue of this, their seventh album. Given how overtly idea-driven Matmos's music often is to begin with, you might think Supreme Balloon might be an egghead fiesta.
Instead, Daniel and Schmidt leave the concepts behind here and stick entirely to analog synthesizers, inviting along a number of guests (Sun Ra vet Marshall Allen, fellow Wire-mag regular Keith Fullerton Whitman, classical pianist Sarah Cahill) and tweaking everything till it's indubitably Matmos. That means tunes that fold playfully in on themselves — "Exciter Lamp" renders its simple motif blurry and fractal by turns — and messing around with already-familiar work (a switched-on take of baroque Frenchman Francois Couperin's "Les Folies Francaises"). And in the case of the album's centerpiece, it means stitching together an ebb-and-flow 24-minute title track that takes a while to rev up, but when it does, consistently generates ideas without growing rococo. The only thing missing is a laser show — and who knows? Matmos might be working on one of those right now. Think of the sampling possibilities. -
They Say...
"No microphones were used on this album," state the liner notes of The Supreme Balloon. That would be a pretty bold statement for a lot of artists, but it's an especially striking one for Matmos, who have taken recording normally non-musical sounds and then reconfiguring and recontextualizing them to an exquisite level. That may be exactly why Drew Daniel and Martin C. Schmidt opted for nothing but electronically generated tones on this album. Not because they've tapped out their usual approach, which is confined only by any sound they can pick up with a microphone and any way they want to tweak it, but because sticking to a purely electronic palette -- including an array of classic synths like the Moog Voyager, ARP 2600, Stylophone, and Korg MS 2000 -- is so traditional that it's radical, and just a shade less concept-driven than the aesthetics that guided their earlier albums. While it may be Matmos' least conceptual work in some time, The Supreme Balloon is the duo's most overtly playful music since A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure. They spend most of the album making their electronics sound as inorganic as possible, with stiffly thumping and hissing percussion and whimsical melodies that bubble, bleep, and toot, as on "The Rainbow Flag," which hops and jerks like a wind-up toy. The album's shorter songs celebrate the vintage electronic pop of the '60s and '70s as well as the era's gear; "Les Folies Française"'s synth-baroque and "Cloudhoppers"' warm analog tones hark back to Jean-Jacques Perrey, Dick Hyman, and library music. Despite The Supreme Balloon's retro leanings, it has the same wit and intelligence of all of Matmos' previous music, which is just as important to their overall sound as their inspired sampling and sound editing have been. The layers of squiggles, zaps, and beeps on "Mister Mouth" -- which features the Sun Ra Arkestra's Marshall Allen on the EVI (electronic voice instrument) -- aren't so far removed from A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure's "Memento Mori," and "Exciter Lamp"'s flutters and taps could fit in on almost any of their earlier albums. The simplicity of these short pieces feels almost as radical as The Supreme Balloon's electronics-only rule, especially after The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast's intricacy, but "The Supreme Balloon" itself shows that Matmos didn't completely downsize their ambitions on this album. Billowing out past 20 minutes, the track's epic length, Krautrock underpinnings, and droning, Eastern-tinged melodies undulate and unfurl effortlessly and never drag -- which is a pretty supreme achievement. And, while The Supreme Balloon's nostalgic synthetic playground is a smaller statement than some of Matmos' other albums, it's still a strong one.
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| 01. |  |
Rainbow Flag |
3:51 |
|
| 02. | |
Polychords |
3:31 |
|
| 03. | |
Mister Mouth |
3:49 |
|
| 04. | |
Exciter Lamp And The Variable Band |
3:22 |
|
| 05. | |
Les Folies Françaises |
2:25 |
|
| 06. | |
Supreme Balloon |
24:09 |
|
| 07. | |
Cloudhoppers |
2:58 |
|
| 08. | |
[Hidden Track] |
5:11 |
|
08 Total Tracks, 49:16 Total Length
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Credits
- Marshall Allen - Soloist // Marshall Allen - Evi // Thomas DiMuzio - Engineer // Thomas DiMuzio - Mastering // Rex Ray - Graphic Design // Rex Ray - Layout Design // Sarah Cahill - Korg Synthesizer // Drew Daniel - Tabla // Drew Daniel - Moog Synthesizer // Drew Daniel - Sampling // Drew Daniel - Korg Synthesizer // Drew Daniel - Omnichord // Drew Daniel - Digital Editing // Drew Daniel - Mixing // Drew Daniel - Sequencing // Drew Daniel - Stylophone // Drew Daniel - Effects // Drew Daniel - Arp 2600 // Drew Daniel - SH-101 // Robert Syrett - Artwork
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