Experimental duo Matmos (Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt) have announced their 14th album, Return To Archive, which will be out digitally on November 3 via Smithsonian Folkways with a physical release in April, 2024. That’s a double take for sure, but less so when you lean that the whole album was created from samples from the many non-musical Folkways records. As usual it’s probably best to let Matmos do the explaining:
Because we were not interested in reworking the music of other people (having just done that in our immediately preceding album, Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer, on which we built new music out of elements from the Polish electro-acoustic composer), for this project we decided that we would rather focus exclusively upon the nature and science recordings within the label’s catalog and would make music only by sampling those sources without adding any new sounds of our own. We hoped to activate the rich musical potential within the hoots, gurgles, thunks, zaps, howls, drips, bangs, and zings that haunt classic early Folkways LPs from the The Sounds of the Office (1964) to Sounds of Medicine (1955) to The Science of Sound (1958). From cable cars on land to bottlenose dolphins underwater, from the quietest gurgling of gastro intestinal interiors to the wildest squalls of junkyard landscapes and the howling ionosphere above the clouds, an entire sonic universe lay hidden in the back alleys of this back catalog.
You can listen to “Mud Dauber Wasp,” which was created entirely from the sounds of actual mud dauber wasps, and comes with a video by M.C. Schmidt. Watch that below.
Matmos will celebrate the release of Return to Archive with a special performance at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in DC on September 9 from 1-3 PM: “In a three-hour demonstration of audio alchemy, sounds extracted from the grooves of LPs like Sounds of North American Frogs, Sounds of the Junk Yard, Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, and Science of Sound will be expanded into original electronic compositions that probe the boundary between music and noise. Expect beating insect wings tessellating across the audio field, cut-ups made from self-hypnosis tutorials, beats constructed from the sounds of infants learning to speak, and many other sonic metamorphoses.” Check out the flyer below.
Return to Archive:
01. “Good Morning Electronics”
02. “Injection Basic Sound”
03. “Mud-Dauber Wasp”
04. “Music or Noise?”
05. “Why?”
06. “Lend Me Your Ears”
07. “Return to Archive”
08. “The Way Japanese Beetles Sound to a Rose”
09. “Going to Sleep”
