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Matmos have talked about their new album and it's exciting(ly convoluted)!
"His concept for the next CD began with a work of scholarship, Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature. Royle sees something telepathic in the relationships between certain literary figures, like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Daniel took to the idea: "After 16 years of making music with Martin, I thought telepathy seemed like a fruitful trope for how improvisers sense where all the people in the room are going. That's a kind of telepathy too." That led him to Ganzfeld telepathy experiments, in which one person, the receiver, minimizes extraneous sensory input by reclining in a chair or on a mattress, and donning a blindfold as well as headphones transmitting white noise. The receiver does his best to empty his mind, and from another room, a second person, the sender, concentrates on a randomly selected image and tries to send it to the receiver via telepathy. During the test, the receiver speaks, responding to whatever enters his mind, and those responses are recorded. For 30 years starting in 1974, researchers used the procedure in an attempt to determine whether or not extrasensory perception exists.
Daniel has been conducting Ganzfeld sessions with friends, assorted Baltimore hipsters and musicians, even some Oxford dons recorded during a visit to England. He plans to collect several dozen audio and video tapes of the sessions, then see if something emerges as the conceptual basis for the next Matmos recording. It might lie in someone's spoken language, a phrase or a description of an image, or perhaps a hummed melody. (Some receivers have sung, hummed, and groaned.) Were someone to say "triangle," for example, Daniel might incorporate the sound of a triangle, or use threes as a musical schema: "A piece based on a triangle? OK, I'll do a waltz: one two three one two three." He could take some of the tapes, ignore the meaning of the words, and treat them as a sort of protoscore: "Let's say I have four sessions that are five minutes long, and in each a different person speaks at different points and with different levels of volume. So you could turn those four sessions into a kind of score for when musical instruments play and how loud they are." He says one female receiver reported a mental image of a lemon cut up, then reassembled with pins and photographed, after which the photograph turned into music. "So we're going to do that," Daniel says. "We're going to record all the sounds of cutting and make music with the lemon and the pins, probably with contact microphones. I find conceptual work very freeing. If you're told, 'OK, you have to make music using triangles and lemons,' to me there's so much you can do there. That could be a calypso piece, that could be a waltz, and it doesn't tell you if it's fast or slow, if it's busy or empty. All the fun decisions still get to be made."
And yes brad I'm still preparin that cd which'll have a song with a triangle.
"His concept for the next CD began with a work of scholarship, Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature. Royle sees something telepathic in the relationships between certain literary figures, like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Daniel took to the idea: "After 16 years of making music with Martin, I thought telepathy seemed like a fruitful trope for how improvisers sense where all the people in the room are going. That's a kind of telepathy too." That led him to Ganzfeld telepathy experiments, in which one person, the receiver, minimizes extraneous sensory input by reclining in a chair or on a mattress, and donning a blindfold as well as headphones transmitting white noise. The receiver does his best to empty his mind, and from another room, a second person, the sender, concentrates on a randomly selected image and tries to send it to the receiver via telepathy. During the test, the receiver speaks, responding to whatever enters his mind, and those responses are recorded. For 30 years starting in 1974, researchers used the procedure in an attempt to determine whether or not extrasensory perception exists.
Daniel has been conducting Ganzfeld sessions with friends, assorted Baltimore hipsters and musicians, even some Oxford dons recorded during a visit to England. He plans to collect several dozen audio and video tapes of the sessions, then see if something emerges as the conceptual basis for the next Matmos recording. It might lie in someone's spoken language, a phrase or a description of an image, or perhaps a hummed melody. (Some receivers have sung, hummed, and groaned.) Were someone to say "triangle," for example, Daniel might incorporate the sound of a triangle, or use threes as a musical schema: "A piece based on a triangle? OK, I'll do a waltz: one two three one two three." He could take some of the tapes, ignore the meaning of the words, and treat them as a sort of protoscore: "Let's say I have four sessions that are five minutes long, and in each a different person speaks at different points and with different levels of volume. So you could turn those four sessions into a kind of score for when musical instruments play and how loud they are." He says one female receiver reported a mental image of a lemon cut up, then reassembled with pins and photographed, after which the photograph turned into music. "So we're going to do that," Daniel says. "We're going to record all the sounds of cutting and make music with the lemon and the pins, probably with contact microphones. I find conceptual work very freeing. If you're told, 'OK, you have to make music using triangles and lemons,' to me there's so much you can do there. That could be a calypso piece, that could be a waltz, and it doesn't tell you if it's fast or slow, if it's busy or empty. All the fun decisions still get to be made."
And yes brad I'm still preparin that cd which'll have a song with a triangle.
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