Supreme Balloon
They're still working with an overriding concept, but this time Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel of Matmos focus on a simple aesthetic limitation: using only synthesizers as input sources. While there's little in the way of outside text to grapple with as a result, the decision opens the door on some gorgeous sonic shifts.
The two guys in Matmos have adopted lots of different personae, but they've never been especially free-spirited—at least not on conceptual albums devoted to the sounds of surgery, songs from the Civil War, and "audio biographies" of luminaries like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Of course, none of those proved as leaden as…
Tom Whyman reviews the latest from the experimental entity that is Matmos.
"No microphones were used on this album," state the liner notes of The Supreme Balloon.
Drew Daniel and M. Schmidt have been making records for ten years now, and they have yet to put one out that's conceptually less than intriguing