LEXIE MOUNTAIN BOYS @ echo

matmos

Matmos read their biographies and re-enacted events from their lives, making songs out of the sounds of the re-enactments. They gathered objects that were important to these people, made noises with them, and built melodies out of the noises. Sometimes the songs are just a tight focus on one detail (the Wittgenstein song is just an exploded view of a single paragraph from his text “Philosophical Investigations”) and sometimes they revisit one event from their life (the King Ludwig II song re-enacts the incident in which he ordered dinner to be served to his favorite horse inside his castle’s Hall of Mirrors with disastrous results). Sometimes they depict their subject abstractly: the Darby Crash song is dark electronics made out of the sound of Drew Daniel crying out in pain getting burned by the Germs’ Don Bolles, combined with the noise of M.C. Schmidt shaving his head. The Patricia Highsmith song was made as a collaboration with her favorite animal, the snail (they aimed a laser at a light sensitive theremin, and then got snails to crawl across the path of the laser, triggering changes in the theremin’s pitch).

Voices are more prominent on this record; there are guest vocals and cameo speeches by Antony, Kalonica McQuesten, Laetitia Sonami, Maja Ratjke, Bjork, and others.

The album features Matmos’s most extremist and gutsy sound design (the sound of semen, burning flesh, and the embalmed reproductive tract of a cow are all featured) but rubbed up against the most lyrical, heart-on-sleeve music they’ve ever written (check out Antony’s voice on “Semen Song for James Bidgood” or the Kronos Quartet’s funereal strings on “Solo Buttons for Joe Meek”). French horns, tuba, strings, harp, darbuka, voice, guitar, drums and synths are chopped into tricky rhythmic patterns and melodic motifs. It’s a funkier, funnier affair than their last album, The Civil War (a hallucinatory blend of medieval English folk and 19th century Americana), but also a darker one.

with:
So Percussion
Lexie Mountain Boys