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CD
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THRILL 632CD
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$14.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/20/2025
"Metallic Life Review is the sound of two people who have collected field recordings of metal objects from around the world for years of their lives together, collaging their magpie hoard into rhythmic patterns, sometimes writing melodies and basslines, but sometimes just letting sound be sound. Patient gathering yields to ADHD editing. Painstakingly made but blink and you'll miss it. Is it music or is it noise? It is without a doubt exceptionally beautiful music wrought from metal detritus. By employing the strong contrast between a harsh industrial clatter-fest and a sweeter melodic dimension that acts as a deliberate counterforce, Matmos created an album that is utterly delightful. A 'life review' is a phrase used to describe the psychological phenomena reported by people who have survived near death experiences: the sense captured in the phrase 'my life flashed before my eyes.' Metallic Life Review is a kind of compressed fast-forward of Matmos' career with a sonic parade of the metallic objects from their lives. The sounds on the album were captured over the entire length of the existence of Matmos as a band. Metallic Life Review features Susan Alcorn's pedal steel, Owen Gardner's glockenspiel, Thor Harris' drumming, Jason Willett's (Half Japanese) guitar, and Jeff Carey's aluminum cans, which were melted, molded into custom aluminum rods, and then bowed and struck. The most dramatic difference from any previous Matmos album is that side two was recorded 'live in the studio,' ala Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth. For the first time on recording, Matmos capture the evolving, shifting, slithering dynamic that happens when they play live and let patterns emerge out of chaos and then collapse and then re-form. Their playful blend of compositional brilliance and improvisational playfulness meld perfectly, truly capturing ecstatic moments in a way that can only happen live. Metallic Life Review is a love story transmuted into sound, the result of a life filled with curiosity and powered by boundless exploration. Matmos have again made something spellbinding, brilliant and emotionally resonant.
"The two men of Matmos are living rebukes to the idea that conceptual art is somehow scary and inaccessible. When they decide to make a track out of the sounds of a breast implant or a cow uterus, they're challenging themselves not just to use those noises, but to make them sound funky and fun." --Pitchfork
"Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have been making music together for so long, and that their music has been so consistently good for so long really is remarkable." --The Quietus, album of the week
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LP
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THRILL 632LP
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$25.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/20/2025
LP version. "Metallic Life Review is the sound of two people who have collected field recordings of metal objects from around the world for years of their lives together, collaging their magpie hoard into rhythmic patterns, sometimes writing melodies and basslines, but sometimes just letting sound be sound. Patient gathering yields to ADHD editing. Painstakingly made but blink and you'll miss it. Is it music or is it noise? It is without a doubt exceptionally beautiful music wrought from metal detritus. By employing the strong contrast between a harsh industrial clatter-fest and a sweeter melodic dimension that acts as a deliberate counterforce, Matmos created an album that is utterly delightful. A 'life review' is a phrase used to describe the psychological phenomena reported by people who have survived near death experiences: the sense captured in the phrase 'my life flashed before my eyes.' Metallic Life Review is a kind of compressed fast-forward of Matmos' career with a sonic parade of the metallic objects from their lives. The sounds on the album were captured over the entire length of the existence of Matmos as a band. Metallic Life Review features Susan Alcorn's pedal steel, Owen Gardner's glockenspiel, Thor Harris' drumming, Jason Willett's (Half Japanese) guitar, and Jeff Carey's aluminum cans, which were melted, molded into custom aluminum rods, and then bowed and struck. The most dramatic difference from any previous Matmos album is that side two was recorded 'live in the studio,' ala Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth. For the first time on recording, Matmos capture the evolving, shifting, slithering dynamic that happens when they play live and let patterns emerge out of chaos and then collapse and then re-form. Their playful blend of compositional brilliance and improvisational playfulness meld perfectly, truly capturing ecstatic moments in a way that can only happen live. Metallic Life Review is a love story transmuted into sound, the result of a life filled with curiosity and powered by boundless exploration. Matmos have again made something spellbinding, brilliant and emotionally resonant.
"The two men of Matmos are living rebukes to the idea that conceptual art is somehow scary and inaccessible. When they decide to make a track out of the sounds of a breast implant or a cow uterus, they're challenging themselves not just to use those noises, but to make them sound funky and fun." --Pitchfork
"Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have been making music together for so long, and that their music has been so consistently good for so long really is remarkable." --The Quietus, album of the week
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LP
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THRILL 632X-LP
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$27.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/20/2025
LP version. Blue color vinyl. "Metallic Life Review is the sound of two people who have collected field recordings of metal objects from around the world for years of their lives together, collaging their magpie hoard into rhythmic patterns, sometimes writing melodies and basslines, but sometimes just letting sound be sound. Patient gathering yields to ADHD editing. Painstakingly made but blink and you'll miss it. Is it music or is it noise? It is without a doubt exceptionally beautiful music wrought from metal detritus. By employing the strong contrast between a harsh industrial clatter-fest and a sweeter melodic dimension that acts as a deliberate counterforce, Matmos created an album that is utterly delightful. A 'life review' is a phrase used to describe the psychological phenomena reported by people who have survived near death experiences: the sense captured in the phrase 'my life flashed before my eyes.' Metallic Life Review is a kind of compressed fast-forward of Matmos' career with a sonic parade of the metallic objects from their lives. The sounds on the album were captured over the entire length of the existence of Matmos as a band. Metallic Life Review features Susan Alcorn's pedal steel, Owen Gardner's glockenspiel, Thor Harris' drumming, Jason Willett's (Half Japanese) guitar, and Jeff Carey's aluminum cans, which were melted, molded into custom aluminum rods, and then bowed and struck. The most dramatic difference from any previous Matmos album is that side two was recorded 'live in the studio,' ala Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth. For the first time on recording, Matmos capture the evolving, shifting, slithering dynamic that happens when they play live and let patterns emerge out of chaos and then collapse and then re-form. Their playful blend of compositional brilliance and improvisational playfulness meld perfectly, truly capturing ecstatic moments in a way that can only happen live. Metallic Life Review is a love story transmuted into sound, the result of a life filled with curiosity and powered by boundless exploration. Matmos have again made something spellbinding, brilliant and emotionally resonant.
"The two men of Matmos are living rebukes to the idea that conceptual art is somehow scary and inaccessible. When they decide to make a track out of the sounds of a breast implant or a cow uterus, they're challenging themselves not just to use those noises, but to make them sound funky and fun." --Pitchfork
"Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have been making music together for so long, and that their music has been so consistently good for so long really is remarkable." --The Quietus, album of the week
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CD
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THR 316CD
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"The Marriage of True Minds is the first new Matmos full-length album in five years. Matmos are known for making toe-tapping rhythmic pop out of odd and unusual sound sources. They have always worn genre loosely, but it's safe to say that this is the first electronic album to start with tap dancing and end with doom metal. Comprising stomping techno, eerie synth jams, musique concrete, Latin rhythms, and Ethiopian music, at once at home in the academy, the art gallery, the nightclub and the noise warehouse, the dizzyingly diverse assemblage which is The Marriage of True Minds is driven by a tightly unified conceptual agenda: telepathy."
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12"
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THR 315EP
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CD
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FACT 006CD
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Autofact is pleased to announce a reissue of The West -- a five song album by the Baltimore electronic duo, Matmos -- in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the album's original recording, released on Deluxe Records in 1999. On this, their third release, Matmos collaborate with an all-star selection of friends to create an unusual hybrid of digitally-constructed acoustic music. Imitating but transforming rock, country, and folk gestures, The West reaches territory similar to work by John Fahey or Gastr del Sol from a perversely opposite end of the spectrum: instead of making organic music that draws upon electronic texture, this is electronic music that feels organic -- both in its sound sources and in its construction. Instead of the bizarre sound sources that Matmos have used in the past (amplified crayfish nerve tissue, rubber clothing, hair), the musique concrète elements on The West have an everyday quality: a phone rings, a car starts, the pages of a book are turned, water drips, a cigarette is smoked. Very quiet, familiar sounds are amplified into strange new shapes. Despite their temporary flirtation with traditional instruments, Matmos' conceptual antics remain: in a Cage-ian gesture, a dice game determined the selection and content of the tiny sample snippet clouds within the first song "Last Delicious Cigarette," with dice rolls selecting records by Penderecki, Minor Threat, Enoch Light, Mandrill, a "Costar" record with Fernando Lamas, and a recording of a Heidegger lecture. The resulting song starts off as tongue-in-cheek turntablism and ends in a ditch with a dark, scraping drone. "Action At A Distance" pits Dave Pajo's tranquil guitar figures against the distorted noise of water dripping on a heavily-amplified copper sheet. Listen carefully and you'll hear the crisp pages of a Bible turning. "Sun On 5 at 152," an ode to a favorite strip of freeway, flickers between gentle repetitions of Mark Lightcap's acoustic guitar and discrete, unnerving digital edits before bursting into full drums/banjo/violin/cello orchestration and peaking with thirty seconds of drum and bass. "The West" ambitiously fuses distinct sections into a continuous 20-minute road trip across quasi-country, kosmische space music, electro, Krautrock, free-jazz, and full-on noise. The final song "Tonight, The End" is a sleazy take on stripper jazz featuring Jim Putnam (of Radar Bros.) on trumpet, Rick Brown (from Run On) at the kit, and Mark Lightcap's talents on the peck horn. Matmos is Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt.
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