MATMOS – Supreme Balloon – CD – OLE799-2

“No microphones were used on this album,” state the liner notes of The Supreme Balloon. That would be a pretty bold statement for a lot of artists, but it’s an especially striking one for Matmos, who have taken recording normally non-musical sounds and then reconfiguring and recontextualizing them to an exquisite level. That may be exactly why Drew Daniel and Martin C. Schmidt opted for nothing but electronically generated tones on this album. Not because they’ve tapped out their usual approach, which is confined only by any sound they can pick up with a microphone and any way they want to tweak it, but because sticking to a purely electronic palette — including an array of classic synths like the Moog Voyager, ARP 2600, Stylophone, and Korg MS 2000 — is so traditional that it’s radical, and just a shade less concept-driven than the aesthetics that guided their earlier albums. While it may be Matmos’ least conceptual work in some time, The Supreme Balloon is the duo’s most overtly playful music since A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure. They spend most of the album making their electronics sound as inorganic as possible, with stiffly thumping and hissing percussion and whimsical melodies that bubble, bleep, and toot, as on “The Rainbow Flag,” which hops and jerks like a wind-up toy.

Heather Phares / AllMusic