The recent partnership between experimental giants Matmos and Chicago post-rock label Thrill Jockey is an exciting one. The release of their new EP, “The Ganzfeld EP,” will coincide with the 20 year anniversary of core members Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt’s status as collaborators and as a couple. The EP will precede a full-length, entitled The Marriage of True Minds, which will drop in early 2013. The press release for the releases is simply too daunting to summarize or synthesize; it states:
The EP and the album have the same conceptual basis: telepathy. For the past four years the band have been conducting parapsychological experiments based upon the classic Ganzfeld (“total field”) experiment, but with a twist: instead of sending and receiving simple graphic patterns, test subjects were put into a state of sensory deprivation by covering their eyes and listening to white noise on headphones, and then Matmos member Drew Daniel attempted to transmit “the concept of the new Matmos record” directly into their minds. During videotaped psychic experiments conducted at home in Baltimore and at Oxford University, test subjects were asked to describe out loud anything they saw or heard within their minds as Drew attempted transmission. The resulting transcripts became a kind of score that was then used by Matmos to generate music. If a subject hummed something, that became a melody; passing visual images suggested arrangement ideas, instruments, or raw materials for a collage; if a subject described an action, then the band members had to act that out and make music out of the noises generated in the process of the re-enactment.
The press release continues to state that the EP is comprised of two original tracks and one remix. The song, “Just Waves” has a lot to live up to as it is reported to include both Daniel and Schmidt’s voices as well as vocal contributions by Angel Deradoorian of Dirty Projectors, Dan Deacon, and Clodagh Simonds. The tracklisting for “The Ganzfeld EP” is below.
“The Ganzfeld EP” tracklisting:
1. Very Large Green Triangles (Edit)
2. You (Rrose Mix)
3. Just Waves
