The late 2010s and early 2020s were one of the richest periods in Matmos' career, with albums like Plastic Anniversary and The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form reflecting extraordinary achievements in their own ways. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt's streak continues with Regards / Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer, a reimagining and reassembling of the works of Polish composer, theoretician, playwright, critic, and teacher Boguslaw Schaeffer commissioned by the Instytutu Adama Mickiewicza as part of the Niepodlegla ...
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The late 2010s and early 2020s were one of the richest periods in Matmos' career, with albums like Plastic Anniversary and The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form reflecting extraordinary achievements in their own ways. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt's streak continues with Regards / Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer, a reimagining and reassembling of the works of Polish composer, theoretician, playwright, critic, and teacher Boguslaw Schaeffer commissioned by the Instytutu Adama Mickiewicza as part of the Niepodlegla program. A contemporary of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Krzysztof Penderecki, Schaeffer's boundary-breaking output in electronic music, classical composition, and theater makes him a fitting subject for Matmos' similarly freewheeling creativity. In comparison to The Consuming Flame, which found the duo working with 99 other artists on three hours' worth of music, Regards is a miniature, but a remarkably detailed one; even the titles of its pieces are anagrams of Schaeffer's name. Like many of Matmos' best works, the album echoes other works in their discography. Most obviously, it evokes the vintage electronics of The Supreme Balloon, the audio portraiture of The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, and the finesse at reconfiguring a composer's body of work they displayed with Jefferson Friedman: Quartets. Once again, Matmos' knowledge of the roots of electronic music and modern composition is formidable, but the way they wield it isn't. On Regards, their skill at creating complete, satisfying pieces from sources like plastic objects and washing machines translates equally well to the more traditional instrumentation that they not-so-traditionally update while giving equal time to their playful and ominous sides on a set of pieces that play like a suite. Beginning the album with elegant mystery, "Resemblage / Parasamblaz" combines the alien spookiness of early electronic music with prickly chamber pop and delivers quintessentially Matmos twists and turns and intertwined textures. The duo indulge in kitschy plunderphonic exotica on "Cobra Wages Shuffle / Off! Schable w gure!," a tooting, beeping, and burbling contraption that foreshadows the album's darker, cavernous second half. The slide toward entropy continues on the excellently named "Few, Far Chaos Bugles / Uff... Bosch gra Walese," where Ulas Kurugullu's viola and erhu nearly engulf the horns and choral vocals, and on "If All Things Were Turned to Smoke / Gdyby wszystko stalo sie dymem," where Úna Monaghan's harp and Max Eilbacher's electronics help Schmidt and Daniel transform Schaeffer's Heraklitiana into something even more unearthly. By the time things finally descend into hissing, pummeling destruction on "Anti-Antiphon (Absolute Decomposition) / Anty-Antyfona," Regards / Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer reveals itself as an inspired tribute to Schaeffer and another fine example of how Matmos' circular interplay of invention and reinvention remains exceptional. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi
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