Consuming Flame

The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form appeared after a period of intensive and extensive collaboration for Matmos Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt. It arrived during the same year as Daniels Soft Pink Truth album Shall We Go on Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, which boasted an impressive number of contributors that pales in comparison to this project. Matmos invited 99 musicians and artists to give them any type of recording they wanted, as long as it was at the tempo of 99 beats per minute. Daniel and Schmidt then combined these offerings into a massive, three-hour-long triptych thats as conceptually rigorous and engaging as anything theyve created during their career. Instead of coaxing a wealth of tones out of a limited source -- like the plastic whose marvels and horrors they explored so brilliantly on their previous album, Plastic Anniversary -- these open exercises broaden the duos sound and show how Matmos bridge various scenes on the cutting edge of art and music. The Consuming Flame is fascinatingly egalitarian: While many of the artists who contributed are well-known in their fields, like Lesser, Wobbly, People Like Us, Yo La Tengo, Matthew Herbert, Daniel Lopatin, David Grubbs, and J.G. Thirlwell, many are not. Students of Schmidts Sound as Music course at The San Francisco Art Institute and members of internet groups also chipped in, and their recordings are just as important to the works success as a whole. The way Daniel and Schmidt piece everything together is pure Matmos; clever juxtapositions of sound and mood abound at every moment and throughout the entire album. Yet it often feels looser than some of their previous work, allowing them to wander seemingly without a map (although the meticulous chart that details who contributed and when proves otherwise) as field recordings from Tokyo, Belarus, and Baltimore echo the way the music traverses the playful, cerebral, and transporting aspects of their style. Even more impressively, The Consuming Flames drifting never feels like dabbling. The constant tempo adds an almost subliminal cohesion and a steady sense of motion to the drastic stylistic jumps of the first section, A Doughnut in the Sky, which moves from motorik-driven rock to gamelan to finely chopped vocal collages; the hallucinatory explorations of the second section, Im on the Team; and the cosmic electro-acoustic sweep of the third section, Extraterrestrial Masters. For those willing to invest the time in it, getting lost in the records vastness is immensely satisfying. In its own way, The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form is a fitting companion piece to Plastic Anniversary. Like that album, its a winning celebration of what makes Matmos special, and a tribute to the boundless possibilities of creativity -- especially when its shared with others. ~ Heather Phares