Matmos — The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form

The Consuming Flame is three CDs and nearly three hours worth of material, with sounds from 99 artists compiled and arranged by Matmos: this is my excuse for not even attempting any meaningful summary of the album. Instead, I’ll hopefully give a sense of how it sounds in a broader sense. Matmos, M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, invited 99 incredibly eclectic projects and musicians over a period of time to contribute anything they wanted - as long as any rhythmic material was 99 beats per minute. The resulting submissions were then crafted into three long collages - A Doughnut in the Sky, On the Team, and Extraterrestrial Masters - all around the hour mark, and all wildly colourful. These collages are also mapped out on a huge poster that accompanies the release, giving a neat visual sense of just how big the whole project is.

The press release compares The Consuming Flame to The Faust Tapes, and this is a good indication of what your ears will get; like previous Matmos releases I have heard, the album is experimental and challenging without becoming overly hardboiled - it retains a definite element of fun. So you will find stuttering vocal samples dragging across twisting drums, unsettling drones and jazzy guitar, primitive electronics and motorik rhythms…I could continue this list for a long, long time. The sounds and colours within The Consuming Flame are ludicrously varied, it would perhaps be easier to merely list genres not referenced at all. It simply can’t be reductively described in any convenient genre, term, or phrase. However, this also makes it a challenging listen in the sense that your ears can’t ever settle or ‘switch off.’ Saying that, it does work as casual listening, but not as inoffensive background noise in any way: something will grab your attention whether you like it or not. I’m discussing listening to it in this way because it is so massive and sprawling that it demands, or inspires, a different kind of listening to that you might normally employ. The entire project hovers between a sense of structure and a sense of chaos, again, there is a tension in terms of it being a ’simple’ or a ‘difficult’ listen. On a lived, momentary level, The Consuming Flame is constantly engaging, surprising, and rewarding; but when thought about, from a distance, it’s less simple to reduce that experience into any simplistic shorthand - or, indeed, review.

Oddly, my first reaction to The Consuming Flame was echoed by Schmidt in the press release, though I only read his words after listening to the album. It is indeed like a train ride, watching an ever shifting landscape as you traverse through it, with different colours, themes, depths, and dynamics. It is a journey constructed with intense detail and care, and could easily veer into an abstruse exercise in electroacoustic collage, even a soft plunderphonics, but Matmos’ alert sense of pop culture and plain fun ensure that the three long pieces aren’t choked by cerebral indulgence. If anything, an atmosphere of absurdity is deliberated courted at points, with the repeated use of comic or cryptic vocal samples, my favourite of which is undoubtedly the duet declaring ’nice men in stable relationships’ during On the Team. The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form is exhaustive but never exhausting, and whilst you might be at pains to describe it, listening to it is undoubtedly a pleasure.