Matmos – “Regards/Uklony Dla Boguslaw Schaeffer” – [Thrill Jockey Records]

aarbor   3/1/2023   A Library, CD

Matmos have never played the music of Polish composer Boguslaw [boh-goo-slav] Schaeffer [shay-fer] but they have played with it and created new songs from fragments of his work. Schaeffer was a part of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in the 1960s and ’70s. Schaeffer was a composer, musicologist, and graphic artist, a member of the avant garde “Cracow Group” of Polish composers. Matmos is the American experimental electronic duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. They’ve been active since the mid-1990s and are based in Baltimore, Maryland. Matmos is a “seething lake of evil slime” from the ’68 cult sci-fi film Barbarella. Regards sounds very much like a Matmos album, from the hyper-swung house beats to the way they introduce their tracks by spilling out their constituent pieces and then gradually assembling them into a coherent groove. There are five shorter and more rhythmic tracks and three longer and more ambient cuts. For the most part, the music here doesn’t push Matmos’ sound into unfamiliar territory so much as recreate it with new materials. AArbor