This striking release from the eclectic duo brings together 99 collaborators to create an enthralling picture of the present moment.
Matmos’ high-concept investigations take narrow parameters to gleefully absurd extremes. For last year’s Plastic Anniversary, the duo of Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt sourced every sound from cast-off plastic objects: vinyl LPs, riot shields, even a breast implant. On Ultimate Care II, they extended a career-long quest to find art in unlikely places by using a Whirlpool washing machine as the album’s sole musical instrument. And 2013’s The Marriage of True Minds examined the pair’s long creative and romantic partnership through a paranormal lens, using experiments in telepathy and ESP to generate musical raw material. The Consuming Flame spins a seemingly arbitrary number into one of their most elaborate conceits yet. Soliciting contributions from 99 different musicians, including themselves, Matmos wove the lot—squirrely electronic beats, post-rock excursions, dub interludes, freeform noise—into a mammoth, three-hour suite meant to be experienced in a single sitting. They only required their collaborators to pace their submissions at 99 beats per minute. The collaged-together results are fascinating, often enthralling, occasionally an uphill slog, and every bit as anarchic as their genesis would suggest.
Matmos have made collaboration a key part of their practice for years, but even by their typically open-armed standards, The Consuming Flame’s guest list is staggeringly diverse. Their accomplices include longtime friends (Wobbly, J. Lesser, People Like Us), electronic veterans (Mouse on Mars), indie titans (Yo La Tengo), improvisers (David Grubbs), noise rappers (clipping.), and an array of experimental electronic musicians (Rabit, Oneohtrix Point Never, DeForrest Brown, Jr.). There are metalheads, techno producers, opera singers, and acoustic fingerpickers. Even author Douglas Rushkoff turns up—doing, as best I can tell, some kind of electronically assisted impersonation of the Muppets’ Beaker. An accompanying poster lays out a detailed timeline of who is playing when—at the music’s busiest, as many as seven artists are in the mix—but it never tells us exactly what they are doing. Part of the fun is in trying to disentangle the strands of the music’s knottiest moments—or, conversely, figuring out why what looks, on paper, like a particularly crowded stretch might yield so few clues as to its constituent parts.
For all the variety of that list, The Consuming Flame is not an eclectic listen, exactly. This is not a supermarket where individual contributions sit neatly packaged and tidily arranged; it’s more like a bulk-foods store after a hurricane, with oatmeal and wild rice, dried apricots and seaweed, carob chips and detergent all swirled together, patterns giving way to chaos and back again, depending on how and where the upturned bins have landed.
Given the album’s length and density, it resists close reading; if there is an organizing logic here, it is not readily apparent, although brushed drums and choppy vocal effects provide thematic through lines, and the occasional recurring motif lends a sense of narrative cohesion. But the music often unspools with natural ease. During one particularly engaging passage early in CD1, “A Doughnut in the Sky,” shimmering drones give way to dubby post-rock that rises into a Loaded-style jam; a fade-out leads us into a field recording of children’s voices, and then a rapid succession of highly suggestive sonic images: the bonging of a broken grandfather clock; power sanders on the fritz; the ghost of Derek Bailey. Before long, a Diwali-like clapping rhythm is paired with prepared piano; toward the end of the first section, a burst of pure, uncut jazz fusion flashes out like a glimpse of an alternate universe.
It’s not always a pleasurable listen; I haven’t found it conducive to meditative morning walks or dinners with friends. There are stretches of monotony, and the tempo they have chosen can drag, trudging along at a sullen andante. But these moments of struggle are part of the point of the endeavor. Schmidt has compared the album, in its 178-minute surfeit, to a journey by car, and lord knows that even the most scintillating road trips have their doldrums. What might be most striking about The Consuming Flame is how perfectly it suits the peculiarities of the present moment, even though the whole project was in the can before the pandemic ever reared its ugly microbial head.
The project could scarcely be more prescient: Its central mode of remote collaboration is, suddenly, one of the principal ways that people work together. Its emotional states, veering from giddiness to abject boredom, are a mirror image of these past few months’ unfamiliar clockworks, their racing weeks and creeping hours. Like most Matmos albums, The Consuming Flame is about more than just its ostensible organizing principle. The number 99 is largely arbitrary, but the animating ideas are the same ones that have been at the heart of Matmos’ work all along: community, interdependence, the radical joy of creative play. And as this long year stretches on, infection curves unspooling against the X axis—not entirely unlike the multi-colored bars stretching across the album’s list of contributors—those same ideas are proving just as important in life as in art.
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