Current Listening: Sam Prekop / John McEntire / The Soft Pink Truth, Matmos
This was something for the 10/6 installment of Bandcamp Friday: “A Yellow Robe Remixes” by Sam Prekop & John McEntire and The Soft Pink Truth.
A standout remix project by The Soft Pink Truth (side-project of Matmos’s Drew Daniel ), A Yellow Robe Remixes features two electronically composed interpretations of “A Yellow Robe”, which is the work of musicians Sam Prekop (The Sea And Cake) and John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea And Cake). The original track is featured on the Prekop / McEntire collaboration Sons Of, which was released in July of 2022 via Thrill Jockey Records.
Both tracks clock in at well under the original’s 23-plus minute runtime and exhibit seasonally appropriate air. The “Truth Dawn Mix” is evocative of a John Carpenter score if it was performed by Mike Oldfield and Weather Report. The “Midnight Mix” is more dance-oriented and pulse-driven.
A Yellow Robe Remixes is available to purchase at Bandcamp and Thrill Jockey Records.
And since Drew Daniel has been brought up…
Matmos has a new album on the horizon titled Return To Archive. If you’re familiar with the Matmos M.O., then you’re aware that this duo (Daniel and co-Matmos conspirator M. C. Schmidt) often construct their albums and sounds based on any number of themes, generating electro-centric arrangements from otherwise mundane and/or utilitarian objects (2016’s Ultimate Care II or 2019’s Plastic Anniversary) or psychological ideas (2013’s The Marriage Of True Minds).
The duo’s latest album is out digitally on 11/3 (physical copies won’t be available till 2024) via Smithsonian Folkways and features tracks constructed of samples taken from the label’s catalogue. Based on the two singles selected, Matmos ably takes advantage of this compendium of fleeting recorded moments
“Taken together, these LPs capture a particular historical moment in the emergence of the long-playing record as a crucial interface between the lonely listener and the surrounding panorama of the label’s Cold War social milieu. Promising the intimacy of access, some records are voyeuristic peepholes into domestic or professional spaces: a baby’s playroom, a busy office, an operating theater. Some records shrink the listener to the Lilliputian worlds of beetles and wasps. Some records are submarines plunging listeners to oceanic depths, or magic carpets flying them to the outermost reaches of the newly explored space age. In its own idiomatic way, every record promises transport, adventure, journeys into sound.”
“Mud Dauber Wasp” was completely built from recordings of mud dauber wasps inflight, these sounds manipulated and arranged into an anxiety-inducing maelstrom of distorted and rattling buzz-n-drone. The accompanying video is terrifying.
For “Injection Basic Sound”, Matmos scoured the grooves of Science Fiction Sound Effects, Vox Humana: Alfred Wolfsohn’s Experiments in the Extension of the Human Vocal Range, and Speech after the Removal of the Larynx.
Return To Archive is available for pre-order from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Music, links, and info provided by Terrorbird Media.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
