RETURN TO ARCHIVE, Matmos’ 14th album, is constructed entirely from the “non-musical” recordings
released by Folkways Records in the mid-20th century. It contains sounds sourced from dozens of LPs,
from Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Sounds of Insects to
Voices of Satellites, Sounds of Medicine to Sounds of the Junk Yard. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt were
given unprecedented access to the label’s fabled archive at the Smithsonian Institution and
encouraged to repurpose and rework the source material however they liked. The resulting
album illuminates the radical, inquisitive, and poetic aspects of the original recordings, extracting
the latent moments of creative revelation on records intended primarily for the backroom
shelves of universities and libraries. Some tracks cycle through source material at a rate of dozens
of samples per minute, while others sit with specific recordings for their duration. Released to
commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of Folkways Records by Moses Asch and
Marian Distler, RETURN TO ARCHIVE is a whimsical, entrancing, and at times unsettling traversal
of what Asch called the “World of Sound.”
For the past two and a half decades, Matmos has made collage-based electronic music that
comments on contemporary culture and hints at the ways humans use sound to structure our lives.
2001’s A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, made primarily using sounds of cosmetic surgeries, is a
landmark album of leftfield dance music and an empathetic exploration of the pursuit of an ideal
body. Matmos subjected their washing machine to a similar process on 2016’s Ultimate Care II, the
pounding rhythms of wet clothes against metal implying deeper truths about domestic labor and
its gendered history. And in a 21st-century update of Annea Lockwood’s Glass World, their 2019
album Plastic Anniversary explored the resonance of that human-made substance most linked to
wastefulness and climate collapse. In so many ways, Schmidt and Daniel exist in a direct lineage
with Folkways recordists like Charles Bogert, Michael Siegel, and Albro T. Gaul: deep listeners
searching for meaning through the raw sounds of nature and civilization who point obliquely
towards their cultural implications.
Listening to RETURN TO ARCHIVE, sounds normally considered incidental or uncomfortable become
unmistakably musical. Glottal gurgles and tree frog croaks are snipped and looped into beats,
siphoning out their inherent grooves. “Mud Dauber Wasp” is built entirely out of the serrated
whir of the titular animal’s beating wings, the disconcerting buzz masterfully flipped into lurching,
blown out techno. “Why?” features sounds of humans attempting to communicate vocally with
animals (John C. Lily’s experiments with dolphins, Bogert’s Sounds of North American Frogs) and
other humans (studies in infant speech development, as well as larynx-less medical patients)
spliced over a hasty four-on-the-floor pulse. Guests Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway, known for their
cataclysmic manipulations of various types of physical media, add elements of chaotic sensory
overload as they work their magic with the Larynx and Sounds of the Junk Yard LPs, respectively.
The album’s second half, especially the sprawling, wind-swept title track, nearly dispenses with
cohesion altogether, harkening back to early experiments with musique concrète concurrent with
the source material’s original release. As on the classic Folkways LPs, our guides throughout this
journey are the naturalists, physicians, and scientists whose authoritative affects betray an uncommon
passion for their subject matter as they attempt to explain exactly what it is we’re hearing.
• Past Matmos collaborators include Björk, Anohni,
Oneohtrix Point Never, Kronos Quartet,
Terry Riley, Yo La Tengo, and more.
• Featuring Evicshen and Aaron Dilloway
• “Matmos make you hear—really hear—the
materials used for their music’s creation. Beyond
how they are transformed into music, there is a
sense that objects and ideas have sonic
properties as distinctive as fingerprints.” — Pitchfork
• “Yes, Daniel and Schmidt are masters of the
sonic slice-up, but they always bring to their
source material something personal. Artistic
passions, histories, friendships, fears, and
moments of incredible chance—listen close, and
you can hear so much more in Matmos’s work
than simply the things you can see or touch.”
— Bandcamp