Matmos Announce New Album Made Entirely From Non-Music Folkways LPs

Matmos, the revered Baltimore-based duo comprising Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, today unveiled details about their 14th studio album, Return To Archive, scheduled for release digitally on November 3rd, through Smithsonian Folkways, with CD/LP formats arriving in 2024 and available to preorder here.

In advance of Folkways Records' 75th anniversary, Matmos accepted a proposition from the label to create new material to celebrate this significant milestone. Ever since their 1997 debut, Matmos have consistently created albums from atypical sound sources. With unprecedented access to an extensive archive of hundreds of LPs, Daniel and Schmidt set out to develop an album made exclusively from sampling the "non-musical" recordings originally published by Folkways in the mid-20th century.

Explaining their approach to the proposition, Daniel remarks in the LP's liner notes: "Because we were not interested in reworking the music of other people (having just done that in our immediately preceding album, Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer, on which we built new music out of elements from the Polish electro-acoustic composer), for this project we decided that we would rather focus exclusively upon the nature and science recordings within the label’s catalog and would make music only by sampling those sources without adding any new sounds of our own.

We hoped to activate the rich musical potential within the hoots, gurgles, thunks, zaps, howls, drips, bangs, and zings that haunt classic early Folkways LPs from the The Sounds of the Office (1964) to Sounds of Medicine (1955) to The Science of Sound (1958). From cable cars on land to bottlenose dolphins underwater, from the quietest gurgling of gastro intestinal interiors to the wildest squalls of junkyard landscapes and the howling ionosphere above the clouds, an entire sonic universe lay hidden in the back alleys of this back catalog."

Alongside the announcement, Matmos shared a lead preview "Mud-Dauber Wasp" and a music video by M.C. Schmidt. Created from a single sound source (“Mud-Dauber (Wasp) Flight” from Albro T. Gaul's 1960 Folkways LP Sounds of Insects), Matmos transform the heavily distorted hum of the wasp’s wings into sounds evoking jagged-edged synthesizers and electronic thuds.

This weekend, on Saturday, September 9th, from 1-4 pm, Matmos will debut material from Return To Archive at the Hirshhorn Museum in an immersive sound environment by positioning eight speakers around the Hirshhorn Plaza. Visitors can engross themselves in the entire three-hour duration or wander in and out of the performance, which is free and open to the public.

photo by Farrah Skeiky