Matmos – Plastic Anniversary

Thrill Jockey

Matmos‘s latest is a really impressive feat, considering every sound that you hear on the album was generated by something plastic. As a comment on the current surfeit of plastic items that we have on the globe, it packs a potent social message; and what’s more, considering the possibilities, it is a really good listen.

The items used seem to come from three different groups; discarded plastic, plastic items that have fulfilled a function and are now surplus to requirements and actual musical instruments that are made of plastic. I mean, they bought a used riot shield from the Albuquerque Police Department just to make one track and a point.

I think they would have been amused by my first introduction to the album. I decided to listen to it whilst in the bath, so set it going and plunged in only to hear what sounded like the disc skipping over certain passages and returning to a point fifteen seconds before — but knowing what conceptual japesters they are, I decided to leave it, assuming this was how it was meant to be. Suffice it to say it wasn’t and after about twenty minutes, it passed the sticking point and I could appreciate the full effect.

Part of the fun of listening to Plastic Anniversary, once you know the premise behind it, is to try and figure out what Matmos are using to make the hundreds of varied and obscure sounds on the album. Thankfully, the liner notes give some information to this effect and it turns out that some of the items are hugely unlikely; plastic poker chips, a ten-foot long drainpipe, LEGO or a toilet brush. It seems that if you can name it, it is possibly there.

As you might expect from a Matmos album, the tracks veer all over the place like it has ADHD, but what was surprising was how rhythmic some of the tracks were. In fact, “Collapse Of The Fourth Kingdom” sounds like a tribal drum party, albeit with some tortured sounds that make you wonder what was happening to the hapless plastic in the studio. The opener, “Breaking Bread”, which sounds like something the Art Of Noise would have manufactured, is incredibly the manipulated sounds of them breaking a load of old records by the band Bread. You would never in a million years have guessed that, and it comes across like a patchwork of game show samples over the testing of various objects for their rigidity.

I was trying to picture the scene in the studio; it must have looked like a recycling centre. “Interior With Billiard Balls And Synthetic Fat” is exactly that. The sounds are edgy and unsettling, and you can imagine them going down a Scott Walker route, but using whatever “synthetic fat” is instead of meat. There is a plastic flute on “Silicon Sel Implant” along with… you guessed it, a real implant — or should I say a fake implant. It all sounds a little 8-bit in places and at other times a little more sinister.

“Plastic Anniversary” itself is like a mournful elegy to the death of plastic — or the possible future death of plastic. Poker chips, “a plastic fish jockstrap” and an exercise ball muscle their way into the dense martial rhythmic impulse that continues into the Test Department go synthetic “Thermoplastic Riot Shield”. I don’t really want to give too much more away, but the ambient track at the end which sounds like field recording from a rainforest quite clearly isn’t, but it leaves you almost breathless at the sheer audacity of the whole thing.

Plastic Anniversary is one of those albums that in the future will be held up as a warning of how we went to far with endangering our natural environment, but also will still be a great record to listen to, as well as a classic piece of conceptual art. If you buy the limited vinyl edition, it comes with an unplayable record made out of a plastic bottle. There must be irony there somewhere, but Matmos will already be chuckling about it as they make their way to the next great idea.

-Mr Olivetti-