Conceptual pranksters Matmos invited ninety-nine musical souls to do what thou wilt, with the blank canvas of the cover of the resulting The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form an inkling of the freedom involved. Complete freedom? Well, not quite – the Matmos boys introduces a tiny condition in there to spice things up — any rhythmic rumpus created needed to bend to a 99 bpm rule, a price that weaves its wicked way through this mammoth three-disc journey, like a golden thread in a sonic labyrinth, the fold-out map included with the release giving you an idea of its complexity and the obvious fun Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt had tinkering with the goods.
The first instalment, A Doughnut In The Sky, spark-plugs in thrown abstracts, quirky rubberised fragments that covert to eventually dance in the digital blender. Conspiring shapes that form “Thyrsus”’s lush circuitries, sizzling your senses like addictive butterflies, wound round “Circle Of Swords”‘ gamalan daisy chains, the spatter pan-clank and handclaps of its conception nervously weaselling a word shuffling malfunction and an artfully realised evangelistic chop-up. There’s so many cul-de-sac(‘d) highlights full-beaming your bemused grin here it’s unreal, as the crazy collaging reveals the Caribbean flavours of “Virgin Unspotted” that slither into a crochety break-beat shuffle atonally mangled by what sounds like a collapsing piano. A constant blur of activity that corkscrews with ingenuity before finally being taper-torn into a Martini-dappled lounge with AI side-order.
The second disc, On The Team, stutters out with a Japanese cross-contamination of smashed crockery and elasticised frets, shapes that bambi your head like bendy legged drunkards as Matmos muck-rake those danceable (im)possibilities. The weirdly wired catchiness of “Nice Men In Stable Relationships” is further exploited in the fruity fluidity of “The Void At The Center”. This is light-hearted electronica of the highest order, whose betweens nod towards the ambient bubblegum of “Friendsylum” and “O! Lavendar River Karez”‘s cascading croons. Loving the fx-flummoxed exquisite corpse of it all; the way they cleverly push the ill-regular (with copious amounts of hilarity), poking fun at our corporate-smothered consciousness whilst clearing out popular culture’s garbage bin (on “Platformalism”) with acerbic wit and the whirr of a chainsaw. The last instalment, Extraterrestrial Masters, furthers the kaleidoscopic colour, that frame of reference erasing / changing so vividly displayed on the previous discs flowing though to the grand finale. A babbitt-bobbing bewilderment dishing out the lymphatic leprechauns and barn-dancing Hawaiians, the mutated Moebius loop of title track pleasantly jingling in the ear like a kosmsiche soup of radiating random. The Consuming Flame is toe-tapping dadaism that’s going to be bush-firing my noggin for sometime to come.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
