Imagine if instead of images and words we documented our lives by collecting sounds. Diaries and photo albums were replaced with audio recordings of objects being sounded – some musical, some otherwise – capturing things that moved our ears and needed to be inscribed for posterity. To organise this archive we latched onto the recurrence of a particular material rather than people, places or times. That’s the project Baltimore-duo Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt, aka Matmos, undertake on Metallic Life Review. The album is made from recordings of metal objects captured throughout their lives: pots and pans, panettone boxes, aluminum tread plates, and tape reels from the GRM studio in Paris. Their chimes, jingles and resonances spliced together and arranged into songs.
On paper the project reads like nostalgia-tinged musique concrète. But this is Matmos, and while Metallic Life Review is both intricate and sentimental, it also sparks, bounces and refracts as all that is metallic melts into cascading rays of sound. The second two words of the album’s name refer to the psychological effect triggered by a near death experience: “life flashing before your eyes”. Matmos evoke that flood of sensation in shimmers and twinkles. Somewhere in each track is a memory: a recording of a door in Norway, cannons drummed in Germany, a crypt gate in Rome. Over this Matmos play other metals – percussion, scissors, gongs and nitrous oxide canisters – alongside more conventional instrumentation from a small cast of collaborators: Thor Harris, the late Susan Alcorn, Horse Lords’ guitarist Owen Gardner (here on glockenspiel), and Half Japanese guitarist Jason Willett.
Metallic Life Review is the sounds of metal. But the qualities of metal captured in the music feel photic as much as sonic. An evocation of the glints, iridescence and wild reflections caused when light hits shiny surfaces. Tellingly, at their recent gig in London, an assistant shone a torch on the objects Schmidt was sounding throughout the set. At one point, Schmidt even suggested someone in the front row put on their sunglasses as they squinted in the glare of what seemed to be an industrial-sized baking tin. This engagement with reflective surfaces gets at what takes Metallic Life Review beyond quirky sound art exercise or gimmick. Matmos’s music evokes unstable glares bouncing off metal trinkets and their mirage triggering potential. How something solid ripples and fluctuates when light hits it the right way.
Opener ‘Norway Doorway’ commences with a reverberant clang and a squeaking hinge, a portentous horror trope that the duo pries out of shape. Bass pulses divide into lopsided rhythms, like a room full of clocks ticking to inconsistent time. Gradually the creaking hinge moves from spooky punctuation to topline. As the track shifts from ominous to luminous, propelled by Harris’ roving percussion – played on tubular bells, steel tongue drums, gong and a cheese grater – an aural illusion occurs and the squeaking door sounds suspiciously like a wailing saxophone.
Matmos have previous working with peculiar constraints and intense conceptual focus. 2023’s Return To Archive turned Folkways Records’ vast field recording library into glitching techno-pop. They’ve morphed the sounds of plastic surgery (A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure), a washing machine (Ultimate Care II), and a park in the borough of Southend-on-sea, Essex (At Chalkwell Park) into intricate sidewinding electronica. The most direct precursor for Metallic Life Review is the polymer fixated Plastic Anniversary. There are similar processes in how they zoom in on a single material, but metal’s peculiar sonorities, and Matmos’ evocation of a sonic parallel to metal’s specular nature, brings drastically different results.
It’s a metal album that mischievously evades the cliches of industrial cacophony, portentousness and heavy music. Compared to plastic, metal is much more explicitly and deeply embedded in the history of sound and music. It’s a part of the soundscape heavily loaded with resonances, symbolism and meaning: eerie church bells, metallophones in gamelan ensembles, Einstürzende Neubauten’s sheet metal punk and the umbrella term for a sprawling maze of heavy music. Metal’s been played throughout history and across the world. Metallic Life Review’s greatest success is how it roams through that baggage rather than following a single chrome-plated lane.
There are industrial hints, for sure, such as in the monumental clank propelling ‘The Rust Belt’. But squint your ears as webs of twinkling polyrhythms erupt from the latter half of that track and you’ll start to hear sparking patterns with as much in common with Dewa Alit & Gamelan Salukat as industrial techno. Something similar happens at points in the closing title track, a twenty-minute-plus piece which takes on the more molten structure of Matmos live shows, where grooves gradually assemble then collapse and mutate. This is not to say that Matmos set out to replicate a gamelan ensemble, doing so would be reductive to both them and gamelan’s rich, complex, multi-layered traditions. But depending on which angle you listen to Metallic Life Review from you could find all manner of musical lineages shining out of it. It’s like an inside-out exotica: rather than lifting ersatz approximations of other traditions and genres, Matmos start from activating a (literal) raw material and following the sonic spectra it emits.
In many ways the record has a different pace and gait compared to their other techno-concrete explorations, a fact which in part reflects the relative diversity of the material they’re using, and the mix of collaborators appearing on the album. Metallic Life Review’s most pounding moments have a more multifaceted, expansive depth than Plastic Anniversary or Return To Archive. Elsewhere, ‘Steel Tongues’ is beautiful, off-kilter downtempo complete with pastoral glockenspiel interludes. ‘The Chrome Reflects’, with its lilting guitar line from Willett, evokes a fluffy cloud emerging from glittering shrapnel. ‘Changing States’’s shift from cutlery drawer glitch into soaring synths and Alcorn’s tingling pedal steel has a soulfulness reminiscent of recent albums from Daniel’s The Soft Pink Truth project. But it’s not merely a mellowing, prettying or dilution of Matmos’ singular oddness through collaboration with other players.
For three decades now Daniel and Schmidt have found gaps where experimental approaches and sources can leak into music that could be played in a club or on the radio, showing that stretching the Overton window of musical sounds doesn’t have to be restricted to rarefied settings. In its range and depth, Metallic Life Review triumphs at pulling moving, grooving tunes from a seemingly restrictive concept. Showing metal isn’t hard, cold and unflinching, but malleable, iridescent and full of unlikely resonances, Metallic Life Review is deeply moving and gloriously alive. Like a spark of light dancing off the copper foil on the cover of a photo album.
