Matmos: Supreme Balloon

The two guys in Matmos have adopted lots of

different personae, but they've never been especially free-spirited—at

least not on conceptual albums devoted to the sounds of surgery, songs from the

Civil War, and "audio biographies" of luminaries like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Of

course, none of those proved as leaden as their premises might suggest, but

Matmos wouldn't be Matmos without an idea to mull. The principle behind Supreme

Balloon

is a sound focused solely on synthesizers—including weird old ones like

the Omnichord and a "breath-controlled oscillator" called the E.V.I.—and

the result plays something like a history lesson in all that is cosmic and

confined in the electronic-music of old. The songs are generally jubilant, as

signaled by the whirring synth giggles and quasi-Cuban bassline in "Rainbow

Flag," but also slight in a way that suggests much of Supreme Balloon would have been a lot

more fun to make than it is to listen to. That certainly applies to an ambient

title track that goes nowhere beyond wiggly test-tones for 24 minutes—a

long time to go nowhere, no matter the concept.