Matmos- “Very Large Green Triangles” (Edit)

The experimental, electronic, and sample-obsessed music duo known as Matmos has a new EP on the way via Thrill Jockey in October. A track has finally dropped from it, and it’s a strange, intricate doozy.

This forthcoming EP is titled the Ganzfeld EP, and it teases toward a new full-length album that’s set to be released in early 2013: The Marriage of True Minds.

“Very Large Green Triangles”–or at least this edit of it, anyway–is a pretty impressive piece of arranged instrumentation and quirky grooves. Monolithic chorus vocals and string sections soar above pulsating loops of rhythms and vocal samples. There are some great piano parts that rise amidst the chaos, too.

It’s all a bit surreal, and it’s got me looking forward to what inventive ideas Matmos pulls out next on their latest material. Both releases have a kind of interesting concept going for them, which isn’t surprising considering the basis of the duo’s last album, Supreme Balloon. This is what has been stated in the press release attached to the release of this new track:

“As previously described, the EP and album have the same conceptual basis: telepathy. For the past four years the band have been conducting parapsychological experiments based upon the classic Ganzfeld (“total field”) experiment, but with a twist: instead of sending and receiving simple graphic patterns, test subjects were put into a state of sensory deprivation by covering their eyes and listening to white noise on headphones, and then Matmos member Drew Daniel attempted to transmit “the concept of the new Matmos record” directly into their minds. During videotaped psychic experiments conducted at home in Baltimore and at Oxford University, test subjects were asked to describe out loud anything they saw or heard within their minds as Drew attempted transmission. The resulting transcripts became a kind of score that was then used by Matmos to generate music. If a subject hummed something, that became a melody; passing visual images suggested arrangement ideas, instruments, or raw materials for a collage; if a subject described an action, then the band members had to act that out and make music out of the noises generated in the process of the re-enactment.”