Reavaluating electronic music’s fundamentals, stripping down and retracing its intrinsic values, is something the propound theorist trio of Metamono seek to practice.
With a pertinacious agit manifesto to work from – which bares them from using any digital sound generators and processing; microphones, and overdubs – they place a host of restrictions on their improvised compositions; revelling in limitations, or as the groups Jono Podmore puts it, “Limitations breed resourcefulness”.
The electro trinity of Bomb The Bass collaborator Paul Conboy, fine artist Mark Hill, and Podmore (the talent behind Kumo, and tenure aide to Irmin Schmidt of Can), annouce their disenchantment and “disillusion with the expendiency of much contemporary music” by reverting to the use of analogue equipment and ring modulators of a recent past – a full list of this hardware that includes the classic ARP 2000 and Korg MS 20, is avaliable for any fanboy on the groups website. Throw in the vibrating otherworldliness of the Theremin, and the static-crisp, lost transmissions from an atavistic valve radio, and you find yourself taken back to the era of R&S Records, Basic Channel, early Warp and the age of intelligent Acid-Techno. For despite the group’s postulations, and calls for something more challengingly new, they’ve certainly evoked the experimental spirit of the late 80s and early 90s. The noble gas themed ‘XeF4’ and ‘H2NS’ both garggle, bleep, burp and pulse with the multi-layering acid manipulation of those years; displaying a fondness for such pioneers as the UKs Mike Dred. On the other hand, there’s a real warm suffused reverberation and sagacious knowledge glowing around these stimulative sound capsules.
Previous electronic tracts of wisdom by Metamono have only been available on limited edition cassettes – a format which they feel best suits, “…aesthetically and in terms of audio quality”. Therefore logic dictates that their first ever vinyl release should be christened the Tape EP, and that the path to a more creative electronic musical future, lies in first, deconstructing that past.
Due: 21/01/2012
[Rating:4]
www.metamono.co.uk/
