Cloud Machines

Description

Cloud Machines is the first extraordinary collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of the legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, an iconic figure of the Baltimore avant-garde and leader of the High Zero festival, the Red Room collective, Geodesic Gnome, and radical sound concepts like Spectral Relay (a custom signal processing architecture) and Relabi (a conceptual genre defined by a Rorschach test-like impulse). These two iconoclasts offer us a truly unexpected work: an electronic opus of strange sweetness, as immediately captivating as a series of savory puzzles. When two of the most irascible figures in experimental music spend twelve years creating an album, you don't just get a new release, but an anthology of miniature universes. This record is a love letter to two of their strongest shared influences from the 1980s: the delirious comics of French author Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) and the magnificent miniatures of the Cluster/Eno/Conny Plank collaborations on the SKY Records label. Cloud Machines pays homage to the spirit of these ineffably "hermetic" creations, reinvented through the prism of decades of accumulated experimental practice and the duo's singular creative personalities. The result feels simultaneously like rediscovering a forgotten classic from 1978 and receiving a transmission from a somehow better alternative reality in 2026. Yet, unlike so much "difficult" experimental music, Cloud Machines retains a strange, subtle accessibility - each track a world unto itself, both welcoming and bewildering. This is not always a duo. Like a kaleidoscope slowly turning toward and away from different light sources, genres and traditions seem to emerge from the mist, sharpen, then dissolve again, never hindering the constant exploratory forward motion.