Greetings good people of the Internet. We are home from our recent sojourn in Germany, where we played six shows in Frankfurt and Berlin as the live musical accompaniment to “(theLID” a work choreographed by Ayman Harper (formerly of The Forsythe Company) and featuring Baltimore’s own Jermaine Spivey and costumes, stage and set design by Tomi Paasonen of Finland. We’re going to do some more performances of this piece in (deep breath) 2012 in Texas and in Germany, so please plan accordingly.

Jermaine Spivey struggles with the Wyrm during The Lid with Matmos accompaniment in Germany this year.

It’s been a year with major ups and some downs too. In April, we had the honor of performing at Carnegie Hall with the Kronos Quartet at their kind invitation; despite a sneaky slide guitar cable hiccup, the show was a delight. Drew’s mom was there! We will play with them again in the springtime in Scotland, no less!

Matmos with Kronos Quartet...ok this is actually at Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. but it's a lovely picture.

We also played some fun shows this year with Konk Pack, Leprechaun Catering, Sissy Spacek, the Bang on A Can all stars, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Emeralds, Dam-Funk, and lots of other folks we like at cool spaces like The Bank and the Fifth Dimension. Martin toured with his improv / noise / weirdo trio Ear, Nose and Throat across the West Coast.

Drew gave lots of academic talks about melancholy, materialism, and punk rock, published some articles about Shakespeare and masochism and demonology, and taught a seminar on Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”.

We released not one but two albums this year, both in collaboration with friends and fellow travelers of longstanding. In May, our collaborative record with So Percussion, “Treasure State” came out on Cantaloupe Records featuring cover artwork by Robert Syrett, and we hauled lotsa gear and a prickly cactus about as we toured the United States and Canada with Josh, Jason, Adam and Eric spreading the post-everything crypto-classical rhythm gospel with some help from the Lexie Mountain Boys.

Matmos and So in The U.S.A.

A smattering of the cornucopia of gear that is So.

Fat delicious Dosa in Vancouver.

In October, the collaborative record “Simultaneous Quodlibet” (see below), a three-headed monstrosity created with Wobbly and J. Lesser and featuring cover artwork by Jason Mecier, was released by Important Records. Big things really do come in small packages.

The losses this year were personal and of wildly disparate categorical “sizes”: the mysterious departure of our cat Gibson for parts unknown was followed by the death of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, whose artistic work and personal example are an enduring beacon (“light shines darkly”). We will miss them both. This turning over of the decade prompts us to continue to work on the new Matmos album, “The Marriage of True Minds”, an ongoing four year plot which just keeps thickening. You can also expect some surprising remixes, and some concerts in the spring in the United States and Europe in the summer, but we aren’t ready yet to get all TMI about that yet.

posted by mcess at 5:11pm| 1 Comment »