The hour long performance on this disc was captured live on October 5th 2002 when Wobbly, People Like Us and Matmos circled their wagons in the lecture hall of the San Francisco Art Institute. Having mutually agreed upon a country and western theme, Vicki Bennett (PLU), Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), and Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt (Matmos) pored over their archives of honky tonk classics, chopping and dicing Nashville's finest almost beyond recognition, and collectively restitching the mangled shreds in a kind of crazed digital quilting bee. Flickering and tranquil one moment, and wildly slapstick the next, Wide Open Spaces hits the sweet spot between song forms and improvisation, and showcases the qualities that all three collaborating artists share: absurdist humour, baroque sample manipulation, and stuttering rhythmic frameworks that lurch and sway. While the presence of five samplers, four laptops, three CD players and a pedal steel guitar on one stage could have led to a tediously ego-driven "jam" or simply cacophony, the results feel lushly detailed but not cluttered, and swing naturally between structure and freedom.. Listening back to the recorded results, all three musical units agreed that this concert was mighty fine, and worth sharing. Originally released on Tigerbeat6 in 2003, the music has been remastered with artwork by M.C. Schmidt and design/layout by Vicki Bennett
