Matmos has a playful nature often lacking in other electronic compositions, bristling with a palpable sense of wide-eyed discovery undiluted across 25 years as a band. M.C. Schmidt & Drew Daniel are long-known for their practice of unusual sampling & experimenting with conceptual restrictions. The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form is both a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to the backlash against “conceptronica”, & their most ambitious project to date. The record is oriented around a deceptively simple commitment. 99 different musicians were asked to contribute: they could play anything that they wanted, but the tempo of any rhythmic material had to be set at 99 beats per minute. The resulting album is a three-hour-long assemblage that’s a kaleidoscope of genre, mood and density, while all synchronized to a constant underlying tempo. There’s a relentless forward-motion keeping more with traditions of pirate radio and mixtapes than the traditional album form
