Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt's two albums last year both represented departures from their trademark audio strategies. The Civil Warsaw the duo incorporating medieval and American folk elements into aseries of pastoral compositions while The Soft Pink Truth's Do You Party? was Drew Daniel's unique take on leftfield digital disco and bottom-heavy electro. Rat Relocation Programis a return of sorts to the old conceptual bag of tricks; a briefexperimental EP that utilizes the microtonal sampling techniquesfamiliar from Matmos' antebellum days. Slightly less academic than the"amplified neural activity of a crayfish" stuff the duo is known for,the sounds on this release were drawn from recordings of a rat humanelycaptured in the couple's San Francisco apartment. This descriptionimmediately recalls "For Felix (And All the Rats)," a track off of2001's A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure that was constructedfrom the bowed and plucked ribcage of their deceased pet rat. Becausethis is volume six in the Locust's Met Life series of "field recordingsand ingenious sound responses," it consists of two tracks: theunaltered recording of the rat protesting its incarceration, andMatmos' digitally processed musical response. I doubt anyone would wantto listen to the fourteen minutes of "Rat" more than once, consistingas it does entirely of piercing rodent shrieks and the sound of tinyclaws trying to breach the metal bars of its cage, with long silencesin between. "Rat Relocation" is a different animal entirely, a longformaudio narrative that preserves the poor creature's squawking, butanswers each shrill cry with a measured electronic response rangingfrom sudden attacks of pummeling drum n' bass, to psychedelic funkexcursions, to minutely detailed DSP fractures that sprinkle the stereochannels with fractal debris. The track feels strangely narrative amidits abstractions, not dissimilar to some of Nurse With Wound's moremercurial sidelong tracks. A clear empathy is created between themusicians and their captured pest, as Matmos attempt to vividlyillustrate the hardwired fight-or-flight instincts of a rat trying toescape its captors, whether they be pacifist animal-loving bohemians orwhite-coated lab technicians. It's an epic on a microcosmic scale.Read More
