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Kid 606 wasn't far from the truth when he claimed that "Matmos are the A-Team of electronica" — the new full-length album is a triumph for this San Franciscan duo. Their fourth album follows along the progression taken with 'The West,' moving even further away from random technological fuckery on their first two to create a cohesive, conceptual, organized result.
The sound sources and concepts here all involve various surgical/medical practices and procedures, beginning with liposuction and continuing with eye surgery, acupuncture, and ending in plastic surgery. Surgical instruments have become musical instruments and have been carefully interwoven with organic and electronic musical instruments and sound samples recorded directly in the medical offices. The two head surgeons Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have also pulled in specialists like Cyclobe/Coil's Stephen Thrower on clarinet, spoken contributions from instrumentalists Kid 606 and Hrvatski, plus various other friends scattered around the album. While the medical theme is global on this release, the styles and moods change impressively between the seven songs. The group has turned liposuction into a beefy bass-heavy post-kraut jam on the album's opener, "Lipostudio". On "Spondee" the duo have morphed various spondees (look it up in the dictionary) and combined them with corresponding sound effects with hearing test tones and cranked out a compelling butt-shaking house tune. "For Felix" (first exhibited on tour last year along with nearly all of the songs on this disc) is an intricate 5+ minute piece crated from bowing and plucking a rat cage, dedicated to their late rat (and all the caged lab rats across the world who die in the name of medicine). Ambient low-end sounds created from connective tissue provide a warm foundation for the percussive sounds of human skull and artificial teeth on "Memento Mori", and the brilliant head-nodding classic "California Rhinoplasty" closes the disc with a ten minutes of plastic surgery samples in an evolving multi-themed epic. 'A Chance to Cut,...' is quite an accomplishment as the group has brought the term 'album' back into the phrase 'concept album' - the recording easily graces two sides of a record totalling a comfortable 46 minutes. Matmos has also once again brought a bold amount of personality and enthusiasm to their flawlessly competant mix of electronical sorcery, something the Euro electronica elite seem to be lacking after all these years. It's not minimal, it's not abstract, it's a damned good solid record.
 
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The band is obviously very interested in its appearance, not just withregards to identity-obscuring costumes, but in the release only ofconcept albums of the highest technical sound quality. Ideas that nevermade it into album form are hardly ever made public or even discussed,and rehearsal tapes are almost unheard of. Their material from the1970's is perpetually being re-recorded on newer electronicinstruments, remastered according to their ever-higher standards, infive-speaker surround sound. The Residents immediately regrettedreleasing something that was as unfinished and poorly recorded (thetunes were, after all, only for their own rehearsal) as these tunesfrom "Fingerprince", "Mark of the Mole" and "Tunes from Two Cities".These songs would eventually become overdubbed, EQ'd, and edited andcleaned up, but the imperfection evident on "Assorted Secrets" linksthe songs more to the post-punk and DIY bedroom-electronic music thatwas happening at the time. One complaint about the Residents' post-1979output is that it's too sterile. That is certainly not the case here.Thus the reissue exists due to massive pleading by their fans, and notbecause the band is proud that it exists. The original tapes werescrubbed as much as possible for the reissue, but hidden in a cardboardwrapper printed with warnings like "Please go away" and "They hateit!". The band's name does not even appear on the wrapper, but theireyeball-in-a-tophat logo does, albeit with the iris covered with alarge black bar of the type that government informants use to protecttheir identity on TV news programs. The reissue is printed in arelatively tiny pressing of 1200, perhaps with the hope that only thatthe die-hard fans will hear it and stop asking about it, and thegeneral public won't even know of its existence.
The last thing the band probably wants is for some reviewer to suggestto his readers to run out and buy this CD, one of the most excitingdocuments of the band yet. The low recording quality and the rawness ofthe playing makes the Residents sound like a performing band comprisedof real people, as opposed to the slick and streamlined, high-techhi-fidelity group that the band wants you to hear. Four distinctplayers can be heard making mistakes, standing too close to themicrophone, saturating the tape at times, sounding rough and alive in away that's been uncommon for the last two decades of the Residents'recorded career. After all, the Residents are a band that printed awarning right on the back cover of their debut CD, "Meet theResidents", to not buy it if you hadn't already heard the subsequentalbums! Clearly, they shouldn't be the ones to judge. In most cases, Iprefer the versions of the songs on "Assorted Secrets" to the ones thatmade it onto the records. The reason they don't want you to hear"Assorted Secrets" is the same reason why it's great. It contains thepassion of a band that's playing simply to hear themselves, not caringabout what their audience will think. When the band started out, theylaboured under their "Theory of Obscurity", which stated that anartist's best work was done without an audience in mind. Their attemptto downplay "Assorted Secrets" proves that they don't really believethat anymore. Available only at their website, www.ralphamerica.com.
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- Mrs. Attitude / White Sox and Sandals - Start Walking / Feel Your Way (In My Direction)
- Meatgrowth - Oh No, No Way
- Miss Bill Apauling - Same Place, the Same Cafe, the Same Time
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- a history of guerilla warfare
- we support iran in their bid to win the 1998 world cup
- the black horns of H2T
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- Stick That Chick & Feel My Steel Through Your Last Meal
- Nana or a Thing of Uncommon Nonsense
- I was No Longer His Dominant
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