Matmos announces new album Return to Archive, featuring “non-musical” source material from Smithsonian Folkways archive

Matmos have announced a new album, made in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways, as part of the institution’s 75th anniversary. On November 3, the electronic duo will release Return to Archive, a new set of music that features source material from “non-musical” recordings from the Smithsonian Folkways archive. Today they’ve shared “Mud-Dauber Wasp,” which you can hear below.

Matmos’ Drew Daniel said in a statement, “Because we were not interested in reworking the music of other people (having just done that in our immediately preceding album, Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer, on which we built new music out of elements from the Polish electro-acoustic composer), for this project we decided that we would rather focus exclusively upon the nature and science recordings within the label’s catalog and would make music only by sampling those sources without adding any new sounds of our own. We hoped to activate the rich musical potential within the hoots, gurgles, thunks, zaps, howls, drips, bangs, and zings that haunt classic early Folkways LPs from the The Sounds of the Office (1964) to Sounds of Medicine (1955) to The Science of Sound (1958). From cable cars on land to bottlenose dolphins underwater, from the quietest gurgling of gastro intestinal interiors to the wildest squalls of junkyard landscapes and the howling ionosphere above the clouds, an entire sonic universe lay hidden in the back alleys of this back catalog.”

Matmos Return to Archive tracklist:

1. “Good Morning Electronics”
2. “Injection Basic Sound”
3. “Mud-Dauber Wasp”
4. “Music or Noise?”
5. “Why?”
6. “Lend Me Your Ears”
7. “Return to Archive”
8. “The Way Japanese Beetles Sound to a Rose”
9. “Going to Sleep”