Photo: Farrah Skeiky

Last month, Matmos announced their 14th studio album, Return To Archive, releasing digitally release on November 3rd through Smithsonian Folkways, and in physical formats later in 2024. The album came about following an invite from Folkways Records to create new material to commemorate their 75th anniversary, and so the duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel were given access to a colossal archive of LP’s originally published by Folkways Records in the mid-20th century.

Matmos had already teased the album with the lead single, ‘Mud-Dauber Wasp’, composed using a single sound source lifted from Albro T. Gaul’s 1960 Folkways LP Sounds of Insects. Now they are previewing the forthcoming Return To Archive with a new single titled ‘Injection Basic Sound’, which uses selections from Science Fiction Sound Effects (1958), Vox Humana: Alfred Wolfsohn’s Experiments in the Extension of the Human Vocal Range (1956), and Speech after the Removal of the Larynx (1964).

Speaking about the hundreds of albums they went through, and what links them, Daniel commented:

“Taken together, these LPs capture a particular historical moment in the emergence of the long-playing record as a crucial interface between the lonely listener and the surrounding panorama of the label’s Cold War social milieu. Promising the intimacy of access, some records are voyeuristic peepholes into domestic or professional spaces: a baby’s playroom, a busy office, an operating theater. Some records shrink the listener to the Lilliputian worlds of beetles and wasps. Some records are submarines plunging listeners to oceanic depths, or magic carpets flying them to the outermost reaches of the newly explored space age. In its own idiomatic way, every record promises transport, adventure, journeys into sound.”

Now listen to ‘Injection Basic Sound’.