Stereolab and Matmos: Retrenching and Recalibrating

There was a time in my life when a devotion to endless innovation or steady reinvention seemed like the only possibilities for musicians. I probably projected my own curiosity and desire for new sounds and forms upon artists, and I often thought it was lame when my favorite musicians dwelled in a specific place for too long. I think it was because there was so much for me to still discover, I wanted everything around me to be in the same state of exploration. In hindsight my own discoveries were about novelty more than actually grappling with new styles, traditions, or approaches, a process that’s been furiously expedited by the Internet, where a person can fool themselves into thinking they understand a particular phenomenon a few hours after hoovering up all available info online. I wade through these notions because this week two of the groups I first encountered and adored in the 1990s are rolling through town, both in support of new albums. Neither of them— Stereolab and Matmos—could be accused of really breaking fresh musical ground in 2025. Three decades ago that would have probably been enough for me to push them to the side, but these days I can recognize value in more subtle sonic transformations.

Instant Holograms On Metal Film (Warp) is the first new Stereolab album in 15 years, and it represents the third time in the band’s long history that it reached out a Chicagoan for help, with Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas following previous partnerships with Jim O’Rourke and John McEntire. Guitarist Tim Gane has always had a weak spot for vintage synthesizers, and the choice to work with Crain is audible on the album’s opening track “Mystical Plosives,” a vignette built around the sort of bright synth arpeggio that’s become a building block of Bajas music. Still, the general sound remains largely unchanged, allowing the listener to revel in the elegant vocal lines of Laetitia Sadier on a song like “Aerial Trouble”—with its familiar plaints about consumerism—which is as catchy as anything the band’s ever made. Check it out below.

The lyrics address a world gone mad with a trademark analytical cool that sometimes seems out of whack in terms of urgency, even if “Melodie is a Wound” could be seen as clairvoyant with its opening couplet, “Flawed, the extradition request / Blown, the freedom of conscience.” Even with the intercession of drum machines and more elaborate harmony vocals—with a variety of singers stepping into the role once owned by Mary Hansen—the band’s post-motorik rhythmic thrust, meticulously trimmed guitar fuzz, and a kaleidoscopic array of keyboard textures and riffs chugs on as if it had never stopped during the band’s lengthy hiatus. The arrangements on the album feature veteran band members of drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Xavi Muñoz, and keyboardist Joe Watson, with a younger generation of Chicago horn players—reedist and Bajas member Rob Frye along with the the great cornetist Ben LaMar Gay—but as usual the directives seem to come from Gane and Sadier. The album is deeply enjoyable even if it lacks surprises. In many ways the crate-digging savvy of Stereolab heralded the Internet-enabled flatness of music history, as hierarchies dissolved in service of obscurities, but their own discoveries felt hard-earned and sincere. Stereolab plays Huxley's Neue Welt on Thursday, May 29.

Matmos—the duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel—haven’t appreciably altered its basic modus operandi in decades, either, but I sense a difference. Their performances still emanate a playful sense of wonder and joy even if they’ve been turning samples of everyday, theoretically unmusical sounds, into their source material for three decades. They know what they’re doing, but that didn’t hamper my delight when I caught a delightful show by them last summer at KM28. When I first read that they had turned exclusively toward metallic objects as source material for its forthcoming new album Metallic Life Review (Thrill Jockey) I had to suppress a yawn. Of all of the potential sources Matmos could deploy this felt only slightly more daring than turning to a guitar or a violin. I mean, researching sonic possibilities of metallic objects seems to be the primary activity of most contemporary percussion ensembles. But once I began to listen to the album it became clear that using surgical sounds, a washing machine, or material from the Folkways archives are all of secondary importance to what the duo does with it, and I’d say that the new record—out on June 20—is as pleasing as anything in its entire discography. It was lovely to have my faulty assumptions swatted away.

There are a couple of things that really stand out on the new record. Several tracks feature cameos from musicians like the pedal steel master Susan Alcorn, who died not long after making her contributions, and guitarist Jason Willett, who’s Morricone-esque twang on the Lynchian “The Chrome Reflects Our Image” became a prescient homage to the late director. (Horse Lords guitarist Owen Gardner also plays glockenspiel on one piece and Austin drummer Thor Harris chips in on two other tracks). Below you can listen to “Changing States,” a track dedicated to Alcorn where her playing helps create a woozy yet jittery post-Exotica soundscape.

But more importantly, the music uses familiar methods to generate one of the most varied Matmos records I’ve ever heard, whether the song-like moments mentioned above or more experimental excursions that reveal an understanding of sound that dwarfs what a new generation of electro-acoustic pretenders are putting down. On the micro level there’s some virtuosic door hinge playing, particularly on the opening track “Norway Doorway,” where Schmidt transforms a door in the Oslo club Blå into a virtual trumpet, aligning Matmos with squeaky door maestros like Pierre Henry, Sun Ra, and Teppo Hauta-Aho. The first five tracks on the album are impressively concise, establishing a premise and expertly articulating it, but the album closes with an epic by Matmos standards. That title work, which opens with a passage enfolding recordings made at GRM in Paris in 2007 and 2024, with the sound of aluminum take-up reels, is the first time Matmos has recorded a piece live in the studio. The piece veers into abstraction, with the duo digging deeper than usual into subtle timbres and metallic overtones, and while they employ familiar rhythmic patterns built from simple sampled phrases, the piece never succumbs to the groove entirely. There’s an attention to detail and a depth to the tones that reveals the duo’s genuine sonic mastery, a quality often hidden behind its humor. Matmos perform at Silent Green on Wednesday, May 28, with an opening set by Chantal Michelle.

Connections Over Time

On several occasions I’ve had the pleasure of writing liner notes for pianist Stefan Schultze and saxophonist Peter Ehwald, who’ve long worked together in a variety of projects. Among my favorites is their trio with the brilliant American drummer Tom Rainey. I contributed an essay to the group’s recently released third album Public Radio (Jazzwerkstatt), a fully improvised session conducted on the fly when there was some free studio time remaining after the pianist’s Large Ensemble had recorded its fascinating homage to Morton Subotnick, The Buchla Suite (A Handcrafted Tribute to Morton Subotnick). The group celebrates the release of the new album as part of a terrific double bill at the Institut Francais on Tuesday, March 27, sharing the bill with another killer trio improvising trio featuring Rainey alongside saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and double bassist Brandon Lopez.

The Schultze-Ewhald-Rainey trio has existed for a while now, and the new album makes plain that its intimacy, rapport, and internal familiarity is more than enough to generate stunning music out of thin air. Some tracks embrace a loose post-bop feel, but my favorites are when the trio clings to abstract forms, where they’re more concerned in forging sustained sonic exploration. I love how the piece “Palladio,” which you can hear below, captures the trio feeling out new terrain, almost tentatively sizing up possibilities, until some hazy fragments and patterns coalesce, and the musicians deftly lean in. The piece remains incredibly open, with the pianist deploying preparations to generate some unexpected swells and smears in addition to cycling right-handed patterns, while Rainey uses his toms to cast a distinct strain of sonic hypnosis and the saxophonist floats atop, toggling between melodic shapes and fuzzy, aerated tones before the whole groups switches gears and increases the heat and turbulence. The trio doesn’t worry about tunes or modes, instead trusting in a sonic relationship forged over time and built upon lifetimes of experience. For this performance the trio will be joined by Helge Lieberg, who will provide live projections.

Rainey has an even deeper connection to saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, and I don’t necessarily mean because they’re married. They’ve been playing together for nearly two decades, working in other’s groups and with various others, and during the pandemic they ratched up their duo with an online practice to keep their sanity. Lucky for us the duo preceded the pandemic and it has continued on. Last fall they released their strongest album yet, Brink (Intakt), which toggles between piquant miniatures and longer pieces, both composed and improvised. The rapport they have together was established years ago, but here they continue to refine their connection in both micro and macro forms, moving from free jazz dialogues to more dialed-in explorations of hyper-specific motifs or sound worlds, sometimes within the same piece. They perform in Berlin with bassist Lopez, with whom they made the excellent 2022 album No Es Playa (Intakt). That record captured the muscular, virtuosic bassist at his best, curbing some of instincts for excess while allowing his power to both hold gravity and push beyond it when blended with the deep intuition of Rainey and Laubrock. Lopez has been attaining new heights since I heard the trio play A-Train during Jazzfest Berlin in 2023, especially on Syzygy, Vol. 1 (577), a duo album with adventurous gayageum player DoYeon Kim. The pair braid their various string instruments in numerous ways, coming together and pulling apart with terse stabs, passages of viscerally abraded bowing, and or twined tendrils of tender lyricism. You can hear the opening track, “I,” below.

Pushing Beyond Conventions

Last week I wrote about The Excruciating Pain of Boredom, the terrific new album by the Felix Henkelhausen Quintet where I referred to one of the band’s reedists, tenor saxophonist Uli Kempendorff, as “a hardcore student of post-bop sophistication.” I stand by that assessment, but at the time I was writing I had only skimmed Who Are You Sending This Time? (Unit), the new album from long-running quartet Field, which celebrates the release of the recording with a performance at Sowieso on Thursday, May 29. Most of the playing I’ve heard from him over the years, including his work in the Julia Hulsmann Quartet, has tended to exist within a clear post-bop continuum, yet that spectrum can be quite broad. I’ve enjoyed the music he’s written for Field, which relies on his bandmates—double bassist Jonas Westergaard, drummer Peter Bruun, and vibraphonist Christopher Dell—to inject plenty of their own ideas into the fold, but on this new record the group has opened things up and quieted things down, achieving a pin-drop degree of interaction where the leader’s compositions feel less central than what the group does with them. Of course, that’s usually the case with jazz, but here the basic building blocks are more ephemeral, skeletal, and schematic, a series of loose but carefully considered forms occupied by the astute, heightened listening skills of the players, and intuition developed over hours and hours of collective work.

Between the titles of Kempendorff’s tunes and restrained, consistently dark melodic contours, the music feels like a dusky reflection of the world we currently find ourselves in, although the performances are rooted in factors that belie such gloom. There’s remarkable empathy on display even if the tone is usually subdued. The album opens with a piece called “Dirge,” which, true to its title, feels mournful if not torpid; Westergaard lays down a spare pulse, a heartbeat beneath the vaporous overtones sculpted by Dell and the meticulously chosen, patiently decaying cymbal accents of Bruun while Kempenforff patiently if not warily unspools a beautifully aerated melody that he explores through the entire piece, its tenderness undercut by little stabs of harmonic turbulence. The piece was written in the aftermath of Carla Bley’s death, but the expressionism on display could be applied broadly. Give it a listen, below. You might think a piece written for the Black singer and actor Herb Jeffries, “The Bronze Buckaroo,” would lean into American southwest themes considering the westerns its subject appeared in, but Kempendorff takes a more abstract path, a kind of peripatetic wandering quality free of any idiomatic markers where the band regularly coalesces and breaks apart from the rangy melody.

Dell opens “Sehr Nüchtern” with a lengthy, knotty solo marked by jagged turns of phrase, halting movement, and colliding overtones, that seems to defy the piece’s title (“Very Sober,” in English), and when the rest of the band finally joins in after a couple of minutes not much changes in terms of the herky-jerk propulsion, a testimonial to the band’s internal wiring where forward motion is achieved in gauzy spasms and meaningful silences. To maintain such a pin-drop sensitivity with elliptical delivery, is no mean feat. This line-up of Field has been working together since 2018, so it’s hardly surprising that they’ve chosen to proceed without a net here—or at least less of a visible edifice to guide them—and Westergaard and Dell also work together relentlessly in a trio with drummer Christian Lillinger in which lines between jazz and contemporary music have been increasingly blurred. Additionally, Westergaard goes back decades, working together in numerous projects since they both studied in Copenhagen, launching a life-long connection. So it’s natural that ideas and approaches from discreet ensembles might bleed into one another, although I don’t think anyone would confuse Field with the other projects these musicians are involved with. Let the mutation and cross-fertilization continue.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

May 27: Ingrid Laubrock, tenor saxophone, Brandon Lopez, double bass, and Tom Rainey, drums; Stefan Schultze, piano, Peter Ehwald, tenor saxophone, and Tom Rainey with Helge Leiberger, live projections, 8 PM, Institut Francais, Kurfürstendamm 211, 10719 Berlin

May 27: Boubacar Traoré, 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin

May 28: Matmos; Chantal Michelle, 8 PM, Kuppelhalle, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin

May 28: Salif Keita, 8 PM, RBB Broadcasting Hall, Masurenallee 8-14, 14057 Berlin

May 28: Tomaž Grom, double bass, electronics, solo, and with Raed Yassin, double bass, 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97, (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435, Berlin

May 28: Michel Doneda, saxophone, and Alexander Markvart, feedback guitar, objects; Martin Küchen, saxophones, Joel Grip, double bass, and Anton Jonsson, drums, 8 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG

May 28: Sawt Out (Burkhard Beins, analog synths, samples, walkie talkies, Mazen Kerbaj, crackle synth, trumpet, toys, radio, and Michael Vorfeld, light bulbs, electric switching devices), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

May 29: Stereolab; Manuela, 8 PM, Huxley's Neue Welt, Hasenheide 107 – 113, 10967 Berlin

May 29: Field (Uli Kempendorff, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Christopher Dell, vibraphone, Jonas Westergaard, double bass, and Peter Bruun, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 29: Gruppo di Improvvisazione Giallo (Hanno Leichtmann, electronics, percussion, Magda Mayas, piano, clavinet, Sara Persico, voice, electronics, and Valerio Tricoli, Revox B77), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

May 30: Biliana Voutchkova, violin and Chris Jonas, saxophone; Drew Wesely, guitar, Andria Nicodemou, vibraphone, and Vasco Trilla, drums, percussion, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin

May 30: Martin Küchen, saxophones, Joel Grip, double bass, and Anton Jonsson, drums, 8: 30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 30: 30 Years Editions Mego (Haswell & Hecker – UPIC Diffusion Session #24, Grand River, General Magic & Tina Frank), 8:30 PP, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Linienstraße 227, 10178 Berlin

May 31: Welcome In—A Musical Course (Sofia Borges, percussion, Axel Dörner, trumpet, Malin Grass, violin, Steve Heather, percussion, Benjamin Kautter, cello, Carina Khorkhordina, trumpet, Lore Amenabar Larrañaga, accordion, Liudas Mockūnas, saxophone, Sofia Salvo, saxophone, Nurit Stark, violin, Dragana Tomić, voice, and Kathryn Williams, flute play works by Peter Ablinger, Carola Bauckholt, Birke Bertelsmeier, Annesley Black, Nikolaus Brass, Raven Chacon, Huihui Cheng, Sidney Corbett, Dominic Flynn, Sofia Gubaidulina, Liudas Mockūnas, Kirsten Reese, Martin Riches, Daniel Rothman, Iris ter Schiphorst, Annette Schmucki, Sol-i So, Kristine Tjøgersen, Caspar Johannes Walter, Kathryn Williams, and Yiran Zhao), 4:30 PM, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin

June 2: Grischa Lichtenberger; Victoria Keddie, 9 PM, Kantine am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin