LATEST ADDITIONS

I’ll be honest, when Klipsch invited me to see the B-52s on Thursday, August 9th, all I really wanted was for Peter Griffin to stroll across the Irving Plaza stage oblivious to the swirling lights and drifting artificial fog, whip out an acoustic guitar, and play that jangly lead from “Rock Lobster”. A bearded lobster donning a turban would then prance to the front of the stage and everyone would scream “Death to America / And butter sauce!” This never happened. However, I did successfully ignore the opening band Love Funk, had my mind blown by the B-52s, but most importantly, I discovered a bunch of new products from the Klipsch family.

“Iraq Lobstah!”

I'll have more to say about Dan Deacon's America, both here and in the pages of Stereophile, but, for now, I'll just quickly say that I like it&#151a LOT.

Full of major chords and glorious crescendos, littered with screeching electronic noise and dressed up with sweeping violins, America is bold, ambitious, arrogant, pretentious, and really beautiful.

If it's rare to go to an audio show and hear most of a company's products set up properly in multiple rooms, it's rarer still to hear those products also sounding terrific in each and every room. Such was my introduction to Marten's loudspeakers at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. In each of the systems in which the Swedish company's speakers were set up, and no matter what gear was upstream of them, I heard distinctly neutral, open, musical sound. After having the very same experience with Marten's speakers at the 2011 CES, I concluded that they must know what they're doing, and that their speakers are the real deal. I wanted to review some.

As I mention in last month’s “Entry Level,” September 5th would have been John Cage’s 100th birthday, and celebrations of all shapes and sizes are taking place around the world. Fans of Cage’s music are especially lucky: several exciting new releases are now available.

Here are just a few:

When I was seven years old, my father brought home an air-conditioner: a flimsy, hulking thing that sat in an open window just as a frame of X-ray film sits in an open mouth. It worked by consuming a steady diet of ice cubes and water, then blowing a fan across the slurry and into our grateful living room. It was loud and it stank and it wasn't very cold at all.

My review of Flying Lotus' fourth full-length album, Until the Quiet Comes, is scheduled to appear in our November issue, but this short film, directed by Kahlil Joseph, does a fine job of depicting the record.

I will not pretend to understand the concept behind The Ganzfeld EP, electronic duo Matmos’ upcoming release, but I will simply say that I dig it, deeply. From the press release, because I can’t say it any better:

The EP and the album [The Marriage of True Minds, available early 2013] have the same conceptual basis: telepathy.

Telepathy!

For the past four years the band have been conducting parapsychological experiments based upon the classic Ganzfeld (“total field”) experiment, but with a twist: instead of sending and receiving simple graphic patterns, test subjects were put into a state of sensory deprivation by covering their eyes and listening to white noise on headphones, and then Matmos member Drew Daniel attempted to transmit “the concept of the new Matmos record” directly into their minds. During videotaped psychic experiments conducted at home in Baltimore and at Oxford University, test subjects were asked to describe out loud anything they saw or heard within their minds as Drew attempted transmission. The resulting transcripts became a kind of score that was then used by Matmos to generate music. If a subject hummed something, that became a melody; passing visual images suggested arrangement ideas, instruments, or raw materials for a collage; if a subject described an action, then the band members had to act that out and make music out of the noises generated in the process of the re-enactment.

The result, to which I am now listening and which is in turn driving me crazy, is perhaps the greatest work I’ve heard from Matmos&#151and that’s saying a lot, as Matmos generally blows my mind.