The two guys in Matmos have adopted lots of
different personae, but they've never been especially free-spirited—at
least not on conceptual albums devoted to the sounds of surgery, songs from the
Civil War, and "audio biographies" of luminaries like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Of
course, none of those proved as leaden as their premises might suggest, but
Matmos wouldn't be Matmos without an idea to mull. The principle behind Supreme
Balloon
is a sound focused solely on synthesizers—including weird old ones like
the Omnichord and a "breath-controlled oscillator" called the E.V.I.—and
the result plays something like a history lesson in all that is cosmic and
confined in the electronic-music of old. The songs are generally jubilant, as
signaled by the whirring synth giggles and quasi-Cuban bassline in "Rainbow
Flag," but also slight in a way that suggests much of Supreme Balloon would have been a lot
more fun to make than it is to listen to. That certainly applies to an ambient
title track that goes nowhere beyond wiggly test-tones for 24 minutes—a
long time to go nowhere, no matter the concept.