MC Schmidt MP3s

There is little if any appointment listening on the web. Don’t let the phrase “webcast” turn you off. More often than not, a live web broadcast is archived, as with Matmos member MC Schmidt‘s April 30 appearance on the Shirley and Spinoza Internet radio show (compound-eye.org/radio). By day, Schmidt has been teaching a “Sound as Music” course at the San Francisco Art Institute, and he brought the class, dubbed the New Genres Orchestra (for the academic department in which the course originated), to S’n’S for a two-hour tour through various sound arts, from field recordings, to hazy noise-scapes laced with spoken word, to electro-acoustic miasmas. It’s available as a pair of hour-long MP3s (MP3p1, MP3p2). Amid the amorphous sounds are some spates of rhythmic wizardry one expects from Matmos, notably about 40 minutes into track one and early on in track two. The webpage promises a list of participants eventually. In the meanwhile, more on Matmos at brainwashed.com/matmos.