Premiere: Matmos - Teen Paranormal Romance

Long-running Baltimore duo Matmos are releasing a new album, ‘The Marriage Of True Minds’, next month, and we’re premiering their newest track. Teen Paranormal Romance is a constantly shapeshifting slab of wonky, sub-heavy electronica with an odd premise behind it.

For the past four years Matmos have been conducting parapsychological experiments based upon the Ganzfeld experiment (a test based around sensory deprivation – yes, really), with Matmos member Drew Daniel attempting to telepathically transmit the concept of their new record to test subjects. This might sound like a bit of goofy gimmickry, but it actually ended up forming the entire basis of the record: during videotaped experiments conducted both in Baltimore and at Oxford University, the test subjects were asked to describe anything they saw or heard in their minds, and the resulting transcripts became the “poetic and conceptual scores used by Matmos to generate the nine songs on this album”, according to the album’s press release.

For anybody familiar with Matmos’s past work, this really isn’t as strange as it might sound.

‘The Marriage Of True Minds’ will be released through Thrill Jockey on February 18th.