If God Is In The TV ever needed a warm glowing electronic house band of mechanical, nebula soul-searching quality, than the Metamono trio would fill the necessary requirements.
We’ve followed the intrepid troupe since inception, following their manifesto led endeavors through the releases of the Tape and Parcel Post EPs – both accorded 4/5 star reviews.
We’ve also played host to the sonic magi’s cover of Bowie’s ‘Warszawa’ – an exclusive addition to our recent ‘thin white duke’ celebrations mixtape, Ashes To Ashes – and featured a special, personal, paean to record shop experiences from the group’s Jono Podmore for Record Store Day.
Firm favorites than, the Metamono continue with their latest project, the long player With The Complements Of Nuclear Physics, which via Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/795891540/with-the-compliments-of-nuclear-physics) hopes to raise the £2,500 to see this LP become a reality. If you are still unaware, unfamiliar or new to the course, the Metamono seek to return the human element back into electronic music by discarding technological changes and equipment after a certain date. Antithesis to the laptop, bedroom bore of more recent times, the troupe formulate a more tactile approach, twisting, modulating and throwing a spanner into the machine-dominating artificial intelligent digital world. Producing acidic and busy techno opuses, they sound like visionaries from a world that called a halt to all development of computers and progression after the release of Trans Europe Express.
If that doesn’t explain it than get your goggles round this:
“Reevaluating electronic music’s fundamentals, stripping down and retracing its intrinsic values, is something the propound theorist trio of Metamono seek to practice.
With a pertinacious agit manifesto to work from – which bares them from using any digital sound generators and processing; microphones, and overdubs – they place a host of restrictions on their improvised compositions; reveling in limitations, or as the groups Jono Podmore puts it, “Limitations breed resourcefulness”.
The electro trinity of Bomb The Bass collaborator Paul Conboy, fine artist Mark Hill, and Podmore (the talent behind Kumo, and tenure aide to Irmin Schmidt of Can), announce their disenchantment and “disillusion with the expediency of much contemporary music” by reverting to the use of analogue equipment and ring modulators of a recent past – a full list of this hardware that includes the classic ARP 2000 and Korg MS 20, is available for any fanboy on the groups website. Throw in the vibrating otherworldliness of the Theremin, and the static-crisp, lost transmissions from an atavistic valve radio, and you find yourself taken back to the era of R&S Records, Basic Channel, early Warp and the age of intelligent Acid-Techno. For despite the group’s postulations, and calls for something more challengingly new, they’ve certainly evoked the experimental spirit of the late 80s and early 90s. The noble gas themed ‘XeF4′ and ‘H2NS’ both gargle, bleep, burp and pulse with the multi-layering acid manipulation of those years; displaying a fondness for such pioneers as the UKs Mike Dred. On the other hand, there’s a real warm suffused reverberation and sagacious knowledge glowing around these stimulative sound capsules.
Previous electronic tracts of wisdom by Metamono have only been available on limited edition cassettes – a format which they feel best suits, “…aesthetically and in terms of audio quality”. Therefore logic dictates that their first ever vinyl release should be christened the Tape EP, and that the path to a more creative electronic musical future, lies in first, deconstructing that past.”
Dominic Valvona
Details of this fund raising enterprise are as follows:
So now it’s time for the big one. The first album, entitled:
With the compliments of Nuclear Physics
All metamono releases are principally in analogue formats, and this album will be no exception – as laid out in this clip:
read Technical Specifications at the bottom of this page for more detail
Most of the music is already recorded and edited. We have enough funds to cover the mastering and to contribute towards the costs of manufacture – which doesn’t come cheap at our high standards. We just need to raise another £2500 to cover vinyl pressing costs.
Mark Hill, who is 33% of the band (MS20, radio, stylophone) is not only a musician but also fine artist. Mark designs all our sleeve artwork, creating it by hand using recycled source material. This was taken a step further with our recent 7″, each cover wasindividually handmade using antique pianola rolls.
For a limited run of With the compliments of Nuclear Physics we’ll use a similar approach – each individual cover being a unique work of art in its own right, using the full benefit of the double gatefold format.
Beyond this, some of you may wish to invest in a very special limited number of 10 drawings and collages created during the process of making the sleeves: stand-alone pieces derived from the design process created with the original materials, supplied with a vinyl copy of the album.
The copy of With the compliments of Nuclear Physics that you will receive by making your pledge is the result of a creative process set in motion with the metamono manifesto in 2010. Throughout the intervening years the manifesto has driven us in to areas of greater creative freedom than any of us have experienced before. This liberating effect is manifest in the range of rhythm, melody, harmony, technique and sound in the music; it’s in the artwork and at the gigs, but mostly reveals itself in the feelings this music generates. Our freedoms are infectious – no dour electronica or turgid 4/4 convention here.
Technical Specifications
We pay much care and attention to high technical standards, so here is some more detail on the formats and standards in which the album will be made available.
The masters and vinyl cut will be made by Kevin Metcalfe at Soundmasters. This is a super high-end facility and Kevin is one of the great craftsmen of British audio tradition.
It is from these masters that the following formats will be reproduced:
Reel to reel tape
This is the highest commercially available quality. The masters will be transferred at 1 to 1 speed to 2 x 10″ reels of factory fresh, 1/4″ ATR tape on NAB hubs at 15ips by Kevin at Soundmasters. Correct line up tones will be provided to ensure perfect reproduction and the tapes will come in a hand crafted box with a booklet containing extensive sleeve notes and artwork.
180g Vinyl
The vinyl lacquers (4 sides at 33 rpm) cut by Kevin will be sent immediately to Record Industry – the largest vinyl pressing plant in the world. We have a great relationship with them and they have manufactured all our releases on Instrumentarium. After processing and generation of the metalwork, they will provide us with high-quality pressings on double 180g virgin vinyl in full colour gatefold sleeve on heavy card. It is the cost of the pressing alone that we are seeking to finance with Kickstarter.
Compact Cassette
In line with our goal of keeping our music in the analogue domain we will be making the album available on CrO2 cassette. As 1 to 1 copies from the original master made at correct speed, these cassettes offer a startling sound quality, especially for younger people brought up in the digital era. As the copying is of such high quality there is no need for noise reduction. The blank cassettes we order are edited to the correct length of the programme.
Digital Download
Although we try to avoid digital audio there are many people who love our music who only have digital playback facilities who deserve to be catered for. But even in this inferior format we try to keep the quality as high as possible, using the finest encoders. The download will be supplied via our Bandcamp page. You will be able to select the encoding of your choice: mp3, WAV, FLAC etc.
Risks and challengesLearn about accountability on Kickstarter
Very few. The music is all recorded and edited and the mastering paid for. The only thing that could delay release of this album would be a problem with the pressing – the physical manufacture. Fortunately we have a good relationship with an excellent manufacturer – http://www.recordindustry.com/ – who have done a first class job on our previous releases. Our records are stocked by Boomkat, Rough Trade, Phonica and many other record stores in the UK and across europe, and these shops are all keen to stock the debut metamono album. You make a pledge, and as long as we raise our £2500, we’ll make sure NOTHING will stop this album getting to you!
Finally here’s a mere taster from the upcoming broadcast from a parallel technological dimension; ‘Linger Langour’.