Matmos

Ew! The new release from this San Francsico duo will make you barf, even while it makes you think and perhaps dance. The theme is medical procedures — with beats! Plenty of ambient artists have made interesting (or unbearably pretentious) music from room tones and tree frogs. Matmos takes the Tom Green notion that everything, no matter how disgusting, has humorous potential. "Lipostudio” features the slurpy sounds of liposuction. Listen to liquid fat spill from speaker to speaker, with equally flatulent bass clarinet squalls enhancing the mood. Delicious! Funky, too. "Lasik” is a meditation on the joys of laser eye surgery. "For Felix” is related to medicine only tangentially: it is a tribute to their late pet rat, and lab rats around the world, being composed entirely of rats scraping and bowing their cages. Along with the visceral samples, the rhythm programming just grooves along bouncily at a variety of tempos. The gross factor only comes into play when you think about it. When you don’t, you’re just noticing that these songs contain some widely varied sounds and they kind of make you want to boogie. It’s a CD that works on a couple of levels, none of them gimmicky. Matmos have explored a truly interesting realm of ideas and have come up with a result that will provoke more than one sensation from the listener. Namely, "hey, this rocks” and "ew!”