Cloud Machines is the extraordinary debut collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, the Baltimore avant-garde institution and band leader behind High Zero Festival, the Red Room collective, Geodesic Gnome, and radical sonic concepts like Spectral Relay (a bespoke signal processing architecture) and Relabi (a conceptual genre defined by a Rorschach-blot pulse). After more than one hundred combined years of this pair pushing the boundaries of what music can be and where it can come from, these two iconoclasts have delivered something genuinely unexpected: an oddly sweet electronic opus that's as immediately engaging as it is a series of delicious puzzles. When two of experimental music's most irascible characters spend twelve years crafting an album, you don't just get another release—it is an anthology of pocket universes.
The record is a love letter to two of their strongest mutual influences of the 1980s—the delirious comic books of French auteur Jean Giraud (AKA Moebius) and the beautiful miniatures of the SKY Records Cluster/Eno/Conny Plank collaborations. Cloud Machines honors the spirit of those ineffably “hermetic” creations by reinventing their legacy through the lens of decades of accumulated experimental practice and the duo's singular creative personalities. The result feels simultaneously like rediscovering a lost classic from 1978 and receiving a transmission from an alternate, somehow better timeline in 2026.
These are electronic soundscapes with genuine architectural ambition: strange structural gambits, process-driven revelations, and gorgeously unexpected details that reward deep listening. Yet unlike so much "difficult" experimental music, Cloud Machines maintains an uncanny and sneaky accessibility—each track a self-contained world, inviting and alien in equal measure.
Across a lithe 42 minutes, the album turns some tight stylistic corners, as the duo expand and contract their sonic palette unexpectedly. It’s not always a two man show. On side one, “The Analysis of Joel” refracts the prepared guitar playing of Joel Knispel into eerie shards as M.C. Schmidt counters with processed fragments of the music of Polish electroacoustic composer Bogusław Schaeffer. John Berndt takes a solo on the mysteriously poised synthesizer etude “The Balcony.” Side two features the largest ensemble piece, “Gecko Lazzaro” a slow-burning sinuous bassline groove featuring the trombone playing of Baltimore improviser Patrick Crossland and a suitably fried guitar solo from Owen Gardner (lead guitarist of Berlin-by-way-of-Baltimore out rockers Horse Lords). Like a kaleidoscope turning slowly towards and away from different light sources, genres and traditions seem to emerge from the haze and pull into focus and then melt away again, but never constrain the constant sense of exploratory forward movement.
The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, with graphic design by John Berndt and M.C. Schmidt, and a cover illustration by Karen Eliot.
1. The Sound of Glink
2. Analysis of Joel
3. “3000”
4. Our Theme
5. Trigger Effect
6. The Balcony
7. Gecko Lazzaro
8. Fragile Parlor Music
9. Comrade Knee
10. Cloud Machines
