Metamono – With The Compliments Of Nuclear Physics

Label: InstrumentariumScore: 9/10

Metamono are a three-headed force of nature flying the flag for blood, sweat and ancient circuit alchemy in their ongoing voyage aboard electronic music‘s original surfboard of discovery. At last, after many months of escalating teasers, EPs and then the actual Herculean effort to realise the record itself, comes the album; as expected, on double vinyl and beautifully packaged.

Since their first limited vinyl and cassettes releases, Crystal Palace trio Jono ‘Kumo’ Podmore, Paul Conboy and Mark Hill have sported their own idiosyncratic look, manifesto and (ever-morphing) sound, their creative processes having more in common with the original sonic trailblazers and lab technicians of early last century, like Stockhausen and Raymond Scott, along with experimental titans like Can, sometimes even modern DIY-centric creators of racket such as Detroit‘s Wolf Eyes. Kicking against the pricks all the way.

Metamono don’t play clubs but hold events where they let fly on their umbilical armoury of second-hand and hand-built vintage analogue synths and ring modulators, plus arcane accessories such as theremin, siren and valve radio. Their manifesto stresses they “will never use a microphone, digital sound generation or sampling, use mechanical sound generation, use digital sound processing, make overdubs, remix, or be afraid of mono. Metamono will only use analogue electronic sound generation and processing, compose and mix simultaneously and build their own and play used instruments.”

If this sounds rigid or restricted in any way, Metamono are actually the most liberated bunch of circuit-treaders I’ve encountered for years, as shown on missives such as the Tape EP on HoHum and ten-inch Parcel Post EP from last year. I’ve witnessed them in action at close quarters in my mate’s loft and was quite stunned as they tinkered, stroked and occasionally tossed off their mounds of wires, knobs and skeletal machinery, producing one off combinations of astral tones, sonic sparks and guttural pulses. They were  having a blast and it showed. At the same time, two metaphysical fingers were jabbing at the faceless laptop DJ epidemic.

Taking the wax and placing it on the deck (while wearing the cover as a starship captain’s hat), the record gets under way with side one’s four outings. All beat with a different pulse, coming in different sizes, shapes and moods on the skittering ‘Uplink’, twinkling ‘Linger Langour’ and clattering ‘Rare Earth Rush’, whether juddering up from a blue whale’s scrotum at the bottom of the ocean or microscopically locating the fabled masturbating space mosquitoes. ‘Plums And Custard’ manages to combine jazzy looseness and squelching supernatural funk in riffs which won’t stand still for a second. Apart from the afore-mentioned questing for the perfect stratosphere and squeak, there are other similarities with Can‘s cold world symphonies, Metamono’s rhythms also seemingly driven by their own telepathic internal funk, sometimes joined by Holger Czukay-style radio tweaking (and Jono Podmore is married to Irmin Schmidt’s daughter). Having said that, the spirit of The Clangers is often hovering somewhere too, here if they‘d taken up that Blaxploitation movie offer.

  Side two stretches and spaces out, ‘Blessedspace’ appearing in a flurry of Sun Ra black hole keyboards then shimmering in that same bottomless ethereal ambience achieved by the man from Saturn in his furthest out 60s expeditions. This stellar side proceeds with the eerie Moon hollers of ‘Construct’ and haunted Detroit shimmer of ‘Slenderman’ before ‘La Grande Peur’ conjures its alien dawn chorus with the kind of melody epic house producers would trade in their Las Vegas residency for. 

Side three presents four floor-friendly antidotes to formula house repetition syndrome, kicking off with the electro skirmish of ‘Slippery Jack’ before ‘Trypnotism’ shows what happens when Metamono get down to acid house, infecting a contagiously percolating groove with 303 squelches and understated funk as gnarled melodic snakes loom out of the machines like spectral flatulence. ‘Deuce’ and ‘Fezgate’ take it even further, straddling four-four kicks, their takes on nagging trouser-techno coaxed through their unique blender, at different times recalling interplanetary bombsites, Gene Pitney’s Martian broadcasts or Godzilla in search of his lost testicles. Their way with coaxing squiffy noise from an arcane synth harks back to the early days in Chicago when miracles like ‘Acid Tracks’ were there waiting to be tickled into life.

Side four is where they let it all hang out as boiled-in-the-bag circuit orgies explode and ejaculate through the spikey, opiated dreamscapes of ‘This Constant’, ‘Glowfade’, ‘Just Real Enough’, ‘Funland’ and ‘Armillaria Solidipes’, the latter turning into a firework display of unleashed dog-fighting machine libidos lighting up the heavens.

I’ve already been quoted going on about Metamono‘s mission to explore and celebrate a time before the soul of electronic music came under siege from digital carwashes and speed-dialled laptop clichés, recalling how punk was necessary to remind increasingly-overblown rock ’n’ roll of the primitive energy which spawned it. Now I can happily add that they’ve made one of the most vitally important electronic statements of the last few years. Maybe they’ll start another trend…