The duo of acclaimed Baltimore artists and improvisors M.C. Schmidt (Matmos) and John Berndt have announced their debut collaborative album Cloud Machines, out June 12th. Along with the album’s announcement, the duo have shared lead single “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 (Horse Lords).
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.
The album features guitarist Joel Knispel, fragments of the music of Polish electroacoustic composer Bogusław Schaeffer, Baltimore trombonist Patrick Crossland and Horse Lords guitarist Owen Gardner, with mastering by Rashad Becker and cover illustration by Karen Eliot.
