PHOTO BY JOSH SISK ALL RIGHTS RSRVD
M.C. Schmidt (Matmos) and John Berndt have shared the sparkling new single “The Sound of Glink” taken from their upcoming debut collaborative album Cloud Machines, out June 12th. The piece scatters a microsampled smorgasbord of sounds into a rhythmic funk, belied by steady bass figures and glistening electronics. The track perfectly embodies the duo’s penchant for employing disparate sounds and tonalities to craft surprisingly infectious grooves and melodic twists.
Cloud Machines 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.
M.C Schmidt is known for his work in provacateur duo Matmos as well as his work at the San Francisco Art Institute and currently the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. John Berndt is a 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 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.
