Just in time for their twenty year anniversary as a label, noted electronic duo Matmos has joined the Thrill Jockey roster, and is about to release the most conceptually elaborate yet weirdly poppy record of their career. The timing is apt, as Matmos members M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel will also be celebrating their own twenty year anniversary as musical and romantic partners this fall. The Ganzfeld EP will be released in advance of the new Matmos album, The Marriage of True Minds, which is forthcoming in early 2013.

The EP and the album have the same conceptual basis: telepathy. For the past four years the band have been conducting parapsychological experiments based upon the classic Ganzfeld (“total field”) experiment, but with a twist: instead of sending and receiving simple graphic patterns, test subjects were put into a state of sensory deprivation by covering their eyes and listening to white noise on headphones, and then Matmos member Drew Daniel attempted to transmit “the concept of the new Matmos record” directly into their minds. During videotaped psychic experiments conducted at home in Baltimore and at Oxford University, test subjects were asked to describe out loud anything they saw or heard within their minds as Drew attempted transmission. The resulting transcripts became a kind of score that was then used by Matmos to generate music. If a subject hummed something, that became a melody; passing visual images suggested arrangement ideas, instruments, or raw materials for a collage; if a subject described an action, then the band members had to act that out and make music out of the noises generated in the process of the re-enactment.

The Ganzfeld EP features two new Matmos tracks that are explicitly based upon psychic session material, and a throbbing minimal techno remix by RRose of the Matmos song “You”. Careening from widescreen electronic pop to eerie choral music, the results are eclectic, fun, and disorienting in equal measure.