people like us/matmos/wobbly: wide open spaces

The hour-long performance on this disc was captured live on October 5th, 2002 when Wobbly, People Like Us, and Matmos circled their wagons in the lecture hall of the San Francisco Art Institute. Having mutually agreed upon a country and western theme, Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), and Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt (Matmos) pored over their archives of honky tonk classics, chopping and dicing Nashville's finest almost beyond recognition, and collectively restitching the mangled shreds in a kind of crazed digital quilting bee. Flickering and tranquil one moment, and wildly slap-stick the next, Wide Open Spaces hits the sweet spot between song forms and improvisation, and showcases the qualities that all three collaborating artists share: absurdist humor, baroque sample manipulation, and stuttering rhythmic frameworks that lurch and sway. While the presence of five samplers, four laptops, three CD players, and a pedal steel guitar on one stage could have led to a tediously ego-driven "jam" or simply cacophony, the results feel lushly detailed but not cluttered, and swing naturally between structure and freedom. Listening back to the recorded results, all three musical units agreed that this concert was mighty fine, and worth sharing. Originally released on Tigerbeat6 in 2003, the music has been re-mastered for this vinyl issue. Artwork by M.C. Schmidt; Design and layout by Vicki Bennett.