It's silly, trippy synth-pop that evokes dancing chihuahuas: your toddler will love it
Hometown: Crystal Palace, south London.
The lineup: Jono Podmore (ARP 2600, theremin and Lili Box), Paul Conboy (home-made Modular, Juno 106, tape echo), Mark Hill (KorgMS20, valve radio, Stylophone).
The background: Metamono are an "electronic cabal" comprising Jono Podmore, aka Kumo, who has recorded with Can's Irmin Schmidt, Paul Conboy (formerly of Bomb the Bass) and the artist Mark Hill, "more outsider than trained musician, who acts as the 'conscience' of the group", according to the press release. Being older than your average laptop Mac-tronicist, and with such distinguished CVs, we were expecting their album, With the Compliments of Nuclear Physics, to be a mature, considered affair, full of thoughtful passages, polished electronica for connoisseurs, proficient but dull.
Further alarm bells were sounded when we learned that they use an "instrumentarium", a "vast bank of recycled and reworked equipment", and when we read their manifesto, full of stern, stentorian demands to "liberate the imagination" and denunciations of "music, [which] has become a flaccid shadow of the social power it once was". It also includes a rejection of overdubs and sampling and a concomitant commitment to analogue technology. All very worthwhile – or do we mean worthy? – but again it led us to expect dour dome-heads toiling to create a routinely riveting synthesizer noise, Laibach-lite without the shticky totalitarian sturm und drang.
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Then we bothered to play Nuclear Physics, a double (available on vinyl, cassette or as a download, pointedly) and we couldn't have been more entertained. Well, we could, but it would have probably required pharmaceuticals and choreographed dancing chihuahuas. But this came close. It's playful stuff – and it does sound, at times, like stuff: by turns gooey/malleable and spindly/brittle, either way the kind of thing designed and manufactured for kids, and by "kids" we don't mean "kids on the street" kids, but actual children. The under-fives would love it. Trypnotism reclaims "silly" and reminds you that synth-pop could often do daft: it's probably no coincidence that Art of Noise called their debut album Daft. Even Yellow Magic Orchestra and Yello had their moments when they teetered on a sort of novelty-sublime. Metamono, unexpectedly, tap into this tradition, the eccentric electro-pop of Trio and M. They also remind us that even the future-inventing Giorgio Moroder made his first mark as the composer for Chicory Tip. This Constant is bleepy, alien-funky, like early Human League or side two of Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement. Linger Languor is pert and perky, normally horrible things to behold, but here the machine whimsy works. Uplink is spindly and spartan, only in a good way; primitive as a term of praise, recalling the raw, rudimentary synth-pop of the Normal, Robert Rental, Thomas Leer.
Blessed Space could have been beamed from 1981 Düsseldorf or Sheffield, but there's also a hint of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, like Delia Darbyshire if she'd signed to Warp in the 90s. Glowfade, all computer-game bleeps and boosts, sounds like the result of an Atari teenage riot rather than a piece of music assembled by 40-year-old men. Slenderman is bionic bossa nova, like Steely Dan if they were androids, and Funland (why wasn't that the album title?) is chillout music for astronauts on drugs. Plums and Custard is music for lunchtimes in primary school where the titular dessert gets served up to universal dismay, then gets flicked around the canteen. It might actually be about geo-political divisions, for all we know, but that's what it conjures up to us. Rare Earth Rush could be Cabaret Voltaire if they weren't worried about surveillance and religious control. There is a track called La Grande Peur (the Big Fear in French), and that was the abiding feeling behind a lot of the music that Metamono evoke: cold war dread, annihilation anxiety. But on the whole, they put that on hold, and now it's for your pleasure.
The buzz: "Easy listening it ain't, but if you fancy a soundtrack to your complete mental disintegration, I can heartily recommend it" – the Hearing Aid.
The truth: Fission on!
Most likely to: Dance till the bomb drops.
Least likely to: Live for a very long time.
What to buy: The album With the Compliments of Nuclear Physics is released on 21 October on the band's own Instrumentarium label – it can be pre-ordered now from their website. They are playing the London Analogue festival on 7 September.
File next to: DAF, Human League, Thomas Leer, the Normal.
Links: metamono.co.uk.
Monday's new band: Gent Mason.
by Paul Lester via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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