Album Review: The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast by Matmos

Just as Wittgenstein found a way to explain the title's seemingly absurd notion ("Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast") Matmos seeks unique ways of making connections -- and of course, music -- that aren't obvious. Though The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast's fractured nature makes it a somewhat daunting listen at first, in the end, its portraits end up becoming a self-portrait of Matmos, and it's a dazzling mosaic of sounds, ideas, and history. Even if it's not as cohesive as their two previous albums, it's some of their best (and certainly most ambitious) work.

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Sound, in the hands of Matmos, is more than just a series of compression waves propagating through a medium. It’s a physical object that can – no, demands to be manipulated, augmented, extended, and recontextualized in much the same way a visual artist views the individual components of a collage. And while the case could be made that all music based around samples objectifies sound, only Matmos take it to such a level that they actually reverse the conversion: objects become the sounds that are treated as objects.

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