Cloud Machines is the extraordinary debut collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, the 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. 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 record 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. It's not always a two man show. On side one, "The Analysis of Joel" refracts the prepared guitar playing of Joel Knispel into eerie shards as M.C. Schmidt counters with processed fragments of the music of Polish electroacoustic composer Boguslaw Schaeffer. John Berndt takes a solo on the mysteriously poised synthesizer etude "The Balcony." Side two features the largest ensemble piece, "Gecko Lazzaro" a slow-burning sinuous bassline groove featuring the trombone playing of Baltimore improviser Patrick Crossland and a suitably fried guitar solo from Owen Gardner (lead guitarist of Berlin-by-way-of-Baltimore out rockers Horse Lords). Like a kaleidoscope turning slowly towards and away from different light sources, genres and traditions seem to emerge from the haze and pull into focus and then melt away again, but never constrain the constant sense of exploratory forward movement.

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