Ultimate Care II is the new album from renowned conceptual electronics duo Matmos (Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt). Recorded in the basement studio of their home in Baltimore, the album is constructed entirely out of the sounds generated by a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II model washing machine. Like its namesake, the album runs across its variations as a single, continuous 38-minute experience that starts with the grinding turn of the wash size selection wheel, and ends with the alert noise that signals that the wash is done.

Between these audio-verité book-ends, we experience an exploded view of the machine, hearing it in normal operation, but also as an object being rubbed and stroked and drummed upon and prodded and sampled and sequenced and processed by the duo, with some occasional extra help from an ultra-local crew of guest stars (some of whom regularly do laundry chez Matmos). Dan Deacon, Max Eilbacher (Horse Lords), Sam Haberman (Horse Lords), Jason Willett (Half Japanese) and Duncan Moore (Needle Gun) all took part, either playing the machine like a drum, processing its audio, or sending MIDI data to the duo’s samplers. The vocabulary of the Ultimate Care II, its rhythmic chugs, spin cycle drones, rinse cycle splashes, metallic clanks and electronic beeps are parsed into an eclectic syntax of diverse musical genres. The result is a suite of rhythmic, melodic and drone-based compositions that morph dramatically, but remain fanatically centred upon their single, original sound source.

Like their promiscuous DJ sets, the palette of genres in play reveals Matmos’ hybrid musical DNA: Industrial music, vogue beats, gabber, Miami bass, free jazz, house, krautrock, drone, musique-concrete, and new age music all churn up to the surface and are sucked back into the depths. In this moiré pattern of textures, the listener encounters elements that sound like horns, kick drums, xylophones or sine waves, but in fact each component is meticulously crafted out of a manipulated sample of the machine. In other hands, such relentless conceptual tightness would court claustrophobia. Happily, Matmos’ willingness to transform audio and engage pop structure bypasses arid, arty thought exercises and produces instead their signature effect: abject and unusual noises yielding weirdly listenable music.

The duo know how to rein back the processing too. In its starkest passage, we hear the rinse cycle of the machine run uninterruptedly for four minutes as a slow filter sweep combs across the oceanic frequency range. The result is a kind of Environments LP that never was: the Psychologically Ultimate Washing Machine. It’s a gesture that’s likely to infuriate some people and tantalise others. Is this the conceptualist emperor’s new clothes, a wistful domestic reverie, a parody of recent moves in ‘object oriented’ philosophy, a feminist point about alienated domestic labor, an elegy to a discontinued model that stands in for unsustainable and water-wasteful technologies generally, or simply an immersion in the beauty of the noises of everyday life? Sucker-punching ambient pastoral, the album ends with a techno-industrial-booty bass workout that recapitulates motifs from across the entire composition before grinding to a halt, its task completed. Funny and sad, bouncy and creepy, liquid and mechanical, Ultimate Care II swirls with perverse paradox, but the agitation at its core offers vital evidence of Matmos’ abiding faith in the musical potential of sound.

‘At once atmospheric, industrial and experimental, Ultimate Care II is kind of like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music had the old geezer from Freeport, N.Y. crafted it out of love instead of vitriol’ – Paste Magazine

‘Ultimate Care II is reliably dream-like, the sort of album you never quite hear in the same way twice; passages jut out or fly under the radar’ – SPIN

Tour support comes from UnicaZürn. UnicaZürn – aka Stephen Thrower and David Knight – utilise a core mix of vintage analogue synthesisers, treated guitar, clarinet and saxophone. Their cavernous spiralling soundscapes and microcosmic delicacy create an immersive, morphologically unpredictable audio experience; their debut album Temporal Bends was described by FREQ magazine as ‘like Jacques Cousteau meets HP Lovecraft twenty thousand leagues under the sea’.