John Matthias follows on from collaborations with the likes of Radiohead and Coldcut by joining creative forces with producer and musician Jay Auborn. Race To Zero is their feature length collaboration and arrives via the Village Green label.
Starting out, the duo used the remit of their combined studio environments to capturing the natural reverb of a wide variety of spaces. These places ranged from "a 700-year-old chapel in the Devon countryside to a basement setting in Reykjavík, Iceland". Recording a series of improvised acoustic compositions within these confines, this sense of a disparate landscape creating a gap within the record is perfectly translated within its musical open-ended spaciousness.
This expansiveness is key to the makeup of 'Race To Zero' and its post-rock discipline that morphs into an almost jazz style consensus finds the duo also experimented with production techniques that use a binaural three-dimensional recording. The result is a record that when played at a high volume gives the impression you can almost step into it and be fully absorbed within the virtual and physical world occupied by the duos sound.
