Cloud Machines

by Berndt / Schmidt

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Cloud Machines on limited LP, with two-sided inner sleeve, full color artwork and download code included.

Includes unlimited streaming of Cloud Machines via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Download available in 24-bit/44.1kHz.

shipping out on or around June 12, 2026

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Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

Download available in 24-bit/44.1kHz.

$10 USD or more

1.	The Sound of Glink 04:55	info
2.	Analysis of Joel 02:39	info
3.	“3000” 04:15	info
4.	Our Theme 03:55	info	buy track
5.	Trigger Effect 03:51	info
6.	The Balcony 01:23	info
7.	Gecko Lazzaro 06:17	info
8.	Fragile Parlor Music 04:48	info
9.	Comrade Knee 05:28	info
10.	Cloud Machines 04:42	info

about

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). After more than one hundred combined years of this pair pushing the boundaries of what music can be and where it can come from, 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. Cloud Machines honors the spirit of those ineffably “hermetic” creations by reinventing their legacy through the lens of decades of accumulated experimental practice and the duo's singular creative personalities. The result feels simultaneously like rediscovering a lost classic from 1978 and receiving a transmission from an alternate, somehow better timeline in 2026.

These are electronic soundscapes with genuine architectural ambition: strange structural gambits, process-driven revelations, and gorgeously unexpected details that reward deep listening. Yet unlike so much "difficult" experimental music, Cloud Machines maintains an uncanny and sneaky accessibility—each track a self-contained world, inviting and alien in equal measure.

Across a lithe 42 minutes, the album turns some tight stylistic corners, as the duo expand and contract their sonic palette unexpectedly. 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 Bogusław 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.

The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, with graphic design by John Berndt and M.C. Schmidt, and a cover illustration by Karen Eliot.

credits

released June 12, 2026

M.C. Schmidt: synthesizers, samplers, piano, bass, voice, field recordings, objects
John Berndt: modular synthesizers, keyboards, saxophone, Peasant Instrument, Rhythm Prism
John Hoegberg: drum programming, sine waves
Owen Gardner & Joel Knispel: electric guitars
Patrick Crossland: trombones

2026 Thrill Jockey Records Box 08038 Chicago IL 60608 2026 M.C. Schmidt and John Berndt
All rights Reserved. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Graphic design by Berndt / Schmidt.
Recorded in Baltimore and Montreal 2012-2025. Thanks to Drew Daniel, Alison Berndt, Obie Feldi, Eric Andre Letourneau, and Julia Niedernman.

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about

Matmos Baltimore, Maryland

Experimental electronic music duo originally from San Francisco but now residing in Baltimore.

vague-terrain.com

shows

Jun 19

Auditorium San Domenico

Foligno, Italy
Jun 28

Plyfa

Athens, Greece

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