Return to Archive, Matmos' 14th album, is constructed entirely from the "non-musical" recordings released by Folkways Records in the mid-20th century. It contains sounds sourced from dozens of LPs, from Sounds of North American Frogs to Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Sounds of Insects to Voices of Satellites, Sounds of Medicine to Sounds of the Junk Yard. Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt were given unprecedented access to the label's fabled archive at the Smithsonian Institution and encouraged to repurpose and rework the source material however they liked. The resulting album illuminates the radical, inquisitive, and poetic aspects of the original recordings, extracting the latent moments of creative revelation on records intended primarily for the backroom shelves of universities and libraries. Some tracks cycle through source material at a rate of dozens of samples per minute, while others sit with specific recordings for their duration. Released to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of Folkways Records by Moses Asch and Marian Distler, Return to Archive is a whimsical, entrancing, and at times unsettling traversal of what Asch called the "World of Sound."
