Pitchfork

Classical music has long had a reputation for being "brainy," but composers John Matthias and Nick Ryan have taken it to another level. Their four-movement mini-suite for strings "Cortical Songs", forthcoming on the Non Classical label, is a process-oriented piece in which players are prompted to play based on the firings of a small computer-simulated brain. How that plays out, exactly, I can't tell you, although obviously the recorded version is fixed in place and sounds like a tense modern classical piece with a drone sensibility. You can check out the fourth movement on Non Classical's MySpace page to hear for yourself. Violinist John Matthias has worked with Radiohead (on The Bends) and recorded a solo album for Matthew Herbert's Accidental label, so he's obviously immersed in the more pop-oriented end of the experimental music spectrum. For the Cortical Songs album, Matthias and Ryan asked remixers including Simon Tong and John Maclean to rework the original tracks. Thom Yorke offers his own spin on the suite here, as he takes small string phrases, chops them into pieces, and layers them with a glitchy electronic rhythm that wouldn't have sounded out of place on any number of Warp releases in the last decade.