"...With apologies for dwelling on the negative for a moment, another colorful Balinese idiom typically hurled at underprepared musicians is batu malablab (bah-too m' lub-lub). Batu means rock or stone, and malablab is the active form of the incisively onomatopoetic verb "to boil."
A gamelan deserving of the sobriquet "boiling a rock" is likely going nowhere fast..."

-Michael Tenzer excerpted from "An Introduction to Balinese Music"
(Periplus/University of Washington Press, 1991)

From its opening cascade of prepared piano chords, “Batu Malablab” works a dislocating magic, summoning and exorcising the long tradition of Western fantasies and forgeries of non-Western musical traditions. Recalling gamelan-inspired classics of experimental music such as Cage’s prepared piano works and Mauricio Kagel’s “Exotica”, the out rock of Can’s “Ethnological Forgery Series”, Michael Snow’s mock ethnographic “The Last LP”, and Jon Hassell’s “Fourth World” era ambient music, Schmidt’s album tackles Orientalist fantasy head-on. There’s a clue hiding in plain sight in its self-mocking title: an onomatopoeic Indonesian phrase of derision for musical ineptitude, “Batu Malablab” literally signifies “boiling a rock”, but figuratively refers to gamelan players who lack dexterity and fall out of synch with each other. It’s a humorously self-aware gesture at the ersatz delirium of the album as whole, a mock UN of imaginary global music fashioned in the Baltimore basement studio depicted on the back of the LP. Divided into two side-long suites titled “Mountain Side” and “Lowland Side”, “Batu Malablab” sidesteps a collapse into cutely post-modern shtick or, worse, mere kitsch, by focusing with commitment and integrity upon the sheer physical beauty of its sounds, tone colors, and unexpected formal pairings.

“Mountain Side” commences with a maximalist exploration of prepared piano as magic carpet, physics lab, and wrestling arena. The music ranges from deep tonal-clusters to twinkling explorations of the upper registers, from fast percussive runs to starkly isolated individual notes that hang in pools of silence. Solo flute enters the fray, and then is unexpectedly run over by a chopped and screwed manipulation of the “Ha!” stab from the notorious Masters at Work classic “The Ha! Dance”, a canny reference to the pathways by which Western representations of otherness can generate their own folk cultural responses, in which “real” and “fake” play off each other in a hall of mirrors. No sooner has this reference been made, then Schmidt gearshifts into a recording of a large ensemble playing home-made instruments in a cavernous room, summoning a hybrid music somewhere between Japanese court Gogaku and ritual horn music of Tanzania.
By the end of the Mountain Side, creamy synth chords evoke the Fourth-World perfumed gardens of John Hassell, but they’re pressed up against dissonant scraping and musique-concrete manipulation techniques, juxtaposing the allure of ambient escapism with some tactile grit and physicality. A detuned lead synth solo is joined by manipulated horns and a virtually gendered vocal chorale, courtesy of board recordings of a live concert with Jon “Wobbly” Leidecker. A final blast of dissonant noise is dispelled by the ringing of a bell that announces the end of this side-long trip.

After a pastoral interlude for bird calls, flute and prepared piano that mirrors the beginning of “Mountain Side”, “Lowland Side” goes deeper into low frequency electronics and yet also further “out” into studio-as-instrument experimental territory. Throbbing low end synthesis and deep, cavernous drones, are put in dialogue with close-mic-ed sounds of Schmidt breathing, suggesting flotation tank sonics. Relaxing or frightening? It’s hard to say. The voice of Joseph Chang, reciting a short story written by Kevin McKereghan and translated into Chinese, is heard both in its “raw” form as intimate voice and through deeply estranging layers of digital vocal manipulation. A virtual choir of multi-tracked and multi-gendered Schmidts rises and is eventually overwhelmed by an intensely flanged wall of digital synthesis from Schmidt and guest star Thomas Dimuzio that recalls late Coil, recent Cyclobe, or the more hallucinogenic side of INA/GRM electro-acoustic music. Having touched the murky bottom of the synth pool, Schmidt re-surfaces to sunlight with a jaunty, deconstructed ragtime post-lude for improvised prepared piano and bull-in-the-pet-shop bird-call squeaks. After building in manic intensity up to Nancarrow speeds, the chattering of agitated birds concludes the trip with a parliament of fowls. It’s a brave, odd record, from one of the more acrobatic figures on the American electronic underground.