Martha & The Muffins pour out some funky Buttermilk with the help of John Orpheus in their tasty new collaborative concoction — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
On paper, there are few teamups less obvious than the pairing of new-wave legends M+M with funk revivalist Orpheus. But they’ve hit paydirt together before, and now they’re about to do it again. On Buttermilk, their second joint single, the unlikely coconspirators throw down a groove that just won’t quit — and prove the success of their ongoing part-time partnership is no fluke.
“You hungry, baby?” Orpheus calls out at the outset of the track. “You know we cooking.” What follows is an uninterrupted three minutes’ worth of witty, mouth-watering metaphors that could be meant to represent the joy master musicians can’t help but feel when they’re concocting something special in the proverbial creative kitchen. Or, you know, they could be talking about that other thing. But it’s best not to over-intellectualize the lyrical intent anyway, when the song’s real raison d’etre is its delicious recipe of wah guitar, heavenly bells and rubber-band bass — a mixture that gets brought to a boil at just the right moments by the thematically disconnected yet irresistible vocal refrain “I’m walking a fine line.”
Its proud creators describe the overall effect of the track as “a sound clash between Remain In Light-era Talking Heads and Funkadelic.” Hey, whatever gets the flour in the pan. What counts is that the record is a slam dunk of a followup to Look To The Moon, their “pan-cultural summer driving song.” Like that boundary-breaking number, Buttermilk is being released under the moniker Chemical Dreams — an umbrella that Martha And The Muffins stalwarts Martha Johnson and Mark Gane have created to facilitate no-holds-barred collaborations with their artistic peers both new and old. Meant to keep the door open to everything from David Bowie tributes to Grace Jones-style club stompers, Chemical Dreams are engineered to be “as unpredictable as your dreams will be tonight.”
It says a lot that Johnson and Gane decided to set up a side project to give free rein to their full range of inspiration, given that their recorded output over the years has run the wide gamut from Canadian pop-rock classics like Echo Beach and Swimming to their ominous 2023 reimagining of Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. Orpheus, for his part, has been making waves of late with tongue-in-cheek paeans to the yesteryear of soul like 90’s Fool and Get Right, which harken back to a time when the Jheri curls may have been dubious, but the musical talent was genuine. No wonder he works so well with the Muffin heads, whose vision for Chemical Dreams prizes off-the-cuff authenticity almost above all else.
In what’s become standard operating procedure for Johnson and Gane, they recorded Buttermilk in their small home studio, The Web. “It’s not particularly elaborate, but we get great results and I think people feel comfortable working in that environment,” Gane says. Mixing was done with Tim Abraham (Grand Analog / Odario) at Secret Door Recording, with an emphasis on maintaining the organic and natural feel that had been part of the track since the first notes were laid down. “We were playing real instruments for the most part,” Gane explains, “so it has that feeling of spontaneity.”
Buttermilk and Look To The Moon are both featured on The International Sound System Party Vol. II, a compilation of singles, remixes and unreleased tracks by artists on The Confidence Emperors record label (the same imprint Orpheus records for as a solo act). The album also includes a third Chemical Dreams track, The Living End, teaming Johnson and Gane with Grand Analog / Odario saxophonist Aubrey McGhee.
Watch the video for Buttermilk above, hear more from Chemical Dreams below, follow them on Instagram, and party with John Orpheus on his website, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
