MOUNT KIMBIE (LIVE) | Electric Pickle | Saturday, April 9th April 9, 2011

Saturday, April 9th

The Electric Pickle & Get Some present

MOUNT KIMBIE (HOT FLUSH, UK) :: LIVE

along with DJs WILLIAM RENUART, HOTTPANTS & ASHROCK

***PRESALES::: http://www.wantickets.com/Events/ShowEvent.aspx?eventId=88117

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MOUNT KIMBIE

Who – or what – is Mount Kimbie, really? “That’s a hard question,” muses Dom Maker. “The hardest. It’s…” “It’s hard to say,” chimes in Kai Campos. “It’s an unspoken thing.”

Unspoken, or barely even there at all? The duo’s first two EPs – Maybes and Sketch On Glass, both out in 2009 through Hotflush – seemed like explorations of spaces so private that all within earshot were turned instantly into voyeurs. The experience was less like listening to music and more like eavesdropping on the machinations of a lone mind – albeit a lone mind surrounded by and retreating from millions of other minds.

For these were releases ushered into existence in Elephant and Castle, south London – a place where, as Kai puts it, “you can get a bus to anywhere in the world”, but is still, ultimately, “the shittest place you could ever live”. You imagine the area doesn’t become any more endearing when you’re forced to sleep within the walls of an old mental asylum.

Armed with found sound snips and a siege mentality, Kai and Dom set about turning London’s ambience into rhythm, its chaos into coherence. Traces of influence remain – the hard-earned spaces of Burial and The Bug vie with the berserk melodrama of Xiu Xiu and Grouper’s sad-eyed glow, D’Angelo’s pervert soul gets cleansed in the intimacy of Phil Elvrum’s Microphones, Angelo Badalamenti’s swollen ‘Twin Peaks’ atmospheres find a cradle in Madlib’s lax lope – but what emerges as ‘Mount Kimbie’ feels so pure in its of vision it’s surprising to learn its roots lead back to a trance club at the end of a pier in Bognor Regis.

“My first experience of electronic music was at sixth form,” explains Dom, who hails from the south coast holiday town. “All my friends would go to this club called Sheiks. They’d play the Tiësto rave mix of Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’, and I’d see girls I knew from school going in all tarted-up with their mums. It was fucking gross.”

In terms of attitude and approach, Mount Kimbie exist alongside those other auteurs in the vanguard of the post-dubstep diaspora – like Joy Orbison, Actress, Untold and Ikonika, Dom and Kai were drawn closer to UK clubland by the bass rearrangements seeping from nights like FWD> and DMZ. And like those other producers, their sound – their electronic response to the dubstep moment – is very much their own: sceneless; untethered from etiquette and genre codes. They float through dubstep and hip-hop, jazz, techno and ambient, post-rock, UK garage and film scores. But when the question comes to place Mount Kimbie’s music physically, we’re forced to return to that earlier question – who – or what – is Mount Kimbie, really? There are two minds at work here – if you were to scrawl a Venn diagram with Dom on one side and Kai on the other, ‘Mount Kimbie’ would be the overlap, a territory where their tastes and empathies interlock and resonate. Kai’s first year in London was “bleak” – he didn’t have any friends, and broke up with the girl he moved from Cornwall for. How important was it for the two of you to meet at that point?

Every track on Mount Kimbie’s new album is unreleased and entirely new, yet it’d be strange to imagine them torn from that locale – this is, after all, the quietly momentous sound of their own memories.

http://www.myspace.com/mountkimbie