MOUNT KIMBIE
THREE YEARS ON FROM THE GAME-CHANGING CROOKS AND LOVERS, THE LONDON DUO HAVE REFUSED TO STAND STILL.
It’s easy to eulogise about supposedly important times in musical history with rose-tinted glasses. Usually, when you start feeling all gooey about moments from the musical past, it’s time to check your nostalgic enthusiasm: was it really as glorious a time for music as your flimsy, drunken, half-baked memories tell you it was?
But even with a healthy dose of self-restraint and cool-headedness, its difficult to avoid the conclusion that somewhere around 2009, something pretty fucking exciting was happening to electronic music. Any serious analysis of forward-thinking club sounds at the end of the Noughties would focus on a handful of record labels – Hyperdub, Hot Flush, or R&S – and the goldmine of creative talent and artistic innovation that they incubated and developed. Acts like Zomby, Joy Orbison, Darkstar and James Blake. And in particular, Kai Campos and Dom Maker – otherwise known as Mount Kimbie.
Something happened alright – UK dance music suddenly got a damn sight more interesting – and at the middle of that ‘something’ were this pair. Their debut LP Crooks & Lovers seemed to capture perfectly the spirit of invention and creativity that followed the first wave of dubstep producers earlier in the decade. And as Mount Kimbie’s star rapidly ascended, they embarked on what would turn into almost two years of constant touring. In the process, they evolved from an idiosyncratic duo operating at the amorphous heart of the post-dubstep scene into an idiosyncratic duo operating at the boundary between progressive guitar dynamics and ambient electronic beats (with some spoken word rapping thrown in for good measure).
When we call up one half of the band – Kai – at the emphatically un- rock ‘n’ roll hour of 9.30am, we ask him how Mount Kimbie found the exhaustive time on the road which followed the success of their debut. “We did about two years of pretty full on touring”, confirmed Kai, “you plan the first six months after the record comes out and then just have to go with it. But we actually really enjoy touring. It’s very different to normal life, but we were learning and getting better the whole time, we weren’t just running out the same thing every night. It’s a full-time job, touring, and it took us a bit of time to figure out what we wanted to do with the new album, so we needed time and space to figure that out.”
Inevitably, the extensive touring morphed and moulded the band’s sound. On Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, their forthcoming second album, the ghostly traces of garage beats are now all but banished, and there is a warmer (if still decidedly murky) feel. And while it’s easy to overplay how different the new record is to their previous output (the scattershot beats, warm keys and melancholy edge are all still present and correct), one of the most significant shifts from their debut is immediately established in the opening track Home Recording: the foregrounding of Dom and Kai’s vocals. Not sampled vocals, swathed in FX and looped to within an inch of their life – actual singing, like an actual band ‘n that.
“I don’t think the new record is a complete overhaul of everything we’ve done. It sounds like us, but we haven’t just knocked out the same thing again, y’know?” counters Kai. “We took the sound we were making on our first album as far as we wanted to take it, we knew that much when we had finished it, and that was three years ago, so we weren’t going to be making the same album again after all that time.”
Notably, there are two collaborations with King Krule, the youthful, Brit School alumnus vocalist/rapper whose rugged, slurry delivery evokes the smoky good old days of UK hip-hop. “We were very keen not to have a second album that was just us making electronic music as a platform for other people to sing over the top of”, Kai says, wearily. “We wanted to keep developing ourselves as writers and artists, not to be pigeon-holed in a ‘producer’ role … you just see it happen, especially with second electronic albums, lots of people singing but no real identity to it. King Krule was the only person who we really considered working with on the new record. We e-mailed him, he was into it, he came down to the studio when all we had was a 30 second clip of a song or whatever, and so we were pretty much working together on finishing the tracks that he’s on. It’s funny, I always think of him as a singer, and it’s only since we started doing press I realised a lot of people hear it as rapping. He does make hip-hop as well, but I think the act King Krule is very much a guitar/ singer type band.”
The question of whether King Krule is a singer or rapper, or whether Mount Kimbie should still be considered alongside the acts with whom their first album was initially associated, is really a question of context. Play the Mount Kimbie albums back to back, and there are plenty of continuities. Listen out for the echoes of the post-dubstep sound they were initially tagged with, and you can find them. But as Kai explains, increasingly, Mount Kimbie’s reference points are elsewhere.
“We’re going on tour in the states in May with Holy Other and also a band called Vinyl Williams from L.A., who are a more psychedelic rock thing. We’re doing three weeks together, it should be fun”, he tells us. “More and more it becomes less viable to be playing in clubs, and certainly we made a conscious decision a long time ago that it wasn’t the right context to be seeing our music. I think it’s a very different job to be a DJ, and being sandwiched between two DJs doesn’t really work, you kind of completely reset the vibe of the night, at a club night it’s meant to be more of a continuous thing.
“I guess by definition what we’re doing now is somehow a bit more of a self-indulgent egotistical trip”, he continues. “We need a fairly big stage, we need to soundcheck for at least an hour, there’s stuff we like to do with lighting, and just generally having as much control of the environment as possible really. There’s all kind of things like that which don’t really work for club nights. Those shows are fine when they work because the energy’s really good, but I guess we’re somewhere in between. There’s elements of the traditional rock and roll circuit that we don’t like too, there’s just as much nonsense that goes on there. We’re trying to create our own niche I guess.”
And, like so many other acts that have sought their own niche, they’ve found a welcoming home in Warp Records, with whom the band signed – with little fanfare – in 2012.
“We stopped touring last Christmas, and started thinking about making another record. We stopped the gigs, we stopped doing any press, and it kind of just happened” explains Kai. “When we signed to them we didn’t have a record at all. I think more so than when we spoke to other labels, we felt like they didn’t have any expectations about what the record was gonna be like, I mean there wasn’t even a conversation about that, which was encouraging. We knew we wanted to do something slightly different, and we wanted to look at things in a slightly longer-term, bigger picture kind of way. They put out a lot of different music, so I feel like they’ve probably seen it all before!”
Cold Spring Fault Less Youth feels lean, like an album that’s been trimmed down to its essential components. But, as Kai explains, there weren’t too many components in the first place. “We find a lot of effort goes into a small number of songs, it wasn’t like we had to cut the new album down from 50 songs or anything. We had maybe 14, which we cut down to 11. There’s not much we finish that doesn’t get used, but it always takes quite a long time.”
One of the standout tracks on the album is the second King Krule collaboration, Meter Pale Tone. Over a softly tribal rhythm and winsome synths, Krule’s sombre, earthy delivery creates a beautiful synergy. But remembering the names of pieces of electronic music can be difficult enough without curveballs like Meter Pale Tone. Kai stressed that in fact the song’s title – and lots of other cryptic Mount Kimbie vocabulary – is rooted in reason. “The title of that song is actually more of a visual thing”, he explains. “I tend to keep notes throughout the year of phrases or words that come up when I’m listening to a podcast, or reading a book, and something strikes me as worth taking down. So I end up with all these sticky notes that are absolute nonsense. Sometimes they’re really outrageous things, sometimes they’re just words I like, but they often end up as song titles, although usually changed slightly to bear a bit of relevance to the song. In this case the three words were something to do with the three of us (Dom, Kai & King Krule) working together in the studio on that song”.
It’s a thoughtful response – and one typical of the considered, almost methodical way that Mount Kimbie seem to go about the business of being a band. They possess the confidence to abandon the safety net of the scene that spawned them, and the maturity to not turn the chance of a change into an identity crisis. Mount Kimbie know themselves well enough to feel happy ditching the clubs for the gig circuit; to aim higher than being merely an electronic platform for other people’s sentiments; and most of all, to create their own niche and then be comfortable inhabiting it.
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Cold Spring Fault Less Youth is out now via Warp Records.
Words: Adam Corner
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