Mount Kimbie, Tour-Maubourg, Astels, et Cabaret Contemporain

Ok, I’ll admit it, “Post-Dubstep” sounds like what Nathan Barley (Charlie Brooker’s loathsome TV character) would call his laziest musical experiments. However, Mount Kimbie are a band that make a very good case for it being far more than just a hipster buzzword, to the extent where they make it some of the most intriguing, well-constructed ambient music to come from this side of the pond in a very long time. The duo came together at Southbank University, where Cornwall native Kai Campos met Dom Maker, a film student from Brighton, and soon after they met they were making music together in a tiny home studio in Peckham. Strange surroundings to create such visionary music, but it worked.

Working together, the duo took the bass heavy energy of dubstep and slowed it down, combining it with influences from electronica, hip hop production and sounds found and recorded by Campos and Maker themselves. In little over a year the duo signed a contract with Hotflush Recordings and released their first E.P in the form of February 2009’s “Maybes” a work that found critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork and XLR8R. The band were not finished however, and five months later released a follow up E.P titled “Sketch On Glass”, which also saw acclaim from all over the world.

However, all the acclaim for their E.P’s was nothing compared to their debut album “Crooks And Lovers”, which came out a year in July 2010. It got universally stellar reviews was hailed as one of the albums of the year by the NME and Drowned In Sound and was nominated for The Guardian newspaper’s coveted First Album Award in the same year. 2010 was also the year they started touring, ad unlike most electronic artists, the duo played the vast majority of their music on live instruments, forming a backing band that, at one point, saw a young James Blake in its ranks.

A lot of people seem to think that pure critical acclaim is a worthless currency, but it was that acclaim for both their albums and their live shows that got Mount Kimbie a record deal with legendary dance label Warp. Ever since then, the duo have remained one of the most consistently acclaimed artists around, both for the E.P’s that followed their debut album and for their follow up record “Cold Spring Fault Less Youth”. Truly, there are few other groups out their more deserving of the term “artists” than they are, and once they reach their prime, they’ll be quite an astonishing sound and sight. Highly recommended.