Electronica experiments defy words
People have tried to categorize Mount Kimbie, often stringing together a few choice tag words to make sense of the novel electronic world that Kai Campos and Dominic Maker have built: “experimental indie electronica,” “post-dubstep,” “ambient garage,” “art pop.”
But descriptions like this usually feel forced and far too general to fully capture the London-based duo’s buzzy, heavily layered production. They also often invite distracting
comparisons that ultimately fail to explain Campos and Maker’s music.
So what’s the best way to describe Mount Kimbie’s sound? It’s a popular question for the duo; it turns out that not even Campos can say.
“After all these years, I still haven’t found a good answer,” he says, adding that he’s been toying with one ever since the 2008 origins of Mount Kimbie. It’s come up yet again during their ongoing tour, which they’re set to bring to San Francisco’s 1015 Folsom on Friday, June 2.
“This is just what comes from being a music fan, or a fan of sound, really,” Campos explains. “In the end, the music that you make is always paying homage to stuff that you think is good . ... Your music is you indirectly showing people your perspective on the world.”
Mount Kimbie’s musical genealogy can be traced to British dubstep: tightly wound, frenetically paced music filled with bleeps, blips and heavy bass, popularized by artists like Burial and producers Chase & Status (who’ve worked with big names including Rihanna, Snoop Dogg and Major Lazer). But instead of following dubstep’s trajectory into the mainstream, Mount Kimbie skews more ambient and experimental, with a strong R&B influence that makes their work more akin to that of contemporaries SBTRKT or Jamie xx.
Between jam sessions and studio recordings, Campos and Maker have figured out how to tap into the bare bones of electronica with deceptive simplicity, deconstructing the familiar to rebuild it into their own image of sparse, pixelated electronic flurries.
Now, after a lengthy hiatus following their 2013 album “Cold Spring Fault Less Youth,” they’re at it again, making waves with two newly minted singles: “Marilyn,” a collaboration with Micachu (English singer-songwriter Mica Levi’s working pseudonym), dropped in early May on the heels of a surprise James Blake feature on “We Go Home Together” just a few weeks earlier.
“We took a lot of time off, and that was good. The aim of that was to be a human being for a while, but also to shake off bad habits you get into when you’re working,” Campos says. “There was a part of the new record that was just about walking away from everything and coming back and seeing what’s interesting to us. We were thinking about what it would be like to not be as focused on details, and to just go with the flow some more.”
The two musicians are strategically precise, specializing in the layering of syncopated, disparate songs and samples — which is the entire point. Everything, so long as it has the potential to sound good, is totally fair game. Campos and Maker are as much mad scientists as they are calculating producers, and each Mount Kimbie record is yet another chance to experiment.
For longtime listeners, this probably feels like a compounded case of whiplash. Mount Kimbie’s first original music in four years has turned out to be an experiment in tonal dissonance, a foray into wobbly, soul-infused instrumentation and newly hazy, purposely raw production.
Transitioning from earlier successes like the overcaffeinated infinite loop of “Before I Move Off” (from 2010’s “Crooks & Lovers”) and the sleek, King Kruledriven “You Took Your Time,” Campos and Maker have decided to upend their past templates in favor of the next challenge.
“You never want be completely content with what you’ve done,” Campos says. “I’d be terrified if I thought I’d got it right and there was nowhere else to go.”