Project House, Leeds
23rd May 2025
Since 2008, musical duo Dominic Maker and Kai Campos have been experimenting with the parameters of electronic music under the alias Mount Kimbie. After initially expanding on the musical template of the UK post-dubstep scene, releasing early experimental ambient house EPs ‘Maybes’ and ‘Sketch on Glass’ that raised their profile for critical success the following year.
In 2012, they signed to the legendary Warp Records to release their second album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth. Mount Kimbie collated an underground cult following as they continued to defy the gravity of British electronic music – shaping a new face of the future music to come.
Subsequently aligning their formation with the technological revolution, Mount Kimbie have succumbed, and optimised the technological influx to keep a fresh approach to their sound to accompany whatever the future may have to offer
Mark Fisher believed that the accelerated rate of technological development has, consequently, had a slowing effect on cultural and creative development. ‘What I wanted to register today was, I suppose, a sense of disappointment,’ he begins his talk at Virtual Futures 2.0’11, ‘[a disappointment] when we think about the expectations of the nineties and the reality of the existing “cyberspace”.’
“Are our mobile phones ‘electro-libidinal parasites’?”
Not so in Mount Kimbie’s case. It’s easy to compare the present with the past, as the past will always seem somewhat better due to it being a lived experience. But like Joni Mitchell once said in the 1970 hit ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone”. I’m by no means for the ever-evolving technological parasite, but I do believe in order to comment on the subject you must incorporate it somehow. In reference to Fischer, it’s not that the rise of technology has affected the creative abilities in Mount Kimbie’s case, it has been molded and developed into their sound, to use both contemporary elements of society that is juxtaposed with the musical soundscape of the digital realm – as a simultaneous relationship that we profusely say we reject but truthfully are unable to live without it.
Their fourth studio album ‘The Sunset Violent’ is a perfect example of this. Nominated for Best Independent Album at the 2024 AIM Independent Music Awards, ‘The Sunset Voolent’ showcases Mount Kimbie at their creative pinnacle for the first time as a quartet. The album follows on a lot of the same themes and imagery from ‘Love What Survives’ and ‘MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning’, about how far we’ve come in this outlandish suburban dystopia and how we are coping with it. Even the eerie, but somewhat calmingly composed album cover depicting a car derailed off a country road into a cornfield comments on the societal derailment – keep off the tracks, where the natural always wins – perfectly encapsulating the offbeat, otherworldly landscape they have created on ‘The Sunset Violent’.
Unable to pinpoint or label the genre heard on ‘The Sunselt Violent’, Mount Kimbie have amalgamated a melting pot of sounds from Radiohead-style rocktronica on ‘Dumb Guitar’, Joy Division timbre with dream-pop backing vocals on ‘Shipwreck’ all emitted through a slacker based monocle of Dean Blunt wonk keeping the laid back simplistic krautrock momentum easily accessible to all. All these sonic transitions throughout the record feel remarkably seamless, more like patterns in a fabric woven together than individual tracks.
Guest features from Mercury Prize-nominated King Krule and Andrea Balency make a return on ‘The Sunset Violent’, as both formally made an appearance on the 2017 release Love What Survives. Balency’s ethereal and sometimes slacker-esque vocals throughout the album fit the aesthetic movement of the record perfectly, especially present on ‘Dumb Guitar’.
Archie Marshall’s (A.K.A King Krule) performance on ‘Boxing’ and album finale ‘Empty & Silent’ add the seamlessly optimal dialogue dynamic to the krautrock wanderings of the track – soundtracking the disorientated bewilderment through the dystopian pastoral landscape they’re commenting on, and subsequently created for our own experience on ‘The Sunset Violent’.
As a special one-off festival warm-up, Mount Kimbie are playing Leeds’ most recent venue, Project House. NDR are delighted to be in attendance.
At 9:30pm sharp, Dominic Maker, Kai Campos and the ensemble grace the stage to a packed-out Project House. As the dimly lit atmosphere of the venue soaked the eagerly awaiting and enthusiastic crowd, Mount Kimbie’s spacious atmospheres seep from the woodwork and begin to blossom, allowing room for their signature concoction of sonic blends from electronic, krautrock, post-punk and indietronica to manifest.
As Andrea Balency-Béarn takes centre stage, and Dominic Maker and Kai Campos on either side orchestrate the pulsing momentum and nostalgic samples that sparkle the head-popping voyage. Further blending the boundaries between electronic music and the traditional rock band setup, Mount Kimbie have augmented the two together to optimise the full potential of the musical scope, further widening the range of the experimentation.
Textural layers build and evolve from the repetitious heartbeats and shimmering angelic vocal harmonies provide the perfect soundtrack to a dazed journey of fleeting moments in a car that glides through the boroughs of London at night with your head lent against the window. The natural ebb and flow of the tracks twist and coil into a metamorphosis, blending tempo’s and ideas into one another, making it unrecognisable and unfathomable from where we came.
Maker and Campos’s previous ambient house wizardry instigated the essence of the tracks from their extensive sampling archives – sounds reminiscent to Bonobo and PlayStation 2 start-up screens are woven into the pulse of the beats, allowing them to stand not as the centerpiece of the song but rather as a fundamental origin in which that track has blossomed from.
Infectious locked grooves, fluttering synths, jangly guitars amongst hard-tech reverbed pianos that blend within repetitious post-punk cycle channels an ever-evolving momentum keeping you fixated at every second of the voyage. Mount Kimbie are like an internet-aged Hawkwind. Unafraid of repetition, riding the track to where ever it may lead them.
Among all this is a sensibility, a group of friends who genuinely have the most fun being together, crafting songs together and conveying their own experiences in the modern world into an accessible journey for all. It is from this we can understand the playful approach to music making in which Mount Kimbie have adapted into their practice. Whilst having fun and pushing the boundaries of modern music, they maintain a serious and prolific result.
Mount Kimbie continue to further the boundaries of electronic, sequestered in their own whirlpool of musical influences and genres to produce some of the most authentic groundbreaking music in the last decade. The show at Project House was a true testament to their artistic evolution, transcending the boundaries of the genre, offering an experience that was both sonically rich and emotionally resonant, reaffirming their status as pioneers of contemporary music.
Buy ‘The Sunset Violent’ here:
https://mountkimbie.warp.net/
