Bursting onto the scene with their Maybes EP at the start of 2009, Mount Kimbie, the duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos, have developed a truly unique sound whose experimental rhythms lend themselves to the fringes of dubstep, wonky and hip hop, but ooze with emotion and echoing ambient soundscapes that take the listener to an entirely different place.
Both Mount Kimbie EPs Maybes and Sketch On Glass cover a lot of stylistic territory, using pitch-shifted vocals along with electronic and organic tones to create beat-oriented headphone music with the elegaic grandeur of post-rock. Difficult to categorise, the lush EPs caused a commotion when released last year with Sketch On Glass recently undergoing reworks from the likes of Faulty DL, SCB (Scuba's darker techno alias) and their sometime collaborator James Blake. With their own remixes for The Big Pink, The xx and Foals becoming hot property, plus an exclusive Radio 1 Maida Vale session on the Gilles Peterson's show, Mount Kimbie have been a core part of the growing scene in London often associated with a sub-genre perfected by labels like Hyperdub and Hessle Audio.
The duo's debut full-length Crooks & Lovers, released in July 2010, sees them refine the delicate experiments of their first two EPs into a longer, more rounded statement of intent. The result is an album that follows a deliciously free-associative logic, veering wildly between bursts of perfect, fizzing pop, glowing ambience and buzzing UK garage. Certainly Mount Kimbie’s increased use of live samples and instruments lends their newer material an organic, natural sense of pace that exceeds even that of their earlier EPs. If one word succinctly captures the essence of Crooks & Lovers, it's hypnotic. Crooks & Lovers possesses a nervy, haunted feel, a tension that’s only heightened by the fragments of living and breathing reality that lurk just beneath its surface.