According to my iTunes playcount, Kuedo’s album Severant has clocked-up over 200 plays. This doesn’t include the many times i’ve listened to it on my iPod out and about or in my car. It may be safe to say that I quite like his music.
Yet believe it or not, I am not some crazed fanatic. Although Jamie Teasdale, the creator of Kuedo, has an impressive back catalogue of dub-step pioneering work when he was one half of Vex’d, I am still yet to sample these wonderments.
Released in 2011, I discovered Severant in Febuary 2012 and have been hooked on permanent loop ever since. It is both low-fi and largely expansive; equally dystopianly bleak and euphorically optimistic. No end of reviews and blogs have referred to the fact that it doesn’t just nod to electro classics such as the Bladerunner soundtrack, and Vangelis, but that it fully swims in its electro-retro glory, and transforms it into something truly forward looking.
Fortunately, just as i’m about to wear my little hard-drive out with such persistent replay, Kuedo has another release on the horizon.
Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space (the title alone conjures images or surreal & geometrically tinged filemic joy) is due out on 25th June. While it certainly has its lovely little fiber-optic fingers hooked back into the ‘Severant’ sound, Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space is a far more electrifying beast.
Kuedo again demonstrates his intricate layering of both analogue and forward-looking, digital synth sounds; each weaving at a thousand, illuminated miles-per-hour into the most syncopated of all electrical plaits. Unlike a lot of ‘Severant’ tracks however, the sounds in the new single do not seem intended to sway you into some eye-rolling, sci-fi ecstasy. Instead they seem to jolt you to right to attention and place your concentration firmly in the middle of some sort of Moroder-esque time-warp (think ‘Forbidden Planet’ rather than ‘Rocky Horror’).
Kuedo is playing Islington Mill tonight. On the same bill is a set by Laurel Halo, recently signed to Hyperdub, who does one of the fantastic remixes on the forthcoming Kuedo single. Her version is more open and ethereal. She adds to the mix whipped-up and spliced strings and creates a sonic space in which she places a heaviness that is achingly intense. I can only imagine the two on the same line-up will make for a fantastically imaginative and luxuriant electronic evening and I shall prepare my ‘Replicant’ look in anticipation.
Additional (getting with the sci-fi vibe): You can read an interview I did with Kuedo in June’s Blankpages
Today I listened to: Kuedo, Austra, Laurel Halo and Alt-J
Today I read: Tis by Frank McCourt
This wasn’t taken today, it was taken a couple of weeks ago in Berlin but I thought it suited Kuedo’s sound so i’m uploading it here.
