Saturday, June 28th 2014 // 00:00 // Auditorium S. Domenico
Live
What does weird sound like? Maybe just listen to the collaboration between American James Pants and German Felix Kubin. On the face of it, the duo couldn’t be further apart. Pants is the Stones Throw-approved junkyard beatmaker, a producer that has found favor with artists like Odd Future’s Tyler The Creator. (“He’s awesome, he’s white and he makes real ass nigga music.”) Kubin is self-professed Dadaist with the distinctive bowl haircut and the even more distinctive sci-fi synth pop. Look a bit deeper, though, and the similarities begin to emerge. Dedicated diggers, detritus devotees, the key to their partnership is that they do everything with a straight face – and, naturally, that means what comes out is strange, weird and wonderful. The first fruit of their labor is the Tanzen Blitzen 7-inch for Kubin’s Apolkalypso imprint. Expect much more in the future.
FELIX KUBIN
He seems Russian but he is German, from Hamburg, even if his actual ties with Russia are very strong. Maybe it's because his label is called Gagarin Records, maybe because he organised political artistic interventions for the Dadaistic communist party Ked, or because he composed socialist hymns for children. All in all, the temptation to write Russia next to his name is very strong. A “Bolshevik from the space age”, is how the popular English publication The Wire describes him, someone who lives and works against gravity. His music is bold and immediately attractive, you will see him wriggling and dancing between keyboards and microphones, giving life to a sort of futuristic Dadaistic pop, where electronic music is used like an instrument rather than an end result, and where experimentation blends with humour.
“Humour is essential, it is non-rational cultural communication and brings about much of our background. Humour is a poetic form of philosophy”.
JAMES PANTS
The most important meeting of James Singleton's career happened in 2001, when after the school prom he went to a club to listen to his favourite DJ. James was a musician and brought along a self made demo to give to his mentor; he approached the console, and while handing over his work, he proposed they go out shopping for records together. Peanut Butter Wolf, patron of Stone Throw Records and obsessive vinyl collector, could not resist saying yes. Thus began the fellowship between James Pants, crazy white boy from Spokane, and Stones Throw Records. A meeting that soon becomes what looks like the classic dream come true. In a very short time, the owner of Stones Throw gave Pants his attention, and after an internship he is signed to the label by the esteemed 'godfather'. James Pants's secret is out: his multi-faceted persona makes him a pedigree character in the rhythmic music circuit. An explosion of colours and styles: from mutant disco to new wave, from early vintage rap to electro-boogie, all the way to eighties modern soul.
