Tone Glow 134: Mount Kimbie
An interview with the UK group about the MS-20 synthesizer, not feeling at home in the club, and the evolution of their songcraft
Mount Kimbie is a band from London, UK. From the 2009 Maybes EP through 2017’s Love What Survives, it was comprised of Kai Campos and Dom Maker, who blended DAW alchemy, post-punk electronics, and analog warmth into a signature sound which stood alone amidst, and ultimately outlived, the “future garage” era. Of late, the duo has expanded to a quartet, with Marc Pell and Andrea Balency-Béarn joining for the forthcoming The Sunset Violent (out April 5th via Warp). Too slippery for the reductive label of “guitar album,” the record—conceptualized in Maker’s then-home of Southern California before being finished in London—is best described as a magnification of, or meditation upon, a foundational element of the Mount Kimbie formula; one that’s been present since the opening chords of “Maybes.”
I spoke to Kai and Dom across a seven-hour time difference over Zoom on February 28th, as they geared up for the album’s release and a tour that will take them to a dozen different countries by the end of the summer. Fittingly, for as wide-ranging as the conversation was, we kept returning to the idea of internal consistency—a core identity which, while expressed variously in different scenarios, never fully surrenders to expectation.
Corrigan Blanchfield: North London and LA are, uh, pretty divergent locales—ought I to read into your respective personalities from that?
Dom Maker: I think it’s just a change of scenery. The reason I moved over there is that my wife is from LA. She wasn’t my wife when I moved, but I followed her back home when she returned from her travels in Europe. I’ve actually just moved back to London, but LA was good! I enjoyed a lot of it. The biggest change for me was not being able to get on the bus or the train or anything, it’s so car-heavy. That took a bit of getting used to, but it was an experience, man. California was fun.
Where in the UK did you grow up?
Kai Campos: I’m from a county which is called Cornwall, and it’s a pretty unique area of the UK. It’s the very most southwesterly bit. As you get further down the country, the roads get windier and windier, so it just takes ages to get there. It’s quite isolated from the rest of the UK, in quite a lot of ways, physically and culturally. There’s lots of beaches around the coast, then lots of farmland in the middle, basically. There used to be a lot of mining industry there—they would mine for copper and tin and I don’t know what else—and then all of that’s kind of gone in the last fifty years or so. It’s kind of a weird place, where it’s a holiday destination for some people in the UK and there are some really expensive parts of it, but it’s also quite desolate in other parts. I left when I was 18, pretty much as soon as I could, but I did love growing up there as well. I was right on the South Coast, in one of the larger towns.
Dom Maker: I’m from the South Coast as well, but not southwest—I’m sort of directly south of London. I was born in a town called Chichester, which is a small little Roman market town. And yeah, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there (laughter).
Were there any musical traditions specific to the region?
Dom Maker: I think we probably had a similar kind of situation, where there wasn’t a lot going on where we were, and it was a lot of tuning into what was coming out of the major cities. The nearest place for me was Brighton, and that was, to us back then, the big city. But it’s just a really, really small place, it’s nothing compared to London. Music taste-wise, it’d be anything transmitted out of those major hubs. The scene around me was just little bands, playing in music halls and stuff.
Kai Campos: In Cornwall, quite a lot of music gets made. The internet existed when I lived there, but it wasn’t the same thing at all, obviously. This is up until 2003, I guess. The way that stuff even reached Cornwall was different back then. Cornwall was known in the past for having a big “free party” scene—that’s, like, “illegal rave,” not sure if it translates the same way. I kind of missed it; it still goes on but it’s not as much as it was in the past. But Aphex Twin is from Cornwall, and there is a scene around that kind of stuff. So there were always people in school making music, but my generation was the one where people started listening to the same thing. Like, the nu metal phase of Cornwall was probably something that regional towns across the whole country were going through.
Dom Maker: I didn’t have much sources that I could really go and tap into; it was more like, I’d hear some of the bigger grime tunes that would come out of London. I think I remember hearing More Fire Crew and Lethal Bizzle when I was really young. I didn’t really know what that kind of music was, but it was exciting. It would be a situation where some friends would burn CDs for me—there were a couple of people in my friend group that were really, really into music. At the time, I was into music, but I was concentrating on skating and film; I was trying to make skate films.
It wasn’t skateboarding, I skated, like, rollerblading at skate parks. Inline skating. I did that for probably ten years when I was a kid, I absolutely loved it and I was always doing it. Filming my friends and I skate was a huge thing, and editing to sound and stuff like that. That actually got me interested in music. And that was weird, looking back, because I’d find out about music through skate films, really. And I wouldn’t either have the means or the interest in looking deeper into anyone’s discography, but I’d find tunes that I really liked. I remember The Faint—I heard them for the first time in a skate film. Black Heart Procession and stuff like that, all of it from the States as well. It was mainly from California or the East Coast. Skating was kind of a niche thing that was just my own, as in the area I lived in there was hardly anyone who bladed. It was a way of expression, and that sort of interest in sound and image has always been in me since then.
In the course of moving back from LA, I actually found the two CDs I was thinking of—one of them was the Strokes record Is This It (2001), and the other one was this weird grime compilation that my mate Kit had made me. But music really took over all of my interest about halfway through my studies—I was studying film.
How much input have either of you sought on the visual component of Mount Kimbie’s music?
Dom Maker: We’ve been really fortunate with the quality and the genius of the people we’ve been able to work with on the visual stuff. I mean, the first record, Crooks & Lovers (2010) with Tyrone Lebon—we were basically working with people where it would feel wrong for us to give any sort of direction whatsoever. It was more like “wow, okay—that’s what you’re seeing? Sweet, that’s not what I expected.” And then a week later—“wow, this is fucking amazing.” We kind of accidentally arrive at these situations by just being there to catch ‘em when they come. And if we’re not working with Tyrone or Frank Lebon, outside of that, like on the new record, we love the artwork by T-Bone Fletcher. Really, Frank and T have connected us with lots of amazingly talented videographers and artists in general. It’s always like a little web around them, mainly. But our input is… I think we’re starting to be a bit more interested in the output, visually, from the band.
Kai Campos: There’s actually parallels to how we approach making an album in that you’re just trying to set up a situation in which good stuff is happening, and not predetermine what the shape of something is. Let that start to emerge from its own, because generally I think there’s a higher ceiling to that than having an idea before we go in. So with that visual side of it, it’s just having conversations with the people who are working on it—you can have a chat with somebody that doesn’t really lead to any focused direction or instruction about what you’re looking for, but just creating a world in which things make sense and being able to pick through it.
How’d you transition to creating your own music?
Dom Maker: The best thing was moving to London, from that kind of situation where there just weren’t too many people that were interested in shit that I was interested in. So moving to London immediately was just insane. We both met really early on, actually—I think it had been maybe a week or two since I had moved up, and Kai had just moved up as well. We had a mutual friend who I was living with in the student accommodation, and we just went from there. Started talking music and realized that there was a lot of sounds that we were both interested in. And then I found out that Kai actually made music—I didn’t know anything about home recording, or FruityLoops, or any of the software. It was really exciting to suddenly be around people who were actually active and doing stuff, finding new things to do with music and art in general.
Kai Campos: Yeah, so I’d been in Cornwall playing drums for one band for quite a long time. Well, I say “quite a long time”—it was probably like two years, but at the time it seemed like forever, right? I actually had a very good music teacher who was very enthusiastic about showing me how to use different bits of equipment. I kind of lost interest in playing the drums in other peoples’ bands when she showed me how to record multi-track. When I found that you could rewind the tape and just record over what you’d done before, that was the big lightbulb moment—I’m like, okay, I can just do it all myself. So I kind of stopped getting better at any instruments at that point, and just got more interested in recording. That was the starting point, and even then the computers we were using weren’t really… you could do stuff on them, but in terms of recording lots of audio, they weren’t super capable.
There was a magazine called Muzik in the UK at the time, which was really informative, and that was my first window into dance music, along with certain radio shows like Gilles Peterson and John Peel, and then slightly later Benji B, all on [BBC] Radio 1. Then I somehow stumbled across FruityLoops online and spent quite a lot of years making a wide range of electronic music. By the time I met Dom, I was making shitloads of it, mostly on software. I’d also kind of bought a bunch of hardware and sold it, gotten computers and gear, gear and computers, even from 16 onwards.
Like I said, the computers weren’t so powerful then, so I learned how to use hardware before I got really comfortable with computers. It was actually so much more accessible, weirdly enough, and then there was just that period of time where everything got more powerful and cheaper, and we just got more options.
I assume your production processes, environments, mindsets have evolved over time.
Kai Campos: Sure, we definitely went through a big period of really boring analog purism, you know? And then kind of getting past that… I just don’t think that you need that many analog synths in your life. Like, one’s probably good, and that should probably be the MS-20. After that, most interesting things have some element of digital nature to them. So that was one switch, and the other big thing that’s changed is how much I enjoy working on an actual mixing desk now, as opposed to… [I’m] just trying to move the focus away from the screen as much as possible, really, and constantly finding ways to trick myself into not over-analyzing what’s going on.
What do you like about the MS-20?
Kai Campos: Um, I don’t know. I’ve got an emotional attachment to it because it was the first synth that I really saw in the wild, so raw and gnarly. The combination of the filters just does something (laughs). What else do I love about it? I don’t know, I think it’s really well laid out in design; if you want to get into the patch bay, there’s lots of fun stuff. The fact that there’s a keyboard attached, that you can detune the second oscillator is something else… that’s probably responsible for quite a lot of music.
A sort of through line that’s stood out to me about the Mount Kimbie catalog is that there always seems to be a bass guitar—or a synth played like a bass guitar—leading the song along.
Kai Campos: Yeah, the kind of dance music or club music focus on the low-end was always a complete mystery to me. There was times when I really wanted to have a handle on it, but I still don’t really know how to use it well, mix it well, or anything like that. Quite a lot of our early music just doesn’t have any kind of bass element to it whatsoever, it’s really all midrange. You’d occasionally hear our stuff out, and it’d sound so small compared to other peers of ours that were really focused on the engineering side of that.
Were you thinking in terms of dance music, necessarily?
Dom Maker: We definitely didn’t feel aligned to any particular genre, necessarily, though early on dubstep was the thing we liked to listen to. We used to go out and find nights where that was going on—we were attracted by the physicality of the music, it was very exciting and kind of minimal, in a lot of ways.
Kai Campos: And it was open as well; it’s a genre where you’ll hear so many different types of things going on in one evening. I think we were really flattered that we were just on the very edges of the scene that we were into—Hotflush was the label within that that was interested in putting our music out, so we probably, at the time, wanted to feel like a part of that in some way. We’d have thought of it as kind of quirky dance music.
I was wondering about your approach dealing with a vocal sample or a guest appearance as opposed to recording your own singing.
Dom Maker: The new record, we’re really pushing all of it in on vocals, and having a vocal up front and center. And also, we’ve had experience with featured vocals before. Kai sang on the first EP we ever did, actually, and I’ve sung on a few bits—there’s always been our voices in there, but more recently we’ve definitely stepped away from any of the sampled vocals and such. Chopping up vocals was something that we were really kind of intrigued by when we were younger, but at the moment we’re making songs that… we’re focusing a lot on the songwriting, and a lot of that starts with guitar and vocal.
I think I find your discography a little more coherent than it’s sometimes received—kind of an oscillation along a spectrum between two styles, but they’re both always present.
Kai Campos: It’s not something that we’ve ever discussed, like, “we should really show people the other side of us.” (laughter). But at the same time, for me there’s always frustrations at some point after the work’s done. When you finish something, you start… not necessarily picking the faults in it, but the really exciting thing is that you really think you’re onto something. And that’s great—that’s how you get work done—but it inevitably lets you down in the end. And that’s totally fine, it’s kind of inevitable, but it’s never the final answer to everything. And that keeps you going; obviously you want to keep on exploring.
So you’re always in conversation, in some way, with the last big statement you made as an album. With the first one going into the second, that was the only time that I feel negatively in some ways about how I reacted to that. When I look back at the first record, the thing that annoyed me about it was the kind of skittish element to it, the really fleeting… I didn’t really see it as a stylistic thing, which it was, or see the positives of it; I just saw this inability to really commit to an idea and flesh it out further. I approached the second record in an overly earnest, po-faced way, and some of the songs aren’t very fun because of that.
A lot of it’s also, as I’ve got old, trying to remove any bits of the creative process that aren’t really coming from a good creative place. You obviously want people to like it, but trying to remove as much ego as possible from the process. In terms of stylistically, though, I think it’s inevitable that you become interested in the thing that you didn’t do, and that’s what keeps us going. But you can’t help that it still sounds like you, which is interesting, because you don’t really know what that thing is that sounds like you across different sounds and instruments.
You’re not ones to revisit your prior work, then?
Kai Campos: Not really, not with a casual sense of “this’ll be fun to put on.” (laughter).
Dom Maker: Oh yeah, I’m the same. But I will say, I’ve been listening a lot to the new record. It’s just really enjoyable, the new one, but I don’t make a habit of listening back.
Where were you looking for guidance on production techniques at the time?
Kai Campos: At that time, there was no YouTube—people love saying that, “there was no YouTube.” (laughter). So I make music on FruityLoops—I don’t know if you know the program, but you kind of drop these sounds into the side, and you’ve got this sequencer that runs alongside. You open the piano roll and it gives you the whole range of notes, and you can draw in what notes you’re playing. I didn’t know that was there for such a long time, and I made two years’ worth of music where I thought the only way to change the pitch of something was to make a copy of it and shift the pitch knob. You could get about two or three semitones up or down, so all of the music never moved more than two or three semitones, it was kind of crazy.
Dom Maker: You must’ve lost your mind when you found that.
Kai Campos: I did, I actually remember how excited I got. Ho-ly shit, all the notes! (laughter).
We’re really good friends with this guy Alex Cameron, who’s a songwriter in his own right. We’ve known him for yonks, he was in a band that was kind of adjacent to Mount Kimbie in style and sound. A long time ago, he stopped doing that to start his own solo career, which was very different—quite a bold change, I thought. At the time, I didn’t instantly get what he was doing—the demos were very classic-sounding stuff. I got more and more into it, and I remember having dinner with him, and him saying that he was just trying to write music that if somebody in the restaurant gave him a piano or guitar, he could play it and people would understand what he was trying to do. That being a goal—I think about that from time to time.
But anyway, his songs in general—and his songwriting, and the friendship with him—has been an influence on me. Because I also mixed one of his albums—the finished product sounds relatively simple, but seeing all of the small detail that goes into making a pop song work better than another one. Within that is some kind of mysterious “good stuff” as well—you can’t necessarily learn it all. And also, just the fact that we hadn’t written with that in mind, or in that way, just makes it fun to do. Because you’re learning, and then you have these little moments of improvement. It’s a rule that doesn’t need to be followed, but it’s something to think about—is there a simpler way to convey this? Is this the most direct way that I can put this across, or am I trying to shield the lack of idea, the lack of honest expression, with a bunch of other things? When I listen back to electronic music that I really liked when I was a teenager, some of it ages well and some of it doesn’t, and I think generally the stuff that was all about technique just sounds really old. That stuff’s great, but it’s what’s behind all of that that sounds good.
What are some examples that you think have aged well?
Kai Campos: Oh, man. All the music. A lot of it’s really influential, it just sounds like shit now. Two records that were really fundamental, and changed the way I thought about making music, but still sound really good, are The Unseen (2000) by Quasimoto, or Madlib, and also The Glow Pt. 2 (2001) by The Microphones. Those were foundational records; Mount Kimbie has some DNA in the origin there. They just really hold up to me—obviously it’s a really personal thing, some people would not hear that as well.
Dom Maker: Me and Kim, my partner, we had a little road trip the other day and were going back and forth with the AUX cable, listening through old stuff. Like Blood Orange’s first band, Test Icicles, which I went nuts for. Stuff like The Klaxons, and shit like that. It didn’t hit in the same way that it did when we were younger, obviously, but some of it… The Strokes have always stood the test of time for me. I was really into that kind of indie scene—Bloc Party, Futureheads, that kind of music—and a lot of that stuff doesn’t really hit for me as it did back then. But I think someone like Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, his vocals and melodies are so undeniably infectious that they’re going to stand the test of time.
Kai Campos: I just thought of two records that came out in 2003 as well that I think are all-time greats, which is the first Dizzee Rascal album and the first album from The Streets. Those were game-changers across the board, and still sound really alive, I think.
That’s what’s interesting: the stuff that your relationship with changes, or that one day reappears.
Dom Maker: Yeah, I mean shit I watched American Beauty (1999) the other day. Oh my god, that was fucking hard to watch. When I was a kid I used to think that was such a great movie, but it was excruciating to watch. But yeah, just changes isn’t it—that’s just gettin’ a bit older and appreciating things. They all served a purpose and had their time for me.
Do you find dealing with someone else’s work for a mix or mastering assignment to be easier than putting your own through the same process?
Kai Campos: I’ve mixed one album and a couple other little bits and pieces. They’re difficult in different ways—I actually, when I was working on Alex’s record, felt so much responsibility for it. I felt like the music was really great and I just didn’t want to fuck it up. Which I think held me back quite a lot, but I don’t know if I just had the inexperience of doing it. But I, at times, enjoyed the process more than working on the finishing touches of our stuff. You do have that distance, but there was also that really big sense of responsibility as well, which obviously… it doesn’t feel the same as ours, where you’re a bit more open to trying stuff. There’s a time limit thing as well, and I didn’t know what I was doing, so that made it quite stressful.
I’d like to do more of it to be honest—you get to understand the music in a completely different way, I’m not sure that there’s another way that you could get inside it as well. It does bother me a little bit if I hear the stuff that I’ve mixed next to something else that’s on the radio and the vocals just pop so much more—I’m like “oh, I really hope that shouldn’t have been someone else doing that job.” But at the end of the day, it’s just a record, and it’s not like it sounds dreadful. There’s just a lot to learn, always.
You mentioned that Alex’s work with Seekae was Mount Kimbie adjacent—in musical friendships, have you found that you generally get along best with similar-sounding artists?
Dom Maker: I don’t think either of us have ever been that plugged into any particular scene. Usually, what would happen is we’d meet bands or artists on the big summer circuit—going around Europe on different festivals, you’d meet so-and-so at that festival, you’ll see ‘em in Croatia on Friday evening and then you’ll see ‘em in Lisbon on the Sunday. We’re all just exhausted, traveling around playing shows. But there’s a few people that we keep close to us, King Krule is one of them. That whole band, we know very well. Alex, of course. And then people we’ve supported—Caribou, we’ve supported The xx, people like that. But in terms of friendships, we’re not out there all the time like those guys.
Kai Campos: I think everyone’s kind of doing the same thing, really—music sounds different because you’ve got different reference points, different upbringings, you’re coming from different directions and different places, but essentially when you speak to people about what we’re all doing, everyone understands what you’re doing is kind of similar.
Some of my fondest memories of the camaraderie of the whole thing are from this festival in Australia called Laneways. That was a pretty broad lineup—us and Earl Sweatshirt and King Krule and Savages. It was yonks ago, 2014 maybe? And it was a festival in Australia that goes across the country, and then to New Zealand and stuff, and actually Singapore as well. And it’s the same lineup, so on the first one it’s the normal festival situation of, like, “oh look, there’s that fucking band, those guys fucking suck.” Everyone’s just saying that about each other, peering into each other’s shit (laughter). And then by the end of it, everyone’s just getting along—it was a funny situation, it felt like a little camp or circus, traveling across the country.
But yeah, quite often you don’t have that time, so you just kind of bitch about how the other bands suck (laughter). With some exception, but if you spend enough time really digging into what somebody’s about, you’re going to end up liking what they’re doing. Just choose what you want to focus on, and what you have time to fully understand.
I know you had both mentioned some amount of isolation in your hometown, and James Blake wrote later on about having been quite lonely—would you say that was typical of the broader scene or era of the future garage stuff?
Dom Maker: I think he’s probably referring to that really early time when, yeah, we were all very beginning of the career. It was kind of like, I remember James used to run a night at his college at Goldsmiths, it was us DJing and then Distance was DJing. Sometimes it definitely was like that—we were kind of on the fringes of it all the time, it didn’t really feel like we were plugged in. So it was kind of a bit like “oh… yeah.” I can imagine him feeling like that.
Kai Campos: It never really bothered me that we were kind of outside of it, because at that point we were in club land, to a certain extent. But we really hadn’t grown up in it, and it wasn’t… the music I was really excited by, but even on a social level I found the clubbing experience to be something that wasn’t super natural. I never felt like “oh, finally I’m home,” which is how a lot of people describe it. This euphoric sense of belonging and stuff like that. We never really came from that, so we were always kind of in it, but not “in it” in the same way.
I almost don’t understand some level of it, and I feel like you can’t write music well for that environment if you don’t get it. Maybe it was something to do with growing up in Cornwall, but that never really seemed odd to me at all, that we were just doing it without a sense of community around it. Obviously, we were able to harness the power of the internet to at least get it to enough people that it felt like you were reaching someone. Obviously that would be a different experience thirty years ago, but I don’t know if it would bother me or not.
What’s the off-album lifestyle like for you guys?
Kai Campos: It changes, there isn’t a natural… obviously the tour comes afterwards, and then sometimes that period of making an album, plus the tour, that can be like four years. By the time you’ve got through that, every time that’s happened we’ve been in a slightly different phase of our lives. The one in between the last record and this has been a long period of time, and I was quite happy to be doing absolutely nothing after we finished touring. I didn’t feel the desire to get back to it, I was very happy to not really be working for a bit. And then that just goes until it starts making you a bit sad (laughter). But yeah, I’m probably a little bit too comfortable doing absolutely nothing. I never understand people who say if they won the lottery they’d carry on going back to their job; I could quite happily amble around and play tennis, do other shit that I might be interested in. Get slightly better at soldering stuff, build a shed and stuff like that. But yeah, dunno—what do you do, Dom?
Dom Maker: (laughs). Always something to do with sport, I went back skating for a long time when I was back in LA. I just try to stay busy; there was a shitload of productions to be done in LA for other artists, which was really fun, so I had that to preoccupy me. But I always pick up something new—I love playing poker, I love playing tennis, I love skating, I love loads of random shit. So yeah, just trying to find something that keeps you happy.
Sure, the idle hours are never really “idle”—you’re just not at your job.
Dom Maker: It’s also a really important time for us, because we get to enjoy just having our friends and our family and stuff like that. Because for a long time, you’re just gone—you don’t see anyone. You’re not plugged in in that way, and so you skip a lot of life in this kind of game.
Kai Campos: Yeah, and it’s always a bit of cleaning up your mess as well, after a few years just fucking around the world.
How so?
Kai Campos: Not literally, I mean (laughs). But it always seems like you make an album and then you have to move house, you finish touring and your fuckin’ lease is up. You’ve got to move to a different part of London and get a cat, get a full health check. Figure out “oh, is that what a lot of people my age are doing now?” (laughter). Maybe that would bring me some fulfillment. Figure out where you’re at mentally, and physically, health-wise, just a bit of a check-in. Because sometimes you have to run it into the red when you’re doing all that stuff. Especially when you’re younger, it doesn’t really hit you that hard, so you can go quite far depriving yourself of things like sleep and nutrition. And that whole period kind of freezes you in time a little bit, so when you get spat out the other end of it, you’re trying to catch up. Because you’ve just been held in this kind of suspension of time, where you’re slightly artificial, you know?
Mount Kimbie’s new album, The Sunset Violent, can be purchased at Bandcamp and the Warp website. More of the group’s music can be found at their Bandcamp page.
Thank you for reading the 134th issue of Tone Glow. “Ah, how inadequate these words seem.”
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