The Recommender

When The Recommender discovers a new artist the first thing we do is try and contact them or their label/management to try and uncover some context and ultimately understand them more. It allows us to deliver you a more complete recommendation, rather than just stating “here’s a song, hope you like it“. With today’s discovery we were so bowled over that we immediately reached out to them, but at that same time we still hadn’t quite got back up onto our feet, as the bowling balls this artist was throwing around were explosive. It meant our initial email started out by stating that “We have no idea what to think of this music, but we’re definitely intrigued“. Their response started out with “I don’t know what to make of your opening comment to your reply but I am intrigued“. This was going to be a recommendation that tried to describe the indescribable and they knew it, but most pleasing of all was that intrigue could be found at both ends of this wonderful discovery.

We buzz around the Internet like a busy bee, but one of the most attractive elements to any artist’s music, which will not only have us hovering around but will actually find us diving in for the nectar, is if we think we hear the sound of the future. Any music that pushes boundaries, tests entirely new ideas and that is searching out new frontiers will always get us intrigued, but with the 24 year-old, Leeds-based solo producer, Mykus, he’s operating in such an advanced arena that it’s like he’s operating on the final frontier. His electronic compositions does to pop what DJ Shadow did to hip hop, blending up a billion samples into something fresh and exciting. Like any bedroom producer in the modern age, he’s been known to create delightfully re-imagined remixes. What he does to ballads, such as Nelly Furtado‘s Say It Right and Adele‘s Someone Like You, verges on mutilation, but it also shows us how adept he is at dancing along the lines found between the conscious and unconscious part of your mind, but with both examples they’re chopped up like Gordon Ramsey had got his knives into them in a bad mood. Put an egg in your mixer and it shouldn’t come out looking anything like an egg, right?

However, it’s with his original works that we see the blends being truly mastered. The chopping continues, as he treats samples as pure sounds, dicing them into tiny pieces. Like a lot of great electronic music he also continues to see the value in utilising vocals, often with the German singer, Fruit Shoes (real name Franziska Sandmann). We’re left with something that is both minimal and beautifully well-rounded. His songs have real range, so you could start out with something as gentle as Limey, or again with the tune Carrots, both of which sound like a lullaby that robots would sing to send their offspring to sleep, but with tracks like Pressed Flowers you get a ramped up comedy character sending up some old 70s funk legend. It’s like you’ve tried to describe what Parliament sound like to an alien and they’ve sent that description on an inter-galactic game of Chinese whispers, only for it to be returned to you in a mangled form of it’s original idea. Whatever he tries it always works. In a world swamped with landfill indie and sausage-machined pop here is an artist producing the kind of kaleidoscopic productions that move things magically forwards. If you were floating through deep space’s final frontier, here is someone ready to fire up the engines.

His handy knife work doesn’t just stop at chopping up samples either, as he’s also not afraid to shatter a song into a million pieces mid-way through, which is witnessed inside the track Waxed Cherry, but when he does so he shatters them using Death Star-sized lasers. He’s also known to not just fade a song out, by shooting it off in the kind of space capsule that saw Ripley drift out of view, as songs like this and also the tune, Forbare The Deludable, lose their grip, so just as you think you have them in your hands the songs diffuse in-between your fingers. The genre-hopping continues with Wetter Bet as he breaks up shards of metal guitar work and a mixture of vocal samples that range between what Jabba The Hut would sound like fronting a thrash band and the now familiar Fruit Shoes cute commentary. On some strange, distant alien planet this song is a global hit, imagined as a tune that you would hear were you to ask one of The Vogons what he’s listening to on his iPod.

He told us that curiosity drives him, mentioning an anecdote about how he inherited the family hi-fi as a kid and set about immediately removing the cover to dissect the innards. This is a producer unlimited by rules, but that doesn’t stop him embracing his mischievous side. His ability to pair up real instruments with electronic samples brings us a new style of producer that’s grown up in the age of the analogue and digital switch over. Mykus is able to tap into his imagination like no other artist we’ve recommended before. It explains the intrigue, as this artist seemingly has no idea what to think of his music either, as it’s almost as if he’s channelled it from his sub-conscious. At least now he is able to read our attempt at explaining it. We had a go at the impossible and no doubt fell short, anyone would fall short of pinning down something this ethereally cerebral, but there’s undoubtedly one thing that remains – the intrigue. Play your way through the 25 tunes and remixes currently listed upon his Soundcloud account and you too will be whisked away to a world you don’t understand, but like Neil Armstrong and all the other astronaut pioneers, this trip will resonate within you forever. This is one small step for man but one giant leap for man’s mind. (MB)

MYKUS feat FRUIT SHOES – ELECTRIC FIZZ

MYKUS feat FRUIT SHOES – CARROTS

MYKUS – WAXED CHERRY

MYKUS – FORBARE THE DELUDABLE