Martin Schmidt of the US electronic experimental outfit Matmos once said, “If you make a living from your art, that starts to poison it. You can’t help thinking, how can I change this art to make a better living. The obvious answer is that you make it more palatable to more people.” It’s a statement that sums up the conundrum facing any creative person, excepting rich dilettantes, which is why it’s always a pleasure to be confronted by an album such as Black is Beautiful, the third from the duo of Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, who also record as Hype Williams.
The pair have left a trail of surrealist misinformation in their wake (their latest press release, for instance, claims Blunt was recently tried for robbing 16 London taxidermists of their stuffed racoons) and appear to revel in amused, opaque avant-garde-ism. This, in itself, makes them appealing in an age when musical artists are increasingly keen to ingratiate themselves with the media and the hipster-blog gate-keepers of pop. Fortunately, the pair also muster some extraordinarily oddball music that flits between multiple kinds of pop and hazy netherworld electronica.
Black is Beautiful does not have song titles, merely numbers, one to 16 – except track one which is called “(Venice Dreamway)”. It’s a mash-up of beats, electronic echoes and snippets of songs, all blurring into each other in a sonic stew that’s both fascinating to the ear and enjoyably off the wall. “5” sound like Korean pop, heard while half asleep, “9” starts with a disembodied voice slurring “Never look back” for ages and then becomes a catchy song, “10” is a grippingly sinister meltdown of tones and echoing voices, and some numbers are just sound sketches, squiggles and squelches that emanate lively freakishness. Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland are blatantly not chasing cash registers, but following their own warped imagination, and the results are invigorating and a little unhinged.
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