Mount Kimbie’s Personal Best

KAI CAMPOS: The first one I picked out was “Maybes”, which was on the first record that we released on Hot Flush and was the first piece of music that we worked on together. It’s a good place to start because it’s when me and Dom met each other.

I’d started the song with this guitar recording that I’d made — which is funny, because the new record is very guitar-heavy, but that instrument has always been around and the first track we ever made was very guitar-heavy in its own way. I just had that loop and Dom was making a film and was going to use the first bit of that — which is the beginning of “Maybes” — for the soundtrack.

We were living in halls in South London and were very interested in the end phase of the dubstep scene in that area. There were a lot of garage influences in that scene, and we were taking in a lot of garage music second or third hand, so the idea of the chopped up vocal technique was very of that era. Once that had become part of the song, it felt like something clicked into place for us, in terms of making sense of where we were and what we were doing.

For the first piece of music that we made together to have the life that it did was obviously really insane, you don’t expect that to happen. For us, even getting a couple of comments on what was then Dubstep Forum was a really big deal and something worth celebrating.

The fact that Dom sent it off to Paul (Rose — founder of Hot Flush) in the first place reflects a key part of our relationship — I would never have thought it was finished enough or good enough to even bother sending it off anywhere. We were just really happy it was released on a label that we listened to and that we saw as a key part of an exciting scene.

BEST FIT: That must be really rewarding, being picked up by someone you actually listened to and a scene you wanted to get involved in. Did you send a polished version of the track at the time?

DOM MAKER: I have a feeling that we sent a handful of songs, maybe three or four, that were probably all unfinished. Paul handled us really well at that time and was a guiding presence that we really needed. We didn’t understand the mechanics of the music industry. He was really instrumental in terms of helping us find our path with it.

Everything was kind of unfinished. We were throwing ideas at things, and that was fine. There was a certain level of naivety because we were so young — we didn’t really care too much.

I guess especially when you first start making music, you’re possibly throwing a lot of things at a wall and seeing what sticks. You can really hear the convergence of a lot of different sounds, and your enthusiasm for that.

DOM MAKER: I think we were excited to have both found someone else we had a shared language within music. It was more like, ‘Fuck, we’ve made something that we both like,’ and we were reveling in that for a really long time.

Were you surprised that it was something you both liked? Did you know you were both coming at it from a similar situation?

DOM MAKER: It was just through experience. I’d grown up with a lot of frustration, that whenever I tried to do music with other people it was a total disaster, in that they wouldn’t be interested in being committed to it at all. There was always an imbalance.

Kai was the first person I’d met who was fully absorbed in making music and was covering himself in music all the time, listening to it, sharing records with me, and all of that.

I think you can hear a lot of that fusion happening on the songs. I think that’s the catalyst for the music on that EP. The fact that it was very different was this collision of all of these ideas, and being careless and free about it.

KAI CAMPOS: This was the first track that we worked on with King Krule. I put this one down because it’s the first time that we had a studio that wasn’t in our kitchen, and it’s the first time that we had the experience of somebody else coming in to work on stuff. It’s the beginning of what would be a really good relationship with Archy.

I distinctly remember having lots of ideas as little loops, Archy recording the first vocal takes and the life that this brought into the studio and into the song, which opened our perspective about what we could do in terms of making music.

We ended up going to another studio down the road called Press Play, which was run by this guy Andy Ramsay, who ended up becoming a big influence. We went there to record some stuff and then Archy would come to those sessions. There’s a big old harmonium there that ended up becoming the second half of the song, and so many lines that come out of that first meeting and those first seconds of working with Archy.

BEST FIT: When you collaborate with other artists, do you already have in mind a close connection between the instrumental work and the lyrics that they bring? Do you give a sense of a brief, or see what comes out of it?

KAI CAMPOS: Normally the way it works for us is for it to go hand in hand. The instrumental will be in a very early stage before anybody starts working on anything. In that way, whatever somebody brings to the very first idea informs your decision-making with the instrumental, so they’re intrinsically linked.

I guess what you’re hoping for is that first moment of somebody bringing something to the table to add to something you’ve started. When it’s good, it opens up this road in front of the song that you didn’t see previously, so you end up with something that’s greater than the idea you would have had, and it’s not entirely the idea that they would have had for it.

Something’s got to come out of that initial moment, hasn’t it? There’s something very specific about that very first time when you’re playing the track together.

KAI CAMPOS: Yes, the flash of possibilities of what you could do, and some level of inspiration that comes from hearing someone engage with it.

With certain chords there’s a million different things you could do over the top, so when someone takes a turn on something it can be really surprising and really engaging. You get to listen to the music in a different way.

DOM MAKER: We started with a sample, the sound that goes through the whole record. Kai came into my little room in the house we were renting in the desert in California, we played through a few bits, and one of the loops that I’d made out there was that particular synth line.

Immediately, it was like, ‘OK, that one’s good’, so he took it into the main studio and played guitar over it, these big, big chords, similar to “Maybes” actually, these massive crashing chords that were really held and had these long feedback sounds, and it was really perfect for the desert. But we never actually committed that to tape or anything.

The vocals took me bloody ages, trying to find a vocal melody or grounding it in was working. Eventually, that spoken word flow at the beginning was the first vocal that we laid down, and it was after that that we got into the B-Section and more chorus-y areas.

It feels really turbulent, that song. It reminds me a lot of the sea, and a lot of that kind of imagery and scenery came out of the instrumental when I was writing the lyrics. It’s quite a chunky song.

KAI CAMPOS: Like “Carbonated”, I think it summarises what we’re doing with the new album in a way, it became a very obvious single when we were looking at that. It neatly gathered a bunch of the ideas that we were exploring throughout the record and put them into a four-minute pop song.

BEST FIT: I know what you mean, like this is where you point to a track and go, ‘This is where you start with this record’. It’s a lot hookier than a lot of the other tracks you’ve put out before, but in a compelling way.

KAI CAMPOS: That’s the hope!

DOM MAKER: Basically, we were trying to make every single bit of it a hook, or at least that’s what we tried to do with the melodies. So, yes, it’s really fat, really chunky. It felt like you could sing along with it.