Ears of 2010, rejoice: it’s been a vintage year for forward thinking electronic music. The past twelve months have furnished us with the swirling melodies of Caribou’s Swim, the joyous clicks n bleeps of Four Tet’s There is Love in You, and a barrage of boundary-pushing bass music from labels like Hyperdub, Hemlock and Night Slugs. Sitting somewhere near the top of this mouth-watering list of are Mount Kimbie – the duo responsible for Crooks & Lovers, one of the most critically-acclaimed albums of the year. The Mount Kimbie sound is a patchwork of influences – crackling electronica, swooning neo-soul echoes and warm, snaking bass lines. Crooks & Lovers is what Massive Attack might have sounded like if instead of immersing themselves in the gloominess of trip hop, they had embraced the restless rhythms of two-step. When I caught up with one half of Mount Kimbie, Dom Maker, the band had just returned from a two week blitz of European dates. “We’ve been playing a few dates with the XX, a big festival called Lowlands in Holland, and a gig that was basically at the base of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. It really surprises me that people know our songs in these places, but it seems to go down really well” said Dom. It’s a feeling that the band are going to have to quickly get used to: they have received fawning praise from the unlikeliest of places. “Our label and press team have done a great job of getting our name out and getting us interviews. But when we got reviewed in The Sun that was just insane” laughs Dom, “I think the fact that the indie crowd have picked up on us as well as the DJs helps too”. There’s no doubt that dubstep started the revolution in electronic bass music that is currently taking place, but having splintered established dance floor genres into a thousand pieces, now only the trace elements of dubstep can be found in the wreckage left behind – a process that Mount Kimbie represent better than anyone else. “Dubstep was the reason we started making music”, said Dom. “We met at university in Brighton and started going to dubstep nights instead of the Fresher’s Week stuff that was on. But our label, Hot Flush, are one of the labels that have just become more and more creative over the years, and that’s given us a great opportunity to develop our own sound.”

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