A woozy headrush of thumping beats, fuzz bass and playful found-sound samples, ‘Lowe Sunsmasher’ is the latest brand-new track by Kinbote, the alias of Glasgow-based electronic producer Matt Gibb. It’s taken from his addictive new album Hemisphere, which will be released on April 12th 2024, on streaming services and as a standalone limited-edition zine with digital download, with an option to purchase the zine with a CD copy in addition to the digital download. The follow-up to Kinbote’s wonderful 2020 debut album Shifting Distance – which received acclaim from the Financial Times, The Herald, The Skinny and BBC 6 Music’s Steve Lamacq among others – Hemisphere will be supported with a series of special audio-visual live shows featuring contributions from different filmmakers and visual artists throughout.

“I tried with this song to do a retelling of The Odyssey, but that was maybe a bit ambitious,” says Matt of ‘Lowe Sunsmasher’. “I ended up cutting it down a lot and now it’s more like a series of references to my favourite bits of the story. There are some fun samples in this one, like wind chimes and the sound of rain hitting a snare drum.” 

Matt first started making music solo on Garageband in 2015 and has progressed with the same bedroom pop ethos ever since (he still uses the same spartan home recording setup revolving around a microphone, a laptop and some broken old keyboards). Previously based in Aberdeen, he released an EP each year for five years on Bandcamp while playing shows around the city as part of the now defunct experimental arts collective Re-Analogue. Shifting Distance was Matt’s first record proper under the Kinbote moniker. Constructed around found-sound everyday samples recorded at whim on his phone then chopped-up, warped and manipulated on his laptop, it was released in the long dark lockdown winter of 2020, followed in the summer of 2021 by the lushly kaleidoscopic standalone single ‘GPA’, a collaboration with fellow Scottish underground electronic artist Kiszes.

 Inspired by all from Marc Levinson’s book The Box to the esoteric electronica of artists such as Lusine, Vegyn and Baths, the deliriously dreamlike Hemisphere exists in much the same continuum as Shifting Distance, but finds Matt developing and expanding upon his restless signature sound. Songs are more character focused, and there are contributions from friends, in what he calls an “extension and magnification” of his processes.

“I started carrying a proper Zoom recorder with a stereo microphone around with me everywhere and tried to capture the sounds of locations and moments in my life holistically, with more intention,” Matt explains. “I also eventually decided to lean into more of a vocal-led style, and eschew the instrumentals completely in favour of a more focused sequence of tracks. Then I allowed a few other people into the process for the first time – a bit of drums, guitar and bass from my friends Tom Coull, James Fox and Jeeva Nagra, and mixing the project with professional engineers Owen McAllister and Jolon Yeoman.”

The first five songs are almost entirely synth based, and get steadily noisier and more abrasive as they go on. Constructed using Logic’s built-in synths ‘Repulse’, finds Matt pondering on his fears of getting sucked into the rat race to a feverishly shifting pattern of choppy beat and dirty bass. On the rushing ‘Petrol, Sushi’, live and synth drums are mixed together and digitally manipulated among layers of distorted vocals to create a by turns blissful and explosive track that’s “more impulsive and emotional and less planned out than the rest of the album”.  Hemisphere’s guitar heavier second act opens with the rousingly tender ‘OnoSecond’, a song about the moment misplaced words turn to regret, interspersed with kaleidoscopic excerpts from an old BBC interview featuring Federico Fellini talking about taking acid. Finger-picked arpeggios weave among a fog of woozy time-stretched samples on the plaintive ‘Persephone’, which reflects on being in a long-distance relationship and communicating through video calls.  

The album’s recurring motifs of global commerce, climate change, international travel and the internet unite at the end with self-styled “lo-fi dirge” ‘Drift’, the last track Matt wrote for Hemisphere. “In which I try to synthesise the themes of the album through an extended metaphor,” he explains, “in which little pressed metal signs bearing kitsch, banal aphorisms like ‘change your thoughts and you change your world’ are manufactured and loaded onto a container ship to be eventually unboxed and put up on the wall, destined to have eyes slide off them forever without really reading.”