Chin-scratching clubtronics hit the spot
Who?
Awkward Moments are Mimi Xu and Gillian Maguire, a London-based duo incorporating immersive art and audiovisual performance with scintillatingly sensual electronics, forming a unique project that places one foot in the rave, the other on the astral plane.
Why Awkward Moments?
Alongside Xu’s club-ready techno productions and Maguire’s sensitivity for emotive vocal soundscapes, Awkward Moments bring a conceptual rigour to everything they do. Drawing on theories of “expanded cinema” and “eternal recurrence”, they offer an outlook best described as the metaphysics of electronic sound. Cue tracks like the ambient glitch of ‘Particles In Motion’, the moody techno of ‘Kinetic Growth’ and the dark, four-to-the-floor ‘METACURSE’. Best of all, their fascination with the existential has blossomed on the pair’s forthcoming album ‘Six Seasons’, which offers a beguiling, ambient electroacoustic investigation of the relationship between humans and nature and namechecks Chaucer, TS Eliot and Nietzsche as inspiration. Xu and Maguire pitch it as “a meditation on our mortality and the limitations of time as we have constructed it”, which is laid bare in the shimmering vocals, twilight piano melodies, and skittish electronics.
Tell Us More…
Awkward Moments are not all high-concept, though. After putting out a dancefloor-ready remix version of their 2022 ‘Life On Venus’ EP, and performing at Fabric and Moth Club in recent months, this summer marks their return to Houghton, the 24/7 dance music festival in North Norfolk. Try finding another outfit making music inspired by some of the most complex environmental and philosophical questions of our age, but whose riotous, cat-suited live electronic sets could start a wildfire.
anton spice
‘Six Seasons’ is out on Entropic Cycles
