Sublime sounds for haunted dancefloors
Who?
Gaunt is the alias of Jack Warne, a former fine art student at the Royal College of Art whose disciplines straddle the musical and visual. Gaunt’s debut album, ‘Blind Since The Age Of Four’, is named after a rare eye condition Warne suffers from known as Thiel-Behnke corneal dystrophy, of which the most extreme outcome is blindness.
Why Gaunt?
Warne’s music seems deliberately unplaceable. His first tracks were heard on Leon Vynehall’s ‘Fabric Presents’ compilation, indicating the pull of the dancefloor, but their structures felt uncomfortably “haunted” (as Warne himself describes them) by something far braver. It might be because they feel unshackled by convention, executed with a carefully constructed skittishness. Imagine Coldcut confessing a deep love for Robert Rauschenberg’s collages. Extending the analogy further, Gaunt’s tracks are like animated videos of those collages viewed through the blocked slits of a broken zoetrope.
Tell Us More…
The album takes its own dizzying approach to extremes. On the one hand, you have tracks like ‘Syncopate’ and ‘Sweet’, both assembled with a beat-driven structure and a presentation somewhere between deconstructed dance music, reconstructed synthpop and modern R&B. ‘UN’ comes across more like a video game theme where the player controls the direction of the track, swerving the myriad left-field interventions that seem hell-bent on disrupting its progress. But at the album’s other extreme lie ‘Memories Talk’, ‘Lesser You’ and ‘Because I’ (featuring a sample of ‘Suspicion’ by 4AD’s Colourbox), each of which is a perfect example of vibrant, uncompromising sprawls inflected with distorted, inverted and interrupted vocals. All in all, inventive and ambitious ideas from the overflowing mind of Jack Warne.
‘Blind Since The Age Of Four’ is out on 3ON
