Musical magpie keeps it in the family
Who they?
Kincaid is Londoner Joe Arthur who has been blipping on our radar for a while. His genre-hopping adventures for a raft of labels include mashed-up Tackhead-like electro and textural downtempo-ness for Bristol labels Futureboogie and Banoffee Pies respectively, left-field dancefloor bangers on Berlin’s Aeon as well as broken techno for hometown imprint Well Street.
Why Kincaid?
On his new six-tracker, ‘More Good Than Bad’, Joe dons an avant-garde soundscape hat, and a dandy one it is too. Written knee-deep in lockdown, he says that tracks like the frantic, skewed drum ‘n’ bass rhythms of ‘Sudden Shifts In Perspective’ and the deliciously melodic broken ebb and flow of ‘Slowly Breaking Away’ are the sound of “a catharsis with different issues”. A deeply personal work, he also says it offers up “samples of memories featuring family and friends that relate to specific places and moments”. It’s a rich listen for it.
Tell us more…
Well, Joe comes from fine musical stock. His old man is… Blancmange’s Neil Arthur. While father and son are very much ploughing their own musical furrows, there is the same level of like-minded sonic curiosity on show. It makes perfect sense then that they have collaborated. Their adventures as Kincaid Featuring Blancmange are well worth hunting down. There’s the 2019 floorfilling ‘Big Fat Head’ single (on Moscoman’s Disco Halal label) and the 2020 ‘Late For Sum’ mini-album (on Neil’s Blanc Check imprint). The latter collects Joe’s remix work for Blancmange and is topped off by a new piece, the dystopian title track. Insert your own happy families joke in here.
The ‘More Good Than Bad’ EP is released by Grid Records
