Rhythmically minded genre flitting
Who they?
Lumpen Nobleman is the alias of Scotland-born, Kent-based Kyle McCallum. As well as making music as Lumpen Nobleman (a parody of Karl Marx’s lumpenproletariat), McCallum runs the Extra Normal label, founded Ramsgate’s Contra Pop Festival, and hosts the eclectic Vacant World show on Neon Hospice Radio.
Why Lumpen Nobleman?
McCallum’s sonic adventures began making rudimentary songs using the SNES’ ‘Mario Paint’ cartridge. The limitations of those formative experiences can be heard in his anything-goes approach to making electronic music – covert mash-ups, tracks made with random percussion instruments and even guitar pop songs have a place in the Lumpen Nobleman universe. His debut album, 2011’s ‘Grusha’, was a hypothetical soundtrack, taking hackneyed IDM/grime reference points and bending them into a complex, turbulent soundscape. A trace of wry humour can be found in McCallum’s work, exemplified by the track ‘Reviewers Are Lazy When They Compare Ambient Music To Eno In 2019, Or Musicians Are Lazy When They Make Things That Sound Like Eno In 2019, Or Both’ from last year’s ‘DHD/SNL/ENO’.
Tell us more…
Forever flying in the face of convention, the new Lumpen Nobleman album, ‘Errors & Remedies’, consists of four tracks created using processed pre-set rhythms. These “errors” veer from ubiquitous Latin percussion to hyperactive electro to drum ’n’ bass and crisp electronic pop, offset by obscure, covert samples and irrepressible melodies. The tracks were then “remedied” by a range of artists, including Adrian Sherwood, Helena Calle, Manu Louis and Sad Man, each one isolating the suppressed wonky character of the originals and turning that up to 11 in their own distinctive, disrupting ways.
