I have recently been listening to King midas Sound ” Waiting for You“, a lovely record that at times sounds like Maxinquaye era Tricky meets Burial with gluttonous amounts of bass, and the type of album that could only come out on Hyperdub (quite a year for them).
If you read the music press, you will know that the mind behind the music of King Midas is in fact Kevin Martin, aka the Bug, purveyor of heavy heavy pummeling hardness, I usually have a hard time getting through the Bug albums, but King Midas is rivetting.
Listening to the album had me thinking about Kevin and how only a city like London could create such a musician, in fact in this interview he did for XLR8R magazine he talks about how much London has “shaped his musical world”.
I know Kevin from the late eighties, he had an infamous free noise/ jazz hardcore band called God, and I briefly did film projections for their live shows, relentless car crashes, that kind of Ballardian thing to accompany the bruising big band attack that Kevin orchestrated. I moved onto sunnier climes but I’ve been following his career with interest.
London in the late eighties had everything that would form our musical world, we had all the US noise bands coming over and doing amazing shows, mainly the Butthole Surfers, Swans, the first Sonic youth shows, Big Black, and at the same time On-U sound was at its peak, creating the noise dub alliance that noiseniks could dance to. Warehouse raves were everywhere every weekend, mix this up with groundbreaking shows by Sun Ra at ULU, Ornette Coleman, Glenn Branca and you can see where Kevin’s head was at.
Kevin had a record label for a while, Pathalogical Records, full of sonic nastiness, but there was one fantastic, underrated album that he released by Terminal Cheesecake in 1990 called Angels in Pigtails, the groups most fully-realised album that managed to combine full on rock noise, dubby production and Can-like jamming – highly recommended.

For me, it’s interesting to see how that mixture of jazz experimentation, dub and noise turned out 20 years on. There’s also a King Midas mix containing some of their influences to go with the albums release over at Fact Magazine, get it here.

Tags: dub, hyperdub, Kevin Martin, King Midas Sound, noise

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