A PRETTY, chopping, sampled sound source lays the foundation stone; a soft shuffle of percussion dovetails, and we see Matt Gibb, aka Kinbote, walking wistfully through the dunes; he’s very well turned out in trad tweed and tie
“I’ll go walking in the winter, I’ll go walking in the winter / If you want I’ll go with her,” he sings. A female voice soothes; found sound layers in. It’s two and a half minutes of calm and poised quirky electronic sample-pop bliss.
“Hiemalis” is the first release by Matt under the Kinbote moniker. He’s signed to Lost Map Records, the lovely imprint based on the Scottish island of Eigg and run by The Pictish Trail’s Johnny Lynch. It’s a project for his rather fine line in enchanting and low-key glitch-pop; and it’s a trailer for his debut album for Lost Map, Shifting Distance, which will be available on digital and CD-R formats on December 4th.
Matt says “Hiemalis” is a song about “gaining perspective on events that seemed inconvenient or frustrating at the time, but I can now accept as valuable.”
Inspired partly by Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, an episodic novel of loss over time, the song also features deft percussion fashioned from samples of Matt walking through a forest, leaves and sticks crunching and snapping under his feet. It’s cute and should definitely appeal to fans of Type and City Centre Offices ‘tronica.
“I started doing music solo on Garageband in 2015 and I’ve progressed with the same DIY ethos since then,” he says. He’s been self-releasing for five years, putting out an EP a year on Bandcamp and playing shows in Aberdeen before relocating to Glasgow.
“I was involved with the (now defunct) Aberdeen arts collective Re-Analogue as a founding member during uni,” he says.
“We put on a lot of shows with spoken word artists and musicians and put out a zine and a mixtape.”
Shifting Distance is Matt’s first album as Kinbote. He explains the stripped-down set-up he used for the recording: “I made the entire album and all my previous music with the same setup; a microphone, my laptop and a broken Yamaha keyboard I got from a charity shop – so it’s very ‘bedroom pop’!”
“A lot of elements of the beats, sounds and textures are self-recorded samples which I record on my phone and then edit on my laptop.
“My main influences are Blithe Field, The Books, Baths, Fog, Katie Dey, Alex G, Trust Fund and Why?”
“Hiemalis” is featured as part of Lost Map’s monthly subscription service, the PostMap Club, for this month; this lovely little packaged missive also includes an exclusive bonus track in a cover of Yellow Magic Orchestra member Haruomi Hosono’s “Sports Men”.
Watch out for news of how to order Kinbote’s Shifting Distance over at Lost Map; you can follow Kinbote on Bandcamp, Instagram and Twitter.
