LuckyMe Festival 2011

CUBIC ZIRCONIA

Barely thirty seconds have passed since the start of the video interview and I'm already making excuses for Nick Hook. Maybe his washing machine is busted? New York must be hot today. Are we on Chat Roulette?

I'm still trying to process how the Cubic Zirconia DJ/producer (who also plays synthesiser for L-Vis 1990, Drop The Lime and El-P) has come to be naked when he suddenly cuts the video feed having reasoned that "it might get a little creepy". I begin to regret having embarrased Hook into reverting to another talk on Skype that is now both sexless and impersonal; more's the pity, because Cubic Zirconia make music that is anything but these things.

When pressed, Hook describes them as a "punk rock band with 808s and soul vocals," though he gives insufficient credit to the band's unique interplay of the hypnagogic and the percussive. "We knew that we wanted to be a band. I love DJing, but there's a sense of explosiveness that only a band can have. There's some magic when a band's clicking and playing really hard."

The punk aesthetic rings true of Fuck Work, a "one-take joke" glazed thick with pulsing acid basslines and Tiombe Lockhart's sleepy, monotone whisper. It's sloppy and half-arsed, but it overcomes its own simplicity because it's fun, if only by virtue of not being a three-chord, Vivian Girls clusterfuck. Given Hook's pre-music CV, Fuck Work largely wrote itself. "My first job was as a potwasher at a Jewish country club. I used to work with this Russian dude and I used to tell him to suck my dick all day. We used to terrorise this forty-five year old dishwasher and spray him with the hose, and he would scream at us so loud that every single person in the restaurant would stop. Once we stopped pissing ourselves laughing,” he adds, "we turned the lights off when he took a shit."

CLAUDE SPEEED

Claude Speeed has played in numerous post-rock bands making "asexual white music" for over a decade. As his own dismissive description infers, he wasn't particularly fussed by any of them, American Men and RUSSIA (the band that effectively begat American Men) excepted. His second gig with Degrassi summed up the ‘punk attitude’ that prevailed for much of his teenage years.

"An A&R guy came to see our second gig and he was like 'Guys that was great, can we have a drink?', and I'm thinking 'some dickhead label guy'. He sat down and said 'your sound's brilliant, but you're a bit shouty', so I immediately told him to fuck off. He'd flown from London to see us. He was really nice, and I was a total dick thinking I was some sort of punk skinhead Fugazi fan. That was the story of that band: we had quite a few opportunities and we told everyone to fuck off all the time."

Cool World, American Men's debut EP of last year (they've added Laeto drummer Robbie Cooper and Eunoia's Steven Shade, aka John Awesome, to the original trio), is replete with staggered time changes and 80s sci-fi synthesisers, something inspired in part by Speeed's exclusive affinity for computer music. "I really hated music when I was a kid, because all of the music that was around I really, really disliked, and I mistook that for not liking music at all. The only music I listened to was on video games. My dad was kind of a computer hacker, and he used to get boxes of floppy discs. I used to go through them and just listen to the intro music."

Since forming American Men, the band has effected a change in Speeed, who admits to having been a "dogmatic" musician. "I used to be the kinda guy who played a gig and not care if people liked it, and that's just stupid. A lot of the post-rock thing is like that, watching bands where they're not even looking at the audience. It's really rude that they dont give a shit. Now, I really want people to engage, and I really want them to enjoy it and have fun and like it. That's distinct from pandering to people, or saying 'I just want to make people happy' which is quite a thin, shallow thing to do."

MACHINEDRUM

Travis Stewart's kaleidoscopic influences of early Warp and Ninja Tune, jungle, house, Chicago footwork and hip-hop accumulated whilst growing up "surrounded by NASCAR fans and guys with shotguns on their porches" in North Carolina. One of the paradoxes is that these influences are amalgamated into a transcendent whole which is identifiably his own whilst seemingly remaining forever in flux. His latest LP, Room(s), sits restlessly on this continuum, which mostly orbits the avant-garde hip-hop spheres beloved by Stewart. "I've always been drawn to urban music or anything that has that raw flavour, because there really is nothing like it. If anything, I wish that I could be part of it, and it's my way of expressing that."

Stewart had, in fact, moved from North Carolina to New York (he now lives in Berlin) to produce for hip-hop artists, but encountered a pervading alpha-male attitude amongst the rappers and vocalists he worked with. "They mainly proliferate this message that you gotta make money, you gotta be the king, the top of the rap game, the leader of the movement, the innovator...they'll start writing lyrics based on this mentality, and it fuels this [attitude] more and more – the more that they're saying or rapping it, they're subconsciously adhering to the message that they're putting out there."

Having long since extricated himself from the swinging dick culture of contemporary hip-hop, Machinedrum's output resembles the genre – and many others that he draws from – only in the abstract. Room(s)' Escheresque sleeve and stated concept of "one large room, containing many smaller rooms" reinforces the point: a self-contained world of distinctive songs and styles, hopelessly entangled in the thicket of Machinedrum's idiosyncratic sonic filter.