Kinbote: Hemisphere track-by-track

This Friday (12 Apr) sees the release of Hemisphere, the second album from Glasgow-based electronic producer Matt Gibb as Kinbote. Coming out via Lost Map Records, a lot of the album was home-recorded with not much more than a microphone, laptop and some broken old keyboards. But Hemisphere sees Gibb involving others in the process for the first time – drums, guitar and bass from Tom Coull, James Fox and Jeeva Nagra, with the record mixed by Owen McAllister and Jolon Yeoman – making for an album that's crisp and rich in production, piquing interest regularly over the course of its ten tracks.

Hemisphere is set for release via streaming services this Friday, as well as via a standalone limited edition zine with digital download. Gibb is also planning to release a music video for each track that will combine into a visual album, set for its premiere at The Glad Cafe on Sunday 14 April. With all of this in mind, ahead of its release, Gibb has kindly talked us through Hemisphere track-by-track and video-by-video.

Rotate
The idea for this song came from living in Copenhagen and doing a lot of cycling, and a lot of drinking, and combining the two in a way that was sometimes dangerous. The narrative is about a couple who are on a pub crawl, cycling between bars, and have a big argument, the perspective switching between them as they litigate their relationship. The hi-hats in this song are intended to sound like the spokes of a wheel, and the beat to sound propulsive, like a drunken late-night bike ride.

The video for Rotate kicks off the narrative of the visual album, triggering the storyline in which the two main characters are separated by supernatural forces. I used an old miniDV camera for half of the shots, and the ‘rewind’ effect you see is actually the tape in that camera rewinding. We shot it on Cumbrae on one of the hottest days of the year – you can see the heat haze rising off the tarmac at the beginning, and the whole crew was thoroughly sunburned by the time we got on the ferry home.

Repulse
I wrote this song while trying to start a post-uni career, and thinking about being forced to make a living and participate in ‘the rat race’. There are self-recorded samples throughout, and all the synths are from a cheap Swedish soft synth plugin I found called Baervaag by Klevgrand. Samples I recorded of drunken chatter on a night out are sprinkled throughout this track too.

The video for this song is directed by Zoe Dutton, and follows immediately on from the ending of the first one, with the red-shirted girl navigating her way back to the city from Largs.

Petrol, Sushi
I asked my friend Tom Coull to record some drums and then manipulated his performance to make the underlying beat of this song, which is then combined with some synth drum elements, synths and bass, as well as a lot of layered and distorted vocals. Lyrically, this is more impulsive and emotional and less planned out than the rest of the album.

The video for Petrol, Sushi is directed by Murray Paterson, and follows the same nonsense-logic and structure that the song does, with distorted 3D animation and uncanny motion design elements.

Daily Vlogger
I was on the island of Møn off the coast of Denmark and recorded a bunch of samples while there, which are placed throughout, and used to make most of the drums and some of the synths. Someone had written the words ‘Daily Vlogger’ in chalk on a fence next to a path above the cliffs, and I decided to write about that – the song is about the obsessed fan of a Vlogger, switching between her perspective and the Vlogger’s.

The video for Daily Vlogger follows the story told by the song pretty closely – I had a pretty vivid image in my mind of this parasocial relationship and the sinister Vlogger who profits from it, so with a brilliant performance by Eilidh Northridge and stunning cinematography by Delilah Rose Niel, we turned the song live-action. 

Thousand Smiles
This is a song that was really thought through in terms of the character and storyline – it’s about someone in witness protection who has to keep moving around Europe to evade his former criminal collaborators. It’s the most sonically abrasive song on the album, and ended up being the longest too.

The video for this song was directed by Ewan McIntosh. Him and I spent two days driving around the Highlands setting up motion timelapse shots of the landscape, with an ominous figure shrouded in a sheet always visible – this motif is echoed by some of the videos later in the album.

OnoSecond
OnoSecond is defined as ‘the fraction of time before one realizes that they have made a crucial mistake after the mistake was made’. So this is about having an onosecond moment right after saying something I shouldn’t have. The samples throughout are from an old BBC interview with Federico Fellini where he talks about taking acid.

The video for OnoSecond was directed by Martin Allison and shot by Andrew O’Connor, two really talented filmmakers who I learned a lot from during the pre-production and the shoot. This video picks up the motif from the previous one, and advances the storyline, allowing our two main characters to meet in person for the first time since being separated back in Rotate.

Catching the Bullet
The line about a man with a skull for a face crashing out of the trees really happened; there was a guy who ran out of the woods while I was on a walk and it scared me. This is about lockdown anxiety, and the time I freaked out while watching the film Martyrs on edibles. I have since warned anyone who will listen not to watch that film, even sober – images from it are burned into my brain.

The video for this one is a mixed-media piece that tries to visually synthesise some of the themes of the song and the album, and generally just introduce an unsettling visual tone as we head into the darker, moodier back half of the album.

Persephone
This song is about being in a long distance relationship and communicating through video calls. The guitar at the beginning is an iPhone recording of when I first wrote that riff; you can hear the people I was in a room with at the time talking, though it’s all rate-stretched to near illegibility. There is a duet between my old, dull-sounding nylon string classical guitar and my new, steel string acoustic guitar in this, which I think gives it warmth and clarity sonically.

The video for Persephone visualises some of the lyrics, and tells the story of a long distance relationship conducted via Royal Mail – objects sent back and forth and photo scanned into 3D, digital avatars – exploring the artifice of digital communication.

Lowe Sunsmasher
I tried with this song to do a retelling of The Odyssey, but that was maybe a bit ambitious. I ended up cutting it down a lot and now it’s more like a series of references to my favourite bits of the story. There are some fun samples in this one, like wind chimes and the sound of rain hitting a snare drum. At the end, the song sort of collapses in on itself, and we hear a snippet from an old public domain audiobook version of Rambo: First Blood, in which Rambo bemoans his inability to save a group of his men, a situation I thought mirrored Odysseus’ repeated problems with his sailors.

I created the video for Lowe Sunsmasher with Chell Young, a brilliant visual artist and production designer, whose work on Walt Disco's videos, at the Hidden Door festival, and with Maranta for their amazing Microsteria club nights really showcase her unique aesthetic. We conceptualised a loose retelling of an episode from The Odyssey, which would be told through a mixture of stop-motion animation, filmed miniatures and live-action, green screen elements.

Drift
I attempted to sum up the themes of the album in this song – oppressive forces and systems like global commerce, climate change, international travel and the internet which are too big to really contemplate, and attempts to reduce and define them. There is a spoken word element to this song, which goes through the manufacture and shipping process of little pressed metal signs bearing kitsch, banal aphorisms like ‘CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS AND YOU CHANGE YOUR WORLD’ which eventually are put up on the walls, destined to have eyes slide off them forever without really reading.

The video for this song resolves the storyline of the entire visual album, so I won’t spoil it here, but it will exclusively premiere on 14 April at the album launch, alongside the seven other unseen videos and some other surprises.

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Hemisphere is released on 12 Apr via Lost Map Records; Kinbote plays The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 14 Apr and VoxBox Music's Record Store Day party, St Stephen St, Edinburgh, 20 Apr

instagram.com/kin___bote

lostmap.bandcamp.com/album/hemisphere