Unicorn Kid: Level Up

Picture yourself as a sprightly 17-year-old: what’s your greatest achievement? Perhaps you’ve convinced your teacher that your dog did in fact devour your homework. Perhaps you’ve persuaded your local off-licence that it is a real moustache. Or perhaps you’ve finally completed Mario after hours on your Nintendo.

Whatever, it’s unlikely that you'll have plugged your Nintendo into a computer, turned the bleeps and blips into a rhythm, produced CD artwork, managed to get signed, enjoyed airplay on Radio 1 and find yourself sitting on the brink of a UK headline tour. Unlikely, but as Oliver Sabin (aka Unicorn Kid) has proved, it's not impossible. I speak to him at his home in Leith, his voice held with a mixture of excitement and trepidation for the tour ahead.

Sabin does not take his cue from the capital's burgeoning folk scene as one might suspect, however. “My music follows the aesthetic of chiptune: it’s a big influence but it’s not the whole story," he offers. "I suppose you could call me 8-bit dance”. To the uninitiated, chiptune is the result of sampling old, bashed-in computer games to make high tempo dance music.

Some artists subscribing to the chiptune school of thought have been criticized for putting the concept over the music itself. I ask Sabin whether he has become as much a part of the scene as a fan of it: “I’m actually not particularly well regarded within the scene because I don’t use the same hardware. I’m not a purist, and I don’t want to be, but I can’t deny I’m not anything to do with it.”

Whether or not he’s considered a true “chiptuner” by the fanatics, his own brand of dance music has amassed attention right quick, with fans dotted around the world as far away as Japan. Just how did he achieve that without traversing the globe? “For me it’s a word of mouth thing, people adding my songs on to their MySpace profile pages or uploading to YouTube, and it’s just built organically like that. It exposes me to more people that would like me, and I work hard to message everyone back.” With over one and a half million plays, it’s a mind-boggling fanbase for an artist who is only just beginning to leave his bedroom.

Despite the surprisingly modest reasons Sabin offers for his success, the huge effort he has put in to keep Unicorn Kid on the cutting edge is clear. With a constantly updated presence via his online networking platforms, it's all beginning to pay off: “Popjustice tweeted me to ask if I wanted to remix the Pet Shop Boys, so I said yeah pretty jokingly. Before I knew it, their manager sent the parts through to my manager, and suddenly I’m remixing their next single.”

This modern approach to the music industry continued to reap rewards with Popmorphic - a Glasgow-based company who have developed technology enabling the first ever interactive music video. They specifically contacted Oli to be the trailblazer of this technology with his single Lion Hat. With more than a trillion ways to play the video, and a prize of £1000 to the person who can retrieve the Lion Hat (after ten failed attempts, I wish I had played more Nintendo when I was younger), it’s an incredibly exciting project.

How did Sabin himself find the whole experience? “It was far more professional than I thought," he confesses. "Each time it was filmed, there were 45 cameras all at different angles. This was all done last November, and I hadn’t achieved what I had in between then and now - it was a really big deal.” You get a sense that even Sabin himself is overwhelmed by his success, especially when his upcoming gig schedule comes up in conversation: “I’ve only gigged about thirty or forty times and now I’ve got a headline tour, I can’t believe it. I’m pretty crazy on stage as well so I'm gonna get tired!”

Throughout this meteoric rise, Sabin has remained surprisingly level-headed: “I’ve managed to get in to Edinburgh School of Art, so if this thing dies on its arse then I can always pick that up.”

Without a doubt, by playing the music business in an ultra modern way, Unicorn Kid proves that you can accomplish great things without turning into some self-proclaimed deity, and in times like these that's incredibly refreshing.