Lost In Music: AR Kane: i

I have a particular interest in bands who occupy liminal spaces, and do their own unique thing, apart from hype machines and trends.

A R Kane are one such band. They were dream pop before it attained that definition, proto – shoegazing, or avant-pop way ahead of the curve.

I adore their second album, ‘i’. It’s deliberately awkward. Band members Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala brought in mysterious collaborators and strange, dissonant noises rubbed up against crystalline melodies. It’s sexy, claustrophobic and dense (‘Honeysuckleswallow’) or catchy, like ‘Crack Up’ and ‘A Love From Outer Space ‘.

It’s ‘In A Circle’ which really gets to me. It’s not entirely sung pitch perfectly, yet it’s beautiful, with strings and beats and a gnawing undercurrent of eerieness, a few years before Massive Attack brought out ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, which drew from a similar template.

It’s where hip hop and indie coalesced in an unholy union, a mesh of This Mortal Coil, club culture and the more mellow side of Sonic Youth. In essence, they made sad bangers before anyone else, and without them, we’d never have the likes of My Bloody Valentine or Young Fathers. That’s not a world I really want to contemplate.