Maurice Fulton is half of Mu and Mu gave me the crazies. By the time I heard 2004's Afro Finger and Gel I had grown a bit soft and smooth, like pudding. Music didn't feel that abrasive anymore, just done-before. There was much to love, but the rub was gone, and so was the itch. The last time I had been made a believer in music as barbed wire was nearly a decade previous when Fugazi's Red Medicine converted me down to my toes and made my hair fall out. Afro Finger made it all bumpy again.
Have you not heard Afro Finger? Then you've never heard 8-bit bass blip boogaloo. Mutsumi Kanamori fronts it and her voice has all the wrong frequencies. It is an un-melifluous wonder, what some writer described as sounding like a psychotic Korean grocer's wife screaming at a shoplifter (at least I think someone wrote that). To call Kanamori punk doesn't even touch on how authentically antagonistic and out her performances are. She sings about hooking; She screams "Leave Michael Jackson alone you stupid bitch;" She does all the voices in a mock daytime talk show confrontation between cheating lovers, and Fulton chops it all up and dumps it back out in blasts of gated afro-cuban diarrhea. Kanamori is a motherfucker, but Fulton.... Fulton is a motherfucker.
I knew that in Fulton I had found a lover for life. But beyond a sophomore Mu album (Out of Breach, 2005), there wasn't much to cuddle with until Syclops. Syclops is a solo project for Fulton with a release date of: aboutgoddamntime.
A Syclops is a different animal than a Mu. A Syclops is less about Fulton flexing his buff glitch tits and more about what he can do on a keyboard or a real drum kit. The epic percussion bonanzas of Mu are gone in favor of the live drum work, synth farts and pad smear. The keyboard sounds and performances are slick and bright. Dangerously slick in fact, and to my ears the most abrasive thing about I've Got My Eye On You is the way it flirts with smooth jazz and tweaks that genre's cold, cheesy textures into something stuttering and soulful.
Eye on You reminds me a lot of the new Four Tet Ringer EP, in the sense that it's heavy on craft and thin on energy. But I'm also still absorbing it and finding it there's a little "come hither" buried in that wiggle that keeps me listening. So I'll just do that.
"Where's Jason's K" might be the the most natural transition for Mu fans as Fulton indulges in a little of his famous pan clanging percussion in parts. "The E Ticket" is more indicative of Fulton's new direction, but like most Mu tracks, backs into its arrangement with a first half of setup before really opening up to the wider truth.
Syclops - "The E Ticket"
Syclops - "Where's Jason K"
Mu - "My Name is Tommi"
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