I’m very interested in that second link.
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Love The Bug, can’t wait for his new one tomorrow.
Big fan of the production work he did for Miss Red’s last album and mixtape too. Lots of great stuff on both of those.
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Ah nice. Kind of done the opposite - only started dipping into the KRM stuff the last year or so. Think I’ll delve back too. Reckon you’ll enjoy London Zoo.
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Just listened to ‘Skeng’ and ‘Poison Dartz’ up thread, both are absolutely ace.
I did listen to a King Midas Sound album a couple of years back and it sounded great but was unremittingly bleak and I wasn’t in the right place to give it a proper go. His other stuff I’ve heard is a a little bit more fun 
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Listened to this podcast / interview with Kevin last week:
https://www.attnmagazine.co.uk/features/15254
Thought he comes across very well. The sound cultures he’s involved in are clearly deeply important to him and have been since a young age. I certainly don’t get the impression he’s doing the white-guy-dipping-into-other-cultures-for-cred thing, he seems very sincere and whole-hearted in his engagement.
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Loved him since I got into God and Techno Animal via my love for Godflesh. Spent years hoovering up as many of his/their releases as I could and while I have a lot, I probably will never have it all. Still think this album is crushing:
Love The Bug stuff although London Zoo is clearly the best, King Midas Sound is also great, both are amazing live… haven’t quite kept up with all his recent Bandcamp Frequency releases (and, whisper it, they all sound very similar) but this one, inspired by the birth of his first child, is beautiful
Read an interview recently where he said he’s moved from Berlin to a really poor quarter of Brussels, so I’m sure how middle class he is TBH
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First heard The Bug through the excellent Tigerbeat6 compilation ‘Open Up And Say…@<%_|[1]’ and have been hooked ever since. Annoyingly, I’ve not seen him live yet despite having many opportunities to, and him playing on the lineup of festivals I’ve been at. Bet it’s a right blast.
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! ↩︎
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Just remembered that Ladybug track he did with Warrior Queen. Excellent track
its always been an experience. saw him as king midas in like 2009 and it looked awesome but was too hard sonically for me to take in. saw him with dylan carlson in 2016ish and it was pretty great, but tbh they got blown out the water by Bong who were supporting.
saw him i think three times as The Bug. once on the iration steppas soundsystem alongside shackleton, which was quite something. once in i think 2009 in brighton which was genuinely a bit shit, the soundsystem sucked and he seemed pissed off throughout. saw him recently(ish) with Ms Red and it was everything i wanted, just a big wash of sound. a bit painful actually, that soundsystem was a bit too full on.
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Was always of this opinion but listened to Angels & Devils this morning on a run. Has aged really well.
This is good. Pay What You Like on Bandcamp…
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My friend went to seen him perform Sirens and said it was a bit much.
Looks like he played at Patterns (was called Audio before) when you saw him in Brighton. Don’t recall the sound ever being particularly impressive there, especially for a nightclub.
it was concorde 2, some charity thing for oxfam. i was definitely not a connoisseur in those days, but seem to remember the soundsystem in audio being ok-ish, the same as you. i remember audio chiefly for getting into an argument about JME with some dickheads (in retrospect of course maybe it was me who was being a dickhead)
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I’m not familiar with everything he’s done but have opened a few links in this thread that intrigued me.
When I went to Boomtown 2015 he was playing really late on the Sunday night so I dropped in for a bit. It was a massive tent, it was really really dark and they were absolutely caning the smoke machines. That vibe combined with the sounds he makes was quite something.
I’d spent the previous few days mostly watching very heavy bass music but it was just so much more intense and creeping and evil.
Like the difference between Led Zeppelin playing loud blues rock but pushing the sex element of it vs Black Sabbath taking loud blues and just slowly slamming it into the floor until it distorted into something that was entirely un-sexy and just bleak.
Good shit.
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really enjoyed that live vid to understand what the vibe was, nice one
the studio version is incredible too, one of the most menacing things I’ve ever heard
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He used to post quite lengthy and passionate rundowns of Bug shows the day after on his Facebook. Running themes were problems with equipment and sound systems (seems he has pretty exacting standards, eg very loud, very bass-heavy and very clear) and ecstatic gratitude for the crowds, who seemed to really make the shows from his perspective. Those posts were always quite nice reads: the vibes were good.
I don’t think he’s middle class really, he grew up in Weymouth, which is definitely not a well-to-do part of the world.
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This was good. He’s worth following on Twitter/Instagram for his albums of the day. Has put me on to lots of good stuff.
If the various ‘middle class’ refernces are aimed at my post, I’d like to clarify and say I have absolutely no idea (and little interest) about his background and wasn’t claiming otherwise.
I was just asking if his stuff had horrible offensive lyrics and if he fell into that category of cultural (?) appropration. I’m not suggesting that the culture he’s approprating is racial by the way, opbviously. Criminal street culture I guess.
‘Fuck a bitch’ is exactly what I’m talking about, and exactly what I feared.
If people want to listen to that stuff, fair enough, although it seems a bit wierd that artists like him get a pass on these boards where you can’t use the phrase ‘monged’ (I genuinely didn’t know! My bad!) without getting reported.
Strange times!
can relate to this. that king midas sound one, Solitude I’m guessing, is probably one of my top 10 albums of all time. have to say though i put it on recently and was like ‘jesus i must have been in a really bad place for this to resonate so much’.
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It’s contextual. I don’t think the board would tolerate a user posting that they would “fuck a bitch” but it might not be a deal breaker in a cultural performance piece, however distasteful.
Your other example sounds perfectly right to have been called out - it is a derivation of a slur used against people with disabilities. You may have used it with no malicious intent but if you’ve been made aware of the potential for offence then I am surprised you feel the need to reference it again?
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I’m not defending my mistake; I had no idea and was correctly corrected.
Agree to disagree about the ‘cultural’ excuse for The Bug, who is a modern British man, and thus presumably subject to the same standards as me.