The Windish Agency

The tail end of 2011 saw the emergence of material from a producer known only as Evian Christ with oblique YouTube videos accompanying music which seemed to occupy its own particular twilit corner of the musical landscape – poised somewhere at the crossroads between freaked, haunted ambiance and sparse, twisted R&B. Signing shortly after to Tri Angle, the renowned incubator of all that is dark and innovative in electronica, Evian Christ (aka 22 year old Merseyside resident Joshua Leary) released a free mixtape, “Kings and Them”, collating his 8 tracks to date, and heralding the arrival of a truly exciting new talent in the process.

July sees the first proper physical release from Evian Christ; a limited edition 12” collecting together four tracks from “Kings and Them” in new and remastered form. It stands as testament to exactly what marked him out as so special in the first place, his music making good use of his professed obliviousness to the current musical landscape, with its fleeting genres and sub-genres, like Steve Reich and some of his experimental forebears,Evian Christ has a miraculous way of passing off the avant-garde as beautifully compelling and making it seem purely accidental. So here we have 4 tracks that are as idiosyncratic as they are utterly seductive, from “Drip”’s nocturnal invocation of strung out hip hop beats to “Thrown Like Jacks”, which manages to sample both Grouper and Tyga in its 3 minute plus running time. Over the span of these 4 tracks, the breadth of his unique vision is just beginning to be explored; you definitely wouldn’t want to miss what happens next.