Mutsumi Kanamori and Maurice Fulton make such a cute couple. She’s a Japanese hothead singer/songwriter who adores the spotlight and spews antagonistic lyrics; he’s an unconventional African-American producer who shuns cameras and journalists. Together (or apart, as we’ll see), the Sheffield-based pair who record as Mu have given dance punk a dynamite enema with two albums of psychedelically enhanced productions and hectoring lyrics delivered in delightfully spiteful broken English.
Mu has been inspiring spazzy movements in the underground with 2003’s Afro Finger and Gel and 2004’s Out of Breach (Manchester’s Revenge). But first we need to establish that Kanamori is Mu. “Maurice is just my producer,” Mu says via e-mail. “I don’t want people to misunderstand that we are a group. We both work in completely different spaces.”
And what a space these misfits create. Almost everything about Mu’s music seems off: rhythms, textures, vocals, lyrics. Pundits have dubbed Mu “dance-punk” or “electro-house,” but neither term captures their radical weirdness. For instance, the maniacal “I Hate U” features repeated shouts of the title to fusillades of machine-gun beats—cathartic for Fulton, but a trial for listeners. “Hello Bored Biz Man” recounts Kanamori’s sex-worker blues (she used to be a call girl), set to a ridiculously rickety Latin-jazz rhythm. “Afro Finger” is about masturbation and the beats aptly vibrate like a buzzcock, with Mu’s vocals pitched to a hysterical yammer.
Afro Finger proved that Fulton is one of the world’s most consistently intriguing producers. Throughout Mu’s output there runs a tension between the organic and the synthetic, between gimmickry and inventiveness. These oppositions spark a skewed strain of dance music that conveys more menace and bleakness than heard in typical club fare.
Out of Breach—lyrically inspired by Mu’s former label, Tigersushi, monetarily shafting her—is an altogether more vibrantly produced album, but Fulton still keeps things extreme and strange, except for the herky-jerky electro-house gimmick “Paris Hilton,” which exploits the air-headed heiress for easy chuckles among lapsed electroclashers (Hilton reportedly thought the track was “hot”). Much better are the title cut’s processional zombie house with its eerily reverbed vocals and massed kalimbas and “Haters,” in which Mu delivers verbal kung-fu while Throbbing Gristle–like bass growls help power some chaotic electronic rock.
Breach‘s weirdest stretch occurs on “I’m Coming to Get You,” wherein Kanamori’s vocals are distorted into a malevolent rasp over Fulton’s paranoid, menacing atmosphere… until the “Shortnin’ Bread” melody absurdly bounces into earshot. The turbulent, ominous “Stop Bothering Michael Jackson” sounds like a rave anthem or a darkstep-jungle track by Panacea slowly being sucked into a vortex. But then Mu will unexpectedly wax sensible, as on “Throwing Up,” her cautionary tale about alcoholic overindulgence. “Look after your body for your lover,” she advises. It’s paradoxically Breach‘s most shocking moment. DAVE SEGAL
Mu play Thurs July 28 with IQU (DJ set), High Dials, DJ Amateur Youth at the War Room, 722 E Pike St, 328-7666, 9 pm–2 am, $5, 21+.
