Admired by his peers, feted by his fans, all experimental dance musician Max Tundra wants now is for builders to whistle his songs.
Max Tundra is about to become a big star. Or, at least, he is in the minds of his fans, who believe his fast-cut, intricately assembled electronic pop has commercial potential.
One of his more high-profile devotees, Owen Pallett, the experimental musician and collaborator with the Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner, was so blown away by Tundra's forthcoming Parallax Error Beheads You that he wrote an awestruck note to go with pre-release copies of the album. "I can't compare this to any record I've ever heard before," he said. "You'd think that it was made by an eccentric millionaire, with every name-brand pop-music producer in the world contributing their own two seconds of material. It is shock and awe. Listen and be humbled."
Parallax Error Beheads You is indeed an impressive piece of work, although it is not exactly the sort of mainstream fare that will make Max Tundra - who has remixed tracks for Franz Ferdinand and the Pet Shop Boys - a producer-star like Mark Ronson. There are hummable bits and catchy rhythms on the album, but they do not last long before the restlessly inventive musician - who seems to suffer, if that is the word, from a surfeit of ideas - shifts direction, changes tempo or pursues another melody entirely. It sounds like several different bands playing at once, at warp speed, orchestrated by a mad professor with a slide rule for a baton.
"I get all the clichés about being a one-man-band or a crazed electronica kid," he says. "But I don't mind being called a studio whiz." He certainly likes being in the studio - he has spent the past six years in one, working on Parallax, the follow-up to 2002's Mastered By Guy At The Exchange. It has taken him that long because there were so many tiny segments of music to manipulate, play around with on computers, or even, in the old-fashioned sense, play. "There are trumpets, violins, cellos, guitars, dulcimers, xylophones - whatever was lying around," he says of the instruments on the album, which he played himself. "If I thought a cello would be good, I had to spend three weeks learning to play the part, and then layering it with so much other stuff that people wouldn't notice that I'm not an amazing cello-player!