PC Music: clubland's cute new direction

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/12/pc-music-sophie-ag-cook-cute-dance

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In the grumpy, po-faced echo chamber of online dance music forums, one label has become the divisive talking point of 2014. AG Cook’s PC Music takes its cues from the Japanese concept of kawaii (cuteness) with a musical pallette encompassing the huge synth blasts favoured by Eurodance chart-botherers such as Cascada, grime’s sub-bass, and happy hardcore’s high-pitched vocal range, matched with promo pics that make its artists look like X Factor contestants from 2054. Their artist names are things like Hannah Diamonds, Princess Bambi and the Lipgloss Twins; their aesthetic, somewhere between an edition of Just 17 and a shopping centre in Shibuya.

Unsurprisingly, the label’s output has polarised opinion, with some taste-making sites declaring PC Music to be the future (“The most compelling pop music in recent memory” – FACT), and others dismissing it as an internet joke (“Ear-splitting squeak’n’bass” – The Quietus).

As well as being serious about pop, the PC Music crew are serious about controlling their image. AG Cook doesn’t give interviews, and you can understand the emperor’s-new-clothes scepticism among music writers who are probably scared to risk becoming a laughing stock for praising a label which feels like it could be an elaborate ruse.

Last month, however, the PC Music sound broke through to a wider audience via QT and her track Hey QT, produced by AG Cook and SOPHIE. Having made his name with maximalist OTT dance tracks for club-focused labels such as Numbers, SOPHIE’s latest efforts have been influenced by J-pop artists such as Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and explore the limits of “good taste”, with recent single Lemonade again splitting opinion.

SOPHIE (who won’t reveal his real name) prefers to label his music “pop” rather than “dance”: “Pop music has to have a good concept, a good sound and good hooks,” he says. “Most dance/experimental music has one of the those if you’re lucky.” Yet the SOPHIE sound is clearly the result of a calculated experiment, amplifying the “pop” elements of his music to the point where they become almost unrecognisable. Is he deliberately testing listeners’ taste thresholds? “Not really. My primary concern is: what’s the most sonically exciting thing I can imagine? then I try to make that.”

In doing so, SOPHIE and PC Music have created a scene devoid of the macho, lad-driven elements underpinning the house revival. Instead of fetishising bass, deep tans and the FHM pin-ups who adorn videos on YouTube channel Majestic Casual, PC Music pays homage to a more innocent teen-girl culture.

With AG Cook getting booked for a career-launching DJ gig in the Boiler Room and SOPHIE being tapped up to produce tracks for Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, who knows how far their cute manifesto will take them?