Shifting Distance by Kinbote

Kinbote is the alias of found-sound sample based electronic glitch-pop producer Matt Gibb. His enchanting debut album Shifting Distance will be released by Lost Map Records on limited edition CD-R and via digital services on December 4, 2020. It’s preceded by the track ‘Hiemalis’, a song about “gaining perspective on events that seemed inconvenient or frustrating at the time, but I can now accept as valuable,” Matt explains. It’s inspired in part by the book To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and features drums made from samples of Matt walking through a forest, leaves and sticks crunching and snapping under his feet.

“I started doing music solo on Garageband in 2015 and I’ve progressed with the same DIY ethos since then,” says Matt, who has been home recording and releasing for five years, doing an EP a year on Bandcamp and playing shows in Aberdeen, where he was previously based (he has since relocated to Glasgow). “I was involved with the Aberdeen arts collective Re-Analogue (now defunct) as a founding member during uni, we put on a lot of shows with spoken word artists and musicians and put out a zine and a mixtape.”

Shifting Distance is Matt’s first album under the Kinbote moniker. “I made the entire album and all my previous music with the same setup; a microphone, my laptop and a broken Yamaha keyboard I got from a charity shop,” he explains. “So it's very ‘bedroom pop’! A lot of elements of the beats, sounds and textures on the albums are self-recorded samples which I record on my phone and then edit on my laptop. The songs are diaristic to an extent, but I also like to inhabit other characters and write about made-up situations. My main influences are Blithe Field, The Books, Baths, Fog, Katie Dey, Alex G, Trust Fund and Why?”

DIY label, run by Pictish Trail, from his caravan on the Isle of Eigg, Scotland.