High Down

Welcome to the world of Grasscut: sweeping melody, epic build, rain, dislocation, glitched-out psych-pastoralism, beauty and beats. Inspired by and continuing the bold tradition of English transcendentalism, this is music that could serve as a contemporary soundtrack to long-lost films by Lindsay Anderson or Powell and Pressburger.

Grasscut are Andrew Phillips and Marcus O’Dair. Phillips is an award-winning film and television composer with over one hundred screen credits. O'Dair, whom he met in their hometown of Brighton, is a double bassist, keyboards player and general noisenik. Together, suited and bespectacled, they are a kind of Gilbert and George of electronic music.

The pair made their live debut at the Loop Festival (Fourtet, Caribou, Holy Fuck) in August 2008, each armed with a laptop and keyboard - Phillips also on vocals and guitar, O'Dair double bass and stylophone. They have since played audiovisual shows at Tate Britain and The Great Escape and supported the likes of Fujiya & Miyagi, Nathan Fake, Wildbirds & Peacedrums and BLK JKS.

Their forthcoming, eponymous debut album is a transcendental journey from the Sussex South Downs of High Down to the Nintendo cathedral of Muppet. Weaving in between the lead vocal are voices from the past and the present, snatched from mobile phones and gramophones – a 1920s tenor, gossiping mums, a Victorian singing poet, a woman reminiscing about post-war rationing.

Some have heard in their music traces of composer Gavin Bryars, others Another Green World-era Brian Eno or the 'steam-powered futurism' of Daedelus. Yet lead single High Down in many ways most resembles a kind of folk music – an original, unsettling exploration of the beauty, alienation and downright strangeness of contemporary life.