Director/Artist Konx-om-Pax Paints Electro-Surrealist Soundscapes
Multi-talented Glaswegian Tom Scholefield, otherwise known as Konx-om-Pax, has been making music since he was a teenager, but he initially distinguished himself in more visually oriented fields. As a director, he's been at the helm of music videos for everyone from fellow Scots Mogwai to Jamie Lidell, while his work as a visual artist can be seen, among other places, in his cover art for such acts as Rustie and Oneohtrix Point Never. But while he's also done his share of DJing, Scholefield really expresses his own inner musicality through laying down tracks, and the soundscapes of his Regional Surrealism album represent all the ideas that have been bubbling under his visual art.
The album, due out July 23 on the Planet Mu label, touches on Scholefield's love of everything from electro to krautrock, and also includes some guitar from Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite. Ultimately, it's a kaleidoscopic electronic swirl of sounds that, unsurprisingly, incorporates a visual sensibility, as Scholefield has cited such non-musical influences as Werner Herzog's film Aguirre among his influences for the recording. Maybe the album's title offers a clue to the inner workings of the Konx-om-Pax sensibility — assimilating stimuli from a multitude of media sources and transmuting them into an appealingly offbeat, individualistic vision that runs on its own inner logic.
