Max Tundra

• Genre: Laptronica

About

To call Max Tundra an electronic music artist is rather to miss the point. While it's samplers, synths and sequencers that make his self-produced, obsessively pieced music possible, he certainly doesn't aim to belong to any recognizable dance-music subgenre. Instead, he uses his circuitry as a means to assembling a kind of hyperactive, hybrid pop music that takes in everything from Prince to the Beatles to Metallica, via John Cage, Steely Dan and Squarepusher. The hermetic, low-key Londoner began his career in 1998 with the Children at Play EP for Warp, but it was 2005's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange that solidified Tundra's rep as a master craftsman of eccentric, uplifting pop music. In 2008, after three years spent painstakingly programming (and deprogramming, and reprogramming) every step of the music on an antiquated computer, he released Parallax Error Beheads You, his goofiest, most gregarious and soulful record yet.

- Philip Sherburne