Photographer: Luc Coiffait at LucCoiffait.com.Stylist: Francesca Turner at Francesca-turner.com. Simian Mobile Disco You’ll Never be Alone Again There comes a point in every youngish man’s life where he must climb atop a stool that is (at minimum) half his height, lace into a sassy Eldredge knot his perhaps elder-gifted cravat, kiss his mum adieu, tightly cinch the elder-gifted cravat round a lateral pole of sorts (what some would call a rung, others perhaps a stepping stone), and brazenly step off said stool, only to endure a brittle, almost death-like snap, and therein, commencement of the workaday grind. For some, they’ll clean pools. For others, they’ll reupholster furniture, or hail flags. Some will fill animals with chemicals until they’re fat enough for slaughter. Others will issue weapons decrees, drive school buses, fill doughnuts with cream. Some will crunch numbers, hug trees, issue tax returns, extoll the merits of a mindfully engaged pelvic floor. For Simian Mobile Disco—James Ford and Jas Shaw—they’ll issue thumpers, cracklers, and harmonic tinkly tinglies, the likes of which will relieve many, albeit briefly or, in retrospect, gauzily clotted shut with OTC 5-HTP, from the stool leap, the pool scrub, the cream fill. “Whorl,” a dense little bugger and the duo’s latest, recorded live this spring in front of 900 such aforementioned time-clock salvationists, at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown, C.A., without laptops, and with spiritual phosphodiesterase that left much of the desert icing it down, sees SMD in our pages, not because EDM has now “reached the mainstream,” (like, really?) but because the stream is polluted with piss and bio-pharma and ad nausea-commercially licensed songs called “Happy.” Here they shake a fist, or at least ash a bit on a handful of questions. This is The Grind Issue—are you in the Grind? What do you think? Does glory equate to power? Why or why not? In matters of semantics, it’s always best to consult the experts. So do any notable thesauri list power as a synonym of glory or vice versa? The answer, of course, is in the negative. What’s wrong with fashion? Built in obsolescence. Describe your experience in the California desert this spring.What, if anything, was revealed? Verily, the true mysteries of the universe. Please dictate a resignation letter to your secretary. That’s a rather schizophrenic question to ask a musician. Why? Did you and the secretary have something that no one else did? We’re the same person.
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