NAMES often stick for good reason. Pleasing to the ear and eye, Super Inuit also evokes the unfaltering pulse and icy elegance of the music of Brian Pokora and Fern Morris.
With debut EP Misgivings, the Edinburgh duo will continue the momentum they’ve built so far, with recent singles Tessellate and Chicane gaining praise and play from influential radio DJs Steve Lamacq and Vic Galloway.
The name was originally Pokora’s Twitter handle, a tribute to a thrilling track by Holy F*ck. The Canadian collective are known for making heart-racing dance music – primarily with analogue instruments.
When Pokora was given just two day’s notice to play his first gig in 2014, he had to decide fast on a name. Super Inuit would do nicely.
“I did some pretty awful solo shows at first,” admits Pokora, recalling how he was keen to start an electronic act following the demise of Trapped Mice, the indie-folk outfit he played bass with. “I’ve always had an interest in electronic music,” Pokora says. “I had dabbled in it before but realised I would need to become more self-reliant, though I had an idea I’d eventually be working with a vocalist.”
In 2015, Pokora worked with Jessica Schouela for Forebear, a mini-album of music he composed for a collection of her poems.
More collaborations followed with the likes of Now Wakes The Sea aka low-fi experimentalist Alan McCormack and short story writer Chris McQueer. The Super Inuit of those earlier days was more subtle and ambient than the song-led nocturnal pop of today.
It is Morris’s voice that immediately grabs the listener on Misgivings, the impressive title track which closes the new EP. Glassy-clear and seemingly effortless, her vocals recal the fractured torch songs of Beth Gibbons, albeit with the Portishead siren’s heart-cracking melancholy replaced by a cool, fluid-like dexterity.
“The EP is a good indication of the progression there’s been,” says Morris, who began making music with Pokora in 2016 after answering his Gumtree ad.
Also a long-term electronic music “dabbler”, Morris nevertheless wanted a project where she could focus on song-writing and vocals. Following what Pokora describes as a “very long, extrapolated process of exchanging emails”, the pair hit their groove fast IRL and scored their first gig soon after.
It was the first of many, with the duo going on to play alongside folk bands, experimental outfits, supporting venerated electronic composer Tim Hecker and also contributing to a performance piece as part of Edinburgh Student Arts Festival.
Following launch shows for Misgivings in Edinburgh and Glasgow, the pair will support Advance Base, the new project of Owen Ashworth, the Chicago singer-songwriter formerly known as Casiotone For The Painfully Alone.
Like contemporary kindred spirits Gold Panda and Kelly Lee Owens, Super Inuit make minimalist, searching pop that pulls off a neat trick of sounding both sophisticated and DIY.
The analogue warmth of Holy F*ck remains, though Super Inuit are usually more serene than their chaotic Canadian forebears.
“A lot of electronic music is quite synthetic, quite dry,” says Pokora. “We that more organic sound. We try to work with a couple of self-imposed rules, one of which is to make sure there’s as much as possible that’s actually played rather than programmed. We try to prerecord things rather than just use samples from the internet, so there’s a bit of atmosphere. It’s about being creative with what you’ve got and using those sounds in a creative way,” says Morris, before laughing. “Once we have something we like, we will then spend a lot of hours making tiny adjustments that are very likely completely indistinguishable to anybody else.”
Tomorrow, Safari Lounge, Edinburgh; July 6, Hug and Pint, Glasgow; July 19, w/ Advance Base, Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh; July 20 Doune The Rabbit Hole, Port of Menteith; September 7, Outwith Festival, Dunfermline
Misgivings is out tomorrow.
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