28-year-old Michael Simmons is the man behind Conformist, hailing originally from the picturesque village of Dale in Pembrokeshire. Michael’s musical inspiration quickened with a move to Cardiff’s beckoning City lights.
Conformist expertly manipulates and reassembles intricate layers of sounds, sampling from cable TV shows, shopping channels, talk shows, pornos, the dregs of TV, hacking, editing to extreme levels of complexity, cutting and pasting together a complex patch work quilt of filthy noise the soundtrack to the cities seedy post-apocalyptic underbelly! His 8 bit analogue chip-tune melodies are shuddered by post-dubstep baselines, sliced open by jagged post punk guitars, and thudded by huge 808 drums hits, which sound like a tower block collapsing. Conformist presents you with his enthralling but dizzy rush of ideas and noises.
Conformist’s glum swatches of electronic sound offer a neat line in humour too, morally bereft and cutting to the punch line, exposing cliché and avoiding it. Thus his work is built for the dance floor as much as it is for thought provoking head moving headphone sessions in the dead of night. In the past Conformist has been praised gained airplay on Steve Lamacq’s on R1 and Adam Walton’s Radio Wales show and earned the praise of local tome The Miniature Music Press and the influential Careless Talk Costs Lives magazine.
Conformist is also the driving force behind Cardiff’s newest audio production facility, Smash Mastering, offering mastering, mixing and acclaimed remixes. See his work on local boys Kutosis’ track ‘Islands’ and Bury Me in LA’s ‘Young Lust Seekers’ these serve as a crunchy taster for his forthcoming new single ‘Savages Go Modern’ followed by a long player scheduled for release in 2012.
Visit http://www.conformistmusic.co.uk for more information.
