Fantastic Mr Fox

Fantastic Mr Fox is Manchester based producer Stephen Gomberg. His new single was Record of the Week in DJ mag, dubstep mavens James Blake and Pariah have proclaimed him the future of everything, and the xx liked him so much, they took him on tour with them to the States recently where, sandwiched between the Mercury prize winners and Warpaint, he did DJ sets interspersed with his own material. Indeed, Warpaint were so impressed they’ve asked him to remix one of their tracks.

Gomberg is being talked up as one of the new breed of dubstep artists. But to our ears his insanely busy, densely layered, intricate “digital symphonies”, with their painstakingly assembled micro-bits of 90s R&B vocals, handclaps, beats, basslines, bursts of 8-bit mania and washes of synth, have as much in common with early-noughties glitch techno as they do those manic cut creators Max Tundra or Hudson Mohawke. How does he get those weird sounds? And how come he’s able to turn them into luscious dub-spacious disco, which with their chopped and treated female vox and darting, dancing basslines sound like Cheryl Cole if she’d made a garage record for Warp in 2002?

We have no idea, so we rang Gomberg and asked him. “I do everything on Cubase in my bedroom,” the 22-year-old explained in his deep West Midlands accent that makes him sound like the Brum Barry White. “There might be 200 layers in a song – I might record myself clapping or there might be a split-second of 60s prog hi-hat that I might then put an effect on and mess with for hours. It’s all very laborious. I take the samples from so many sources, and they get so messed up, you can’t tell in the end where they came from.” The result is sort of like Timbaland if he started funking up the acts on the Tri Angle label such as Balam Acab and oOoOO, resulting in abstract R&B arranged with a Cubist disregard for form.