Max Tundra

Warmly beloved by a devoted few, but undeniably an acquired taste too esoteric for mass consumption, the music that Londoner Ben Jacobs makes under the name Max Tundra is dizzyingly dense, labyrinthine, and hyperactive, but at the same time utterly effervescent, sunny, and obsessed with melody. As a child, Jacobs rebelled against his classical piano lessons, preferring to pick out the tunes to television theme songs and commercial jingles, and sometimes using a tape recorder to construct rudimentary re-edits of his playing; meanwhile, he got his first taste of musical performance as a member of his primary school's steel pan ensemble. In his teens he bought himself a Commodore Amiga 500, the most popular home computer model of the late '80s, along with a cheap piece of music-sequencing software -- a geeky perfectionist's ideal alternative to actually being in a band -- and began using it to construct elaborate electronic compositions. Eventually he started shopping his work to labels, with a demo tape consisting of a single 13-minute track. Most rejected it as too long, too weird, or too full of ideas (a criticism oft-repeated throughout his career), but electronic pioneers Warp saw fit to release it, unaltered, as the A-side of the first Max Tundra single, "Children at Play," in 1998. The full-length Some Best Friend You Turned Out to Be followed in 2000 on Domino, accompanied by the singles "Cakes" and "Ink Me." A restlessly varied album consisting mostly of more manageable-length (but no less musically jam-packed) instrumental IDM tracks, it was programmed on the Amiga but also incorporated an assortment of live instruments, all played by Tundra. Rapturously received (at least in rarefied critical circles), 2002's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange marked the first...