 Emerging out of cultural badlands of Australian suburbia, fleepish music began life as a series of ill-advised and remarkably unsuccessful incarnations as a guitar band in the best traditions of the Pixies, the Cure and, er, Nik Kershaw.
Many years at the helm of a graveyard shift radio show brought exposure to goth, early German electronica and, sadly, more Nik Kershaw, and the beginning of the end of fleepish-as-rock-pig was at last in sight.
The transformation was completed by a whole-hearted embrace of everything twee, for these were the years when Stereolab reigned supreme. Luscious strings and lovely little moogy bleeps were quickly installed as the new gods before which fleepish music would prostrate itself.
A hefty stint of jazz piano followed, nicely tempered by a near-fatal dose of everything Warp. Thelonius Monk and Wes Montgomery lined up against Autechre and Aphex twin, and much carnage ensued. Some quaked. A few giggled. But the foundations upon which the temple of fleep would rise had been definitively, intriguingly, disturbingly laid.
Fleepish music upped sticks and headed for Blighty, and continues alongside an interminable PhD in politics at Oxford [honest: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~linc1130]. The ethos remains one of setting voluptuous classical textures against mildly eccentric and slightly nostalgic samples and twiddles, and then hacking it all to pieces with angular, really rather inappropriate beats and noises.
Production remains primitive. Whether this represents a stand against the cult of slick in modern music or simply half-arsed ludditism remains debatable.
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