The British Electro House duo Simian Mobile Disco, with the help from local promoters Late Night Social Club, will bring their DJ set to the Lowbrow Palace this summer. The show will be 1 of 4 US dates left scheduled for the duo this year, 2 of which are festivals and the other being a club show in San Francisco.
Carving out their little piece of time and space, the British duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw have showcased a pretty substantial career in the realms of house, tech house, electro house, nu-disco and many other subgenre tag that applies to their 3 studio albums, 4 EPs and a slew of remixes.
For Ford and Shaw, creating electronic dance music began in the form of drum ‘n’ bass making beats alongside DJ Silver for MC Mr. Wrong in their group King Rib.
They later joined fellow Manchester University school mates Simon William Lord and Alex MacNaghten in electro-rock outfit Simian. Cut from the same electro cloth as Cornershop and Gorillaz, the band released 2 albums, the first was 2002’s “We Are Your Friends.” If that name sounds familiar to EDM fans, it’s because it is the track that launched French electro-house duo Justice. Credited to Justice vs. Simian, “We Are Your Friends” is a 2003 remix of Simian’s “Never Be Alone” (lyrics contain the album’s title in the chorus), was actually submitted to a Paris college radio station’s contest which would later get Justice signed to Ed Banger Records. The remix that would later become a huge hit in 2006 spawning a video that won the MTV Europe Music award for best video.
Before the band split up, Ford and Shaw were already playing DJ gigs as Simian Mobile Disco and after the split, they simply continued on pursuing dance music. They had grown such a following that they even formed their own private, traveling nightclub called “Night Owl Sanctuary.” Fans would meet at various places around Britain including an abandoned clog factory, a slaughterhouse and even Carl Barat’s (of the Libertines, Dirty Pretty Things) mother’s house for these private raves. They had to stop because of miscommunication that brought 600 ravers to an actual owl sanctuary in Suffolk that led to the unfortunate death of a Long-Eared Barn Owl.
They would later record their first full length, 2007’s “Attack Decay Sustain Release,” recorded on all analog machines and named after the ADSR envelope, a common component of synthesizers and samplers.
In 2008, SMD teamed up with Nike and produced a 27-minute long running-oriented song titled “Run: Nike + Sport Music.” A year later, they released a tech house style LP, “Temporary Pleasure,” which saw the duo venturing into pop territory with collaborations with artist such as Jamie Lidell, Gruff Rys of Super Furry Animals, Chris Keating of Yeasayer and Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip.
Their 2010 release, “Delicacies,” was released on their own label called Delicatessen. It was a compilation of songs from their night club project that was also called Delicatessen, with the intention of releasing the tracks digitally and on vinyl for their more “techno based” songs being longer and more club-oriented. The album “Unpatterns” released last year is quite the understated house album and a return to form for the group.
SMD released a new live album earlier this year simply titled “Live.” The career spanning set was “recorded live in one take without edits,” as the liner notes proudly read, was taken from a show they did last year in Philadelphia. In an earlier interview, member James Ford mentioned the release to be a “document of a particular live show, a particular time and space.” Catch the dynamic duo at Lowbrow Palace on August 22.