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Molek FMDig of this Week: SYNTHPUNK
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As it turns out, in the local scene, anachronistic J-pop isn’t the exclusive territory of producers Pradana and Adam Kasturi as well as their cohort, noisician Jerk Kerouac. North Bornean SYNTHPUNK — part of funk-vaporwave collective Sunrise — has been posting some really funky ‘80s-style city pop on SoundCloud for close to six months now. To quite the number of listeners to boot, raking up to almost 14,000 plays to date – that’s significantly more than what the majority of local producers covered by JUICE before had achieved, and SYNTHPUNK doesn’t even have any social media presence at all! It’s difficult to pinpoint how much of his production are materials composed from the ground up, but it’s safe to say that unlike, say, fellow modern funk producer Dâm-Funk, this Bornean is heavy on the samples. Not a bad thing, mind you, as sampling has become something of a lost art amongst non-hip hop producers. Musically, the city pop-esque vibe could be purely coincidental too as a single glance at the hashtagged genres he’s listed, one could glean that he’s more influenced by the French scene; ‘Michiko’s Shoes’ is closer to Poly Pony Club’s brand of harmless synth pop and first track ‘SuperNeonLight’ is obviously derivative of Daft Punk’s sound. With ‘Sad Story of Michiko’, SYNTHPUNK states that the song marks an official farewell to his brand of sample-based future funk — we’re excited to see what’s up next.
Listen to a few select songs below:
More from SYNTHPUNK here.
