Man With Beard

Bio

Throughout his formative years as a young electro-buccaneer and into 21st-zentury adulthood, Sands spent aeons burrowed away in a home studio pressing all the buttons, hitting all the keys, and creating all the sounds.

This self-education led to collaborations with several local musicians and his engineering and production skills were finely honed until the creation of his current incarnation, MWB.

As his found-sounds and sampling work developed, his original pieces became ambient soundtracks set to deep-sea diving and nature films. JK, a self-confessed Cat-man, has always been most comfortable chewing the proverbial fat criss-crossing myriad musical touchstones and stroking a feline friend like some crazyhip James Bond fiend.

Music is his biology.

It's in his DNA.

His knowledge is encyclopaedic.

May 2021

His debut album, released May 2021, is a metaphysical soundscape for a surreal, abstract journey through space and time; from childhood to adulthood. Imagine the cycles of growth, love, loss, decay and death?

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange is the opus that encompasses the questions that we all ask ourselves in these most difficult - and most joyous - of times.

It is at once both optimistically pessimistic and pessimistically optimistic; a sonic exploration of different electronic textures set across a vast ocean of genres. These are big themes for big music. With good reason.

The album was written in a time of reflection; the aftermath of the artist losing his father. The death of a parent is a rite of passage most of us undertake at some point in our journey, and it is up to us to embrace and celebrate the influences we inherit.

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange is dedicated to Sands Sr, a proud family man who made his love of music secondary to his family, thus providing the means to create an environment where his children could flourish artistically.

His son's music takes an array of musical inspirations and weaves them into a profound electronic aural experience. When not in the studio, or on the sofa being influenced by classic and abstract music or movie and TV greats, MWB is inspired by the artists of labels like Erased Tapes, Warp, Ninja Tune and Brain Feeder to name but a few.

The American auteur David Lynch whose "look a little closer" ethos and dark themes are a major feature of his works is a key motivation felt throughout the album, especially in the opening track 'Shepard Tone of Despair' and the title track, which is itself a direct reference to the Lynchian masterpiece Twin Peaks.

Neo-Classical composers such as A Winged Victory For The Sullen and Nils Frahm are clear touchstones. Less obvious but evident throughout is the impact of works by 70s pioneers Can and Neu! and even the free-jazz of Miles, the ultimate Cat. A Place Both Wonderful and Strange is a dream that celebrates the wonderful strangeness and strange wonderfulness of life and death, and the emotions we experience inbetween.

It will challenge your perceptions of how electronic music can make you feel.

MWB is here.