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Guestlist Recommends: Rudi Zygadlo
Wednesday 31st October 2012 | Laura
The singer/songwriter and electronic magician will perform 10th December at the Sebright Arms.
Rudi Zygadlo is known for turning dubstep upside-down. He did it with his first album, Great Western Laymen, released in 2010 which The Fader defined as: “smart, weird pop songs built with big ideas and the kind of magpie ingenuity that is sometimes mistaken for mental illness”. The Glaswegian vocalist and multi-instrumentalist second album, Tragicomedies, is risky and surprising, just as expected for real dubstep fans. Influenced by Frank Zappa, Eastern European Classical music and contemporary US Indie, it has been described as “an amalgamation of pop song writing with dubstep”. As with any new flavor, it deserves to be tasted, it can be strange and unpalatable at the beginning, but then you won’t be able to stop wanting more of the new weird sensation.
There is something arrhythmic in his songs that end up making sense inside the whole melody.
For the recording of the second album, Zygadlo moved to Berlin where he states "I did have a couple of life-changing experiences there and they wrote most of the album.” But he didn’t let Berlin’s electronica get into his compositions; he preferred to go a little bit further in the city’s musical history, until reaching the classics: “I listened to a lot of classical music. Taking acid and listening to the Grosse Fuge is far more interesting than listening to contemporary dance music on drugs. Virtually the only gigs I went to were the free lunch time chamber recitals at the Philharmonie on Tuesdays.”
Zygadlo has the originality of one of those who knows the rules enough to break them. And we can’t forget that at the end as the album title denotes, it’s all about playing.
By Laura Vila
@LaursTime
