Making his name as part of British dubstep duo Vex’d along with Roly Porter, Jamie Teasedale’s reinvention as Kuedo has been part of a gradual process towards finding his own musical voice. Transitioning through the name Jamie Vex’d, where he retained some of the heavy Vex’d sound, Teasedale’s continued explorations led him to disconnect his sound completely from his former project and reinvent himself as Kuedo.
His first ventures under this moniker came via the colorful and warm EPs Starfox and Dream Sequence, both released on the influential Planet Mu label. Kuedo’s debut full-length, Severant (2011, Planet Mu), has met with critical and popular acclaim, garnering the producer an ever growing and diversifying fanbase. The first impression and most overt effect of Kuedo’s music is an atmosphere of starry-eyed futurism and modernity that evoke “that same kind of feeling that we get from looking into deep star fields or images from space” (interview with FACT).
Kuedo’s arcing, glassy synth superhighways draw frequent comparisons to the sweeping, arpeggiated synth passages of Vangelis, and infuse the music with that familiar, futuristic feeling that is reminiscent of sci-fi soundtracks. The rhythmic patterns in Kuedo’s music are equally interesting and important to the overall aesthetic of his work. While it is easy to label his beats as post-dubstep, they are actually heavily inspired by the juxtaposition of dramatic beats with steely lack of emotion, present in 808-driven Dirty South and coke/gutter rap. The rapid patterns from Dirty South offshoot, trap, which is characterized by rapid rhythms and recurring high-hat rushes, as well as the radically different patterns of the Chicago footwork phenomenon that has recently been thoroughly explored by Planet Mu, also influence Kuedo’s rhythmic construction.
The blend of warm, futuristic synths, and cold, hit-hat-filled beats in Kuedo’s music creates an environment of personal fantasy and escapism, which is exactly the artist’s intention: "As reality shapes imagination and escapism affects choices in the real world, there is a strange relational loop between the two and the space in between the two."
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soundcloud.com/kuedo
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planet.mu
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