Micachu and The Shapes

No one can deny that the face of planet music is changing at a rate faster than ever before. Whether one believes that it's awkwardly evolving into a beguiling new beast, or imploding into a certain apocalypse, one thing's for sure: the soundtrack will be like nothing you've ever heard before. 21-year-old Mica Levi is the unassuming five foot one figure creating tunes that somehow perfectly define these sometimes scary, often overwhelming, but always exciting times. She's leading the future-pop frontier, with an instinctual understanding of music only possible from one of those rare lives where rhythms, melodies, discord and noise have underpinned every last waking second. Over the past year Micachu, as she's become known, has released an avidly received mixtape that moulded concrete grime and ruff-neck hip hop to avant-electronics, composed a Nuevo-classical epic for the London Philharmonic Orchestra on the personal request of revered conductor Marc Anthony Turnage, and formed a band, The Shapes, to help channel the mind-boggling waves of creativity that swell from her scruffily curled bonce at the rate that most people breathe.

Helmed by her adopted Svengali and seeming long-lost spiritual godfather, Matthew Herbert, Micachu’s debut LP, is a teeny, but visionary peek at the infinite maelstrom of musical carnage that hurtles through her brain 24-hours-a-day. A mangled outpouring of fidgeting guitars, untameable bass splurges, fragile, swoonsome wails, sabre-toothed electronics and snatched sounds, from rattling bottlenecks to demonic hoovers. Whilst on paper it doesn’t sound a sing-a-long setup, in between the shudders, splurts, stabs, stutters, stops and starts, spills a pure, pristine thread of melodic playfulness that makes ‘Jewellery’ one of the most fiendishly addictive breakthrough albums of the year. Case and point: Mica’s steadily risen as one of the UK’s most talked-about acts, gracing all the best music rags, broadsheets and even national TV whichever way you look. A reluctant star, Mica isn’t so fussed about the flashing lights and lenses, no matter who’s listening or not, the music will always play on.

What does Micachu actually write songs about then? “A load of old bollocks,” she cackles, with trademark heel-scuffing modesty. “I’m not about bearing the deep crevices of my soul, that would feel so weird. There are things you can love aside from people. I just like picking up on stuff that amuses me, and building motifs from there.” “It’s the day-to-day creating that drives me,” she explains of her unrelenting productivity. “I’m maybe not even bothered about the results. It’s just something I need to do like getting up and having breakfast. I crave the challenge of writing.” The arrival of The Shapes –aka Raisa Khan on keys and Marc Pell on drums- midway through recording the album added a whole new dimension to proceedings. “They’ve certainly helped tame my madness, we’re very much a band now, this isn’t just me anymore,” she explains. So now the demons have been exorcised, laid out for all to see on little plastic discs, what can we expect from the one-girl anti-hit factory? “I’m enjoying being in band now, writing in that setup, with playing live in mind,” she says. “But as for the distant future? Fuck knows. I want to be a composer. Fuck guitars. I want to make gigantic orchestral compositions, finish them, and then not let anybody hear the results.” Perfect.

SEE MICACHU AND THE SHAPES LIVE AT THE DEAF INSTITUTE SUPPORTED BY THE INVISIBLE ON THURSDAY 8th OCTOBER