Happy Happy, the next album release from Capitol K - and the first on self-run label Faith and Industry - is the follow-up to 2002"s Island Row. It"s the most fully realized of Capitol K"s recordings to date: a home made, kaleidoscopic hybrid of precision electronics rendered boldly and beautifully live by an eclectic four-piece band; personal twists with a global perspective and psychedelic excursions interrupted by impromptu all-night parties in the parts of the city you can only reach by bike.
The story of Happy Happy begins with the wandering and wondering of Capitol K"s alter ego Kristian Craig Robinson who, following the success of Island Row (XL/Planet Mu), found himself strolling further away from the solitary warmth of the studio and immersed in popular (un-popular?) culture: organizing local shows and clubs, collaborating with friends and neighbours; setting up networks and forming chance connections. At the same time, a more personal narrative was running: of love and heartache, of how to respond to massive global events, of how to make the Future Pop that you hear in your head.
Soon the diverse talents of Kristian and friends Leafcutter John, Jo Apps and Adam Stringer were evolving into a four-piece band and - with help from odd passers-by - the sound of soaring and elegantly wandering guitars, rushing beats and bleeps, pulsing Arabic/electro basslines, generative electronics, analogue squeals and sweet, idiosyncratic vocals. The welding together of intense live performance with obsessive studio tinkering and intricate sound collage created the unsettlingly sweet and sweetly unsettling blend of sound and influence that is Happy Happy.
Happy Happy is the sound of machines with souls and cities with hearts both broken and mended; the sound of electronic musings and meditations on the nature of love, pleasure, loss and happiness itself, real and artificial. It"s the sound of opposites meeting and soundclashing into strange hybrids of real and imaginary, local and global, human and machine, you and me, happy and sad. The sound of ideas formulated, decisions made and sounds collected, processed and coerced into infectious pop,- but pop with a strangely mutating, gene-splicing, secret life (and mind) of its own.