Pop Mutations presents:
Gum Takes Tooth
plus Lugas Europ
The Old Hairdressers
Friday 20th September
18+
“Straddles club and noise to perfection. Brutal. Can’t recommend it enough.”
LOUDER THAN WAR
As Gum Takes Tooth, the duo of Thomas Fug and Jussi Brightmore plot an adventurous, idiosyncratic and willfully unpredictable trajectory. Continuously exploring and mutating with an ever more nuanced approach while maintaining a staunch commitment to non-conformity, the band formed in East London in 2009 with wild gigs across the East London underground music and art scene. Early material coalesced primitive DIY Silver Apples electronics, blast beat mayhem, and experimental noise with explosive avant-punk energy.
Now marrying an unflinching beat-driven assault to a questing and transformative vision, their fourth album RECOVERY POSITION (2023)
represents a clean slate for Gum Takes Tooth at a time when this ever shifting and morphing entity sheds its skin once again, revealing a lean, formidable and precise new form.
Recalibrating their signature enmeshing of drums and electronics they landed on a propulsive all-electronic delivery that stubbornly eschews
genre constraints while maintaining the duo’s clear affinity for the rattle and rumble of bass bins under duress. Thus was birthed a unique amalgam of industrial grime aerobics, sci-fi mutant 808 protest music and hands-in-the-air rave bangers.
The album documents the tumultuous years of personal and worldwide upheaval since its predecessor. Yet the duo have alchemically transcended their circumstances, channelling the personal and political into salvation. True to form, what’s emerged is their most singular and potent work to date, simultaneously their most pop-adjacent and their most extreme.
Lugas Europ, a sonic polyglot and dedicated community servant, is best known as one half of the Glaswegian synth-pop transcendentalists FREE LOVE. Over the past several years, he has been a central figure in Glasgow's vibrant DIY music scene, working and producing at the heart of La Chunky Studios while also establishing the Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound, a community-based electronic music library. Now, Lugas presents his own dance-pop blend of naturally-fermented analog synthesis, drawing inspiration from artists like YMO, Japan, Alexander Robotnick, and Anna Domino.