Melt Yourself Down
@ the Love Supreme Jazz Festival
5 July 2014

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Biography

Melt Yourself Down make sounds you can taste and smell. Strange incantations of fierce post-punk, discordant funk and wild sonic voodoo.

Centred around saxophonist Pete Wareham, they number some of the finest musicians in the land, spanning jazz, rock and world music. Theirs is music mined and hewn from North African deserts and the New York underground. Sounds blasted and blown. Jazz detonated. Rhythms to rearrange the DNA.

Melt Yourself Down have issued three calls to arms, the singles “Fix My Life,” “We Are Enough” and the full-on frenzied funk of “Release!” filling dance-floors and airwaves. The self-titled album, out in June, fulfils the promise, plunging you into an ecstatic fever dream. As Pitchfork has it, they’re “a bazaar sax smackdown that has an iron in every furnace of global psychedelia, smelted into a structure of tungsten strength.”

Live, they’re a tropical storm, lit by full-frontal fireworks and led from the front by Kushal Gaya, part finger-pointing punk shaman, part proselytising preacherman, spitting fire and brimstone calls that demand a response. Their message: Melt Yourself Down and turn yourself up. Get out of it and into it. And go.

Melt Yourself Down personel

Melt Yourself Down: Pete Wareham (Acoustic Ladyland, Polar Bear), Kushal Gaya (Zun Zun Egui), Shabaka Hutchings (Sons Of Kemet, Heliocentrics), Tom Skinner (Hello Skinny, Sons Of Kemet, Mulatu Astatke), Ruth Goller (Acoustic Ladyland, Rokia Traoré), Satin Singh (Fela!). Rubbed the right way by Leafcutter John.