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The Times

Why MaJiKer is the French Mark Ronson

My film-making obsession is to illustrate the creative process. I would have a field day with this indie pop musician

My obsession when making movies is to illustrate the creative process, whether in music, poetry, sculpture or painting. I would have a field day with the indie pop musician MaJiKer (pictured), whose given name is Matthew Jon Ker. I’d have a sequence where he’d paint the Lascaux cave walls with splashes of primary colours, painting his face and body as well, beating his chest like a drum to raise the dead. Though not yet 30, Ker is already a disciplined and successful music producer and performer, about to promote his first album, Body-Piano-Machine, in a series of concerts in early November, in Brighton, Birmingham and London (at the ICA). The video for his single Flesh & Bone is out now; Tongue, his second single, will follow. Born in Birmingham, Ker has lived for several years in Paris , where he’s the French version of Mark Ronson, producing, arranging and launching the careers of the best of current pop chanteuses. His French-inflected English reminds me of these lines of the poet Rimbaud: “I am an inventor ... a musician, even, who has found something which may be the key to love ... It is necessary to be totally modern.” Ker is modern: unusual, unique, abstract and compelling. His work is a “sonic theatre experiment”, he says. Now that he is composing his own works, you must see him live for the full effect. Not only a lyricist and minimalist composer who wraps you in aural cocoons of melody, he’s also a body percussionist, staging a theatrical tour de force with piano and toy synthesizer. A body percussionist is a human beatbox. MaJiKer uses his own chest, face, mouth and hands in a rhythm of thumps, pounds, taps, blows; pops, slaps, clicks and snaps — a flurry of above the waist tap-dancing and vocal mimicry of urban boombox ka-chooms and chugga-chuggas. (“The hands give a focus.”) His hands dance about his face and chest, making impeccable co-ordination look simple and graceful, while the rhythms are fast and driven. It’s a juggler’s art, and sound is what he’s juggling. Ker grew up in a suburban family with an older sibling. “I was the quiet one, the listener,” he says. He was playing piano at the age of 5, and percussion at 11. In performance and recording he relies on his Yamaha PSS-270 keyboard from 1986 (“my little machine”), whose limits are intentional (“the presets are absurd”). It gives his songs the “1980s naïve space-age sound” that accompanied his childhood. In his studio a muscle-bound Rambo doll perches on his piano, his plastic face fixed in an heroic grin. What does Rambo make of it all? Ker is defying gravity. He plays evocative melancholy tunes on the piano or takes up a mallet and cudgels the piano strings. MaJiKer shapes air with his hands into percussives, plosives, body-drumming, vibrato. It’s a paradox: constant motion and improvisation, woven into moody lyrics and upbeat dance tunes (Strings & Wires) by an unusually calm and still intelligence. He’s a pop composer who is his own band (with performance support by singers whom he’s produced). Ker jumps among his “trinity of Body-Piano- Machine”, applying himself to music as a painter does to canvas. Colour is important to him — red for body, blue for piano and electric green for the circuitry of his Yamaha machine. Splashes of paint punctuate his shows, where the actress Bénédicte Le Lay smears red, blue and green on his face and white shirt while teasing, berating or embracing him. Ker, a graduate of Dartington Arts College in Devon, is in the tradition of David Byrne and Kate Bush, creating catchy, beautiful tunes and lyrics from a sonic mix of sounds and odd repetitions that oscillate between passion and remoteness, hinting at a wild heart of darkness. He’s a master of remix — rearranging the music behind vocals for Philip Glass, Temposhark and Nico Muhly (the composer for the film The Reader). MaJiKer, like his name, is an amalgam of influences. His grandfather lived in Bangalore, making him Scottish by way of India, just as Ker is Birmingham by way of Paris. He’s toured the world these past two years performing with Camille, whose albums Le Fil (Thread) and Music Hole he produced. He constantly travels to Iceland and Sweden to collaborate — the Yamaha can just about squeeze into his luggage. He lives “very much in the now”, he says, but with the experimental spark of a Renaissance man. He imagines his piano burning and giving birth from the flames to a baby, the little Yamaha keyboard, who cries like Pinocchio: “I would like to become a real piano.” Ker has an impish sense of humour. His tunes are a play between amusement, wonder, trance, threat and melancholy. He’s more than confident about his work, yet can transmit an oceanic wistfulness in his single Flesh & Bone, singing in his melodic pure falsetto, with synth ringtones and washes of sound. In the sublime video directed by Raphael Neal, MaJiKer plays a Napoleonic soldier adrift in modern Paris. “I know the time is here,” he sings. I vouch for that — his time is here. Body-Piano-Machine is out now on Gaymonkey Records. MaJiKer plays the Hare & Hounds, Birmingham (Nov 3), Unitarian Church, Brighton (Nov 6), and the ICA, London SW1 (Nov 9); www.myspace.com/majiker Read more at www.timesonline.co.uk

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Benoît Mandelbrot, Novel Mathematician, Dies at 85

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.

His death was caused by pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge.

Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

“Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,” said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. “He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study.”

Graphic representations of the Mandelbrot set have been implanted in popular culture, gracing T-shirts and album covers.

In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.” Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.”

For most of his career, Dr. Mandelbrot had a reputation as an outsider to the mathematical establishment. From his perch as a researcher for I.B.M. in New York, where he worked for decades before accepting a position at Yale University, he noticed patterns that other researchers may have overlooked in their own data, then often swooped in to collaborate.

“He knew everybody, with interests going off in every possible direction,” Professor Mumford said. “Every time he gave a talk, it was about something different.”

Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.

“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”

In the 1950s, Dr. Mandelbrot proposed a simple but radical way to quantify the crookedness of such an object by assigning it a “fractal dimension,” an insight that has proved useful well beyond the field of cartography.

Over nearly seven decades, working with dozens of scientists, Dr. Mandelbrot contributed to the fields of geology, medicine, cosmology and engineering. He used the geometry of fractals to explain how galaxies cluster, how wheat prices change over time and how mammalian brains fold as they grow, among other phenomena.

His influence has also been felt within the field of geometry, where he was one of the first to use computer graphics to study mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, which was named in his honor.

“I decided to go into fields where mathematicians would never go because the problems were badly stated,” Dr. Mandelbrot said. “I have played a strange role that none of my students dare to take.”

Benoît B. Mandelbrot (he added the middle initial himself, though it does not stand for a middle name) was born on Nov. 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936 his family fled the Nazis, first to Paris and then to the south of France, where he tended horses and fixed tools.

After the war he enrolled in the École Polytechnique in Paris, where his sharp eye compensated for a lack of conventional education. His career soon spanned the Atlantic. He earned a master’s degree in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, returned to Paris for his doctorate in mathematics in 1952, then went on to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for a postdoctoral degree under the mathematician John von Neumann.

After several years spent largely at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Dr. Mandelbrot was hired by I.B.M. in 1958 to work at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Although he worked frequently with academic researchers and served as a visiting professor at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was not until 1987 that he began to teach at Yale, where he earned tenure in 1999.

Dr. Mandelbrot received more than 15 honorary doctorates and served on the board of many scientific journals, as well as the Mandelbrot Foundation for Fractals. Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles.

“He doesn’t spend months or years proving what he has observed,” said Heinz-Otto Peitgen, a professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen. And for that, he said, Dr. Mandelbrot “has received quite a bit of criticism.”

“But if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences,” Professor Peitgen said, “he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.”

Besides his wife, Dr. Mandelbrot is survived by two sons, Laurent, of Paris, and Didier, of Newton, Mass., and three grandchildren.

When asked to look back on his career, Dr. Mandelbrot compared his own trajectory to the rough outlines of clouds and coastlines that drew him into the study of fractals in the 1950s.

“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.” Read more at www.nytimes.com