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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