Somewhere in London a man who goes by the name Max Tundra is hopefully working on some new music. He tends to do this slowly, and with the haunted precision of a perfectionist. Not that he needs to rush. His last album, Parallax Error Beheads You, came out six years ago and I am still savoring its initial rush, like a strong time-lapse medication or a particularly complex fruit.
Tundra’s music is bright, busy and complex, but introverted. I remember being a teenager and watching my kid sister nudge open the swinging door to our kitchen with her shoulder, one hand on a wicker doll stroller and the other overflowing with stuffed animals, muttering to herself about a very important tea ceremony everyone had to attend. This is a little bit what listening to Max Tundra can be like. You are bearing witness to a party happening inside someone else’s brain.
Some of it sounds like 1970s soul, some of it like prog-rock, some like Broadway showstoppers, much of it rendered on an old Amiga computer—big music crammed into a little box, bursting to get out. The Amiga is a badge of honor for Tundra, who has said he knows there are better ways to work, but liked how step-by-step the process was, forcing him to program each step on a actual QWERTY keyboard, sharp by sharp and flat by flat.
In the past year, Tundra has released two sets of much older music through his Bandcamp page: one called Selected Amiga/BBC Micro Works 85-92(a play on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92), and, more recently With Love To Mummy, covering 1993-1997, finishing off with music recorded around the time of “Children at Play”, Tundra’s 1998 debut single.
Micro Works is, as advertised, a collection of video-gamey miniatures ranging from three minutes down to forty-four seconds, some recorded when Tundra—whose given name is Ben Jacobs—was as young as 11, “hence the insistent background chatter of eighties schoolchildren,” as his accompanying notes apologize. Mummy is more self-consciously mature, straying into the kind of longer-form, left-field instrumental techno further explored on 2000’s Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be.
Both bear out his obvious influences: stadium-house auteurs the KLF, the playful, lopsided jazz and orchestral music of the composer Moondog, mid-70s Genesis and mid-90s IDM. Actually, split the difference between the two styles, add vocals and force them into pop-song lengths and you’d get something like Jacobs’ titanic 2002 album Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, which is one of those albums I would be happy to feed a five-dollar bill to every time I put it on.
For someone so notoriously tight about his art, releasing juvenilia like Micro Works and Mummy feels strangely out of character. Not that I’m complaining—for me, Tundra is the kind of musician who even at his least formal feels more worth my time than a lot of other things I could be listening to. Part of me worries that he thinks he’s been forgotten and feels some need to keep the pot warm. To that end, I say try the early work, then move swiftly to Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, and later to his remix of Freddie Mercury’s “I Was Born To Love You”. Then, if you feel moved, reach out to Ben Jacobs and tell him you’re ready for more whenever he is.