Glaswegian electronic group Looper have announced their return with a mammoth five-CD box set, containing tracks from across their back catalogue and including material from a new album, Offgrid:Offline. These Things is out via Mute, who released their last album, 2002’s The Snare, and sees the band turning the notion of the box set around a touch – rather than simply including all their albums, which also include Up A Tree from 1999 and 2000’s The Geometrid, as they stand, they’re reordering all of the tracks across the five discs, under five headings: lexiphonics, kinokraft, voxtrot, transmitte and melos.
The band was formed in 1997 by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart David and his wife Karn, kicking off with a multimedia show to raise funds for Stuart’s now Turner Prize-nominated sister Karla Black at Glasgow School of Art, before going on to release albums through Sub Pop and Jeepster as well as contributing music to film soundtracks, including Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky. Says Tim Burgess (fact fans: the Charlatans frontman came to the aid of Looper by providing a spare set of AA batteries when their sampler died at a 1999 show in LA): "I wasn’t even exactly sure where the music came from: the past, the present, the future, another life or a parallel universe but it totally chimed with what I loved – a starkness attached to the glitches and bleeps but a real go get ’em soul to go alongside that." The box set will be out on April 13, and for the time being, get acquainted with the band through a five-track sampler above.
