mxms

The dark. It’s a place some acknowledge from a distance, cowering in fear. To others, it’s hollow void is a welcomed solace; a destination of comfort and safety. For Ariel and Jeremy, otherwise known as “Me and My Shadow”(or MXMS for short), it’s their un-written reality. The two met by chance in a studio in the San Fernando Valley in late 2013; Ariel having just arrived in Los Angeles from New York City. What was to be a short writing session instantly blossomed into something poingent and deeply moving as their personal stories meshed into song over the coming weeks and months. The pair moved through the discovery that expelling love, death, pain, and fear into art brought instant relief not only to their personal lives; but became readily relatable to others navigating the broken state of our world and its current affairs. Offering hope through honesty showered from broken beats, dark pianos, angry synthesizers, and Ariel’s unparalleled hypnotic voice, MXMS carves yet another name on the genre tree…funeral pop. With a gamut of releases and their first feature cinema score slated deep into 2017, MXMS challenges our darkness to come to light through sound and visual stimuli in the same blunt and dramatic fashion that the duo’s influencers Massive Attack, Tricky and others began during the renaissance of technological music. “MXMS’s music frequently swells from lush yet painfully intimate lows to rousing and inspirational cinematic highs, demanding to be mined for a transformative film montage. The duo relishes straddling the fine line between light and dark–as well as navigating, and often deliberately disrupting, the fault line between their fierce desires to both shun industry norms, and to share their music with the world.” –Kurt McVey for Interview Magazine