CD: Micachu & The Shapes and London Sinfonietta - Chopped & Screwed

Forget Lady Gaga – Mica Levi, aka Micachu, is modern pop’s true maverick. More likely to sport jeans and T-shirt than frock of flesh, she’s a skinny, scruffy tomboy who can hold her own in a game of keepie-uppie. Her take on music is similarly unassuming, but it’s also, genuinely, extraordinary. Debut album Jewellery, originally recorded for Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label but then snapped up by Rough Trade, deserved to be classed as pop, in her own eyes, because it comprised “short songs, with choruses and verses”. But its wonky and defiantly lo-fi tunes, hammered out on a tiny, charity-shop acoustic guitar, were never going to bother the charts.

 

Chopped & Screwed is even further from pop: it’s a collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, recorded live at London’s Kings Place, and billed as the “first ever classical release” not only for Micachu but for Rough Trade as a whole. Such a prospect might set alarm bells ringing, but this is no Paul McCartney-goes-ambient grand folly. Micachu’s music has always had about it the spirit of post-punk, part of the reason Rough Trade seems a good home. But she also has a classical background, having studied at the Purcell School and Guildhall. When I joined her on tour in South Africa a couple of years ago, her iPod playlist was split evenly between grime and dubstep – "Intensive Snare" by Plastician and Skepta was a particular favourite – and the microtonal composer and instrument-inventor Harry Partch.

 

"Not So Sure" opens the album with a whimper rather than a bang. In a pre-digital era, one might wonder if the tape was being mangled, or the record playing at the wrong speed, such is the impression of slow motion. The tune could soundtrack a scene of drowning, or of drifting through space – just the drifting, mind; nothing exciting like encounters with aliens. "Fall" keeps things similarly low-pitched, that gloriously natural voice at times dipping so low as to be mildly androgynous, and similarly free of pop landmarks like regularly beating drums.

Just when it dawns that Micachu really has created something outside the framework of pop, she drops "Low Dogg". There’s the same strong scoring for strings, but this time it’s highly rhythmic; there’s the same slightly disembodied quality, but now it’s visceral too. My head is nodding involuntarily to the scrubbed string ostinato. Maybe the Dogg in the title is Snoop.

In fact, though the hip-hop influence is strongest on "Low Dogg", the whole titular concept of chopping and screwing is a reference to Houston hip hop and its drink of choice, cough syrup - for the codeine, not because rapping causes sore throats (sounding like this; hence Micachu titles like "Medicine Drank", which sounds like being sucked down a particularly cosmic plug hole, and the queasy pulse of "Everything"). Yet there’s Harry Partch in there too: Micachu, already known to conjure music from a vacuum cleaner (see video below) and CD rack, built a number of homemade instruments specifically for this project.

Partch was known for splitting the octave not into 12 semi-tones, as per traditional Western notions of tonality, but rather into 43 smaller steps. Somehow, Micachu has used this wonky pitching to emulate the effects of being on codeine, thus managing to bring together these otherwise very much separate Venn diagram circles of hip-hop and American avant-garde composition. It’s unsettled and unsettling, but hugely immersive – and best of all, though nothing like her previous output, it could be no one but Micachu. There are a lot of female pop artists around in 2011, but ain’t none of ‘em coming at music like this.