My first encounter with Kane West was at short-lived north London club night Eternal last year. Playing as part of an unofficial PC Music showcase alongside smaller acts from the label’s roster, his set followed the misshapen Evanescence samples of club music producer Spinee and the upbeat Eurotrance leanings of labelmate Danny L Harle. Against this backdrop, I was surprised by Kane West’s music: it felt like it had more in common with the gritty grooves of old school Chicago house than the contorted pop that’s usually associated with PC Music. One thing Kane West’s music does share with the label is its wicked sense of humour, with daft vocal samples and OTT flute solos laid over jacking house rhythms and gnarly basslines. And, of course, there’s that choice of artist alias.

You can read all sorts of things into that name, but Gus Lobban—the brains behind Kane West, and one third of Anglo-Japanese pop band Kero Kero Bonito—says that there’s not much of a grand statement behind it. Perhaps the moniker is “more bait” than other pun-tastic club producers like Joy Orbison and Lindsay Lowend, he admits when we meet in the centre of his hometown, the Bromley suburb of south-east London. Like anything even vaguely associated with PC Music, Lobban’s tracks have been dismissed by some as a conceptual prank: a critique of house and techno rather than a celebration of it. But from Aphex Twin to Legowelt to Todd Terje, dance music has always had an eccentric side, as recognised by Montreal techno institution Turbo Recordings, who put out Kane West's Expenses Paid EP this summer—his first post-PC Music release. For all his goofiness, he's an artist making some of the grooviest house music around right now.

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Growing up in the commuter belt just outside of London, Lobban started making “wack GarageBand electronica” after discovering iconic electronic acts 808 State and LFO. Pretty soon he was exploring music from the weirder end of the dance spectrum: Chicago house records, acid tracks, and Sheffield bleep’n’bass. He cites leftfield dance music legends Maurice Fulton and Ceephax Acid Crew as major influences—artists who understood that you can still be serious about your music even if you don’t take yourself too seriously. In early 2014, he started the Kane West project with an irreverent remix of Tiga and Audion’s “Let’s Go Dancing”—dubbed “Let’s (Not) Go Dancing”. It wasn’t the first time Lobban had made dance music, but it was the first time he’d hit upon an aesthetic that unified his ideas.

Lobban has played Kane West sets at Berlin’s Panorama Bar, at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, and before heading out on a US tour with Kero Kero Bonito in support of Skylar Spence, he performed recently at influential London clubnight FWD>>. If anyone at these nights had their preconceptions about Kane West and his associations with PC Music, they disappeared on the dancefloor. “[People] really get it,” Lobban beams, “They just roll with it, no hang-ups. But that’s what dance music should do—it should cut through all that.”