I-D Magazine N0.137 New Faces Issue. Feb 95
Tony Marcus

It was the track Ruthless Compassion on Bedouin Ascent's eponymous debut EP that suggested a strong talent had arrived. It had a densely sensual energy and inner calm that was different from any other techno record. Way beyond dance, this was the tense, low-light sound of sweat on hot flesh. And you didn't need to be into Derrick May or rave culture to appreciate it: just feeling kind of physical, warm and spiritual would do. Now, over two years later, Bedouin (aka Kingsuk Biswas (or Biz) has released a debut LP on Rising High, Science, Art And Rltual, that's been hailed as a classic of the new semi-techno, semi-ambient music of the 90s. And like that first single, the album imagines a world where pagan ritual and sexual magick linger over soft dub-Inflected rhythm.

"When I first started making music, I saw it as part of a long tradition of people that were creative going right back to primitive people rubbing a couple of stones together,” says Biz. Now 26, he talks about himself as a human being responding to his historical, present and spiritual environment. Living in London, he works from a bedroom studio and meshes flutes, temple bells and gongs with electronic and computer-mapped textures. At once archaic and futuristic, his tracks gently inspire the mind with a strange set of possibilities. " There's a lot to be said for mysticism in the true sense of the word," Biz offers, "not as some kind of external deity, but as a means by which the world takes to communicate with us. By being just out of reach, it instills us with a need to strive further. And what's really important is the fact that someone strives rather than achieves because achievements in themselves are pretty abstract."

Plans for this year include an album that reworks some older, unreleased material and, if we're lucky, some more of that late-night tantric-shag music.