Mun Sing at The White Hotel

It’s a well-worn narrative. If you played the new music of the 1990s to a 1970s audience, they’d likely be baffled – unsure whether it even counted as music. But play a lot of today’s experimental music to a noughties crowd and you’d get polite recognition. Has the the idea of the future as rupture collapsed, or does it just take more digging for the good stuff, now that the algorithmic overlords are in charge?

Listening to artists like Mun Sing nudges us towards the more optimistic outlook. This music doesn’t trade in nostalgia or comfortable déjà vu reference points. It presses forward, dense and unresolved, refusing easy placement and sounding unmistakably of the present tense.

Mun Sing is the solo alias of Bristol-based producer Harry Wright, one half of the electronic duo Giant Swan. Across several EPs and one album, he merges tongue-in-cheek playfulness with obtuse rhythms and warped vocal treatments, concocting a fiercely original, confrontational dance music.

On his debut LP Inflatable Gravestone (Planet Mu, 2023), Mun Sing explored grief and addiction following the sudden loss of his father. Built from fragmented electronics, pneumatic low-end pressure and warped vocal treatments, the record received widespread critical acclaim, including being named one of Resident Advisor’s best albums of 2023.

Since then, he’s composed music for runway shows and projects for Acne Studios, produced tracks for artists including BABii, Gaika and Iceboy Violet, and was personally invited by Björk to perform alongside her at special events in Reykjavík and New York in 2024.

Mun Sing’s latest EP, Frolik, centres on indulgence and consequence, unfolding as a surreal, demented fairytale. At its heart is the character of the Scarecrow – a “boogeyman of indulgence” embodying guilt and the shadow of excess. Drawing inspiration from stadium pop spectacle and pantomime-style audience interaction, the release marks a shift away from the grief-soaked awkwardness of Inflatable Gravestone as the music turns more frivolous and maximalist, full of high-energy hyperpop gestures and cartoonish switch-ups.

Expect that indulgent, spectacle-driven energy to carry into Mun Sing’s performance at The White Hotel, with support from Nahi Mitti – a producer navigating a “galaxy of genres” with a technical style of layering and relentless momentum.