Raw, lo-fi and off-the-wall. Sounds like Serious Trouble.

"It’s just a name," say Susumu Mukai, the quietly spoken Japanese man behind Zongamin. "The word doesn’t exist. ‘Min’ is a bit like vitamin. I don’t know really. When I started I wanted it to sound like a band from another dimension. So I came up with a different word for it."

And a different world it is: genre-confused, dirty, funked up, fuzzy, instrumental and generally a bit off-the-wall. "I wouldn’t like to put it in any musical genre but I guess it’s quite raw and lo-fi," Susumu says.

Susumu grew up in rural Japan, catching stag beetles and battling them with friends to the soundtrack of his mother’s western pop music. Then, at the age of 11, he moved to East Anglia’s famously liberal Summerhill School. "The main point is that the kids and teachers had equal rights and could suggest things at the meetings we had every week," he recalls. "It was a very democratic education."

While he was there he was persuaded by a friend to learn the bass: "He was really into playing blues guitar and basically he wanted a bass player. He found this bass guitar that had been thrown out and we fixed it, and I started learning." While playing in pub bands he was also making his first forays into recording. "I was into chart music and I was making re-edits of my favourite songs on a double cassette tape recorder."

Susumu soon moved on to sampling and cutting together his own live instruments while attending The Royal College Of Art. He played the results to a friend of his, Mike Silver of the band Sonovac, who was starting his own label. "Midnight" Mike liked what he heard and signed him to the fledgling Flesh records. His first track, Serious Trouble, then found its way onto Soulwax’s 2 Many DJs cut-up compilation.

Zongamin is tribal, rock ’n’ roll dance, fused with a jazz anything-goes attitude. "I don’t really think about what kind of music I’m making when I’m making it," he says. And it shows. Matt Walton 28 March 03

Zongamin, released 24 March 03 on Flesh Records/XL Recordings.

useful link www.xl-recordings.com