The Clonious

Before taking part in Toronto’s 2007 Red Bull Academy—an annual gathering renowned for its roster of forward-thinking musicians and creators—Viennese guitarist, sampler, and producer Paul Movahedi had already contributed to several ensembles blending post-rock, jazz, and funk. The experience prompted him to focus more intensively on studio work, and by 2009 his track “Valediction” appeared on the compilation Circulations and Jay Scarlett Present New Worlds. That exposure drew the interest of Ubiquity, the Los Angeles label specializing in left-coast soul and electronica, which signed Movahedi and, under the alias the Clonious, issued the atmospheric funk EP Adroit Adventures in June of that year. He selected the name to evoke his affinity for sampling and the jazz recordings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Early endorsements from BBC Radio 1’s Mary Anne Hobbs and BBC Radio’s Benji B, alongside encouragement from Los Angeles’s experimental underground, encouraged the Clonious to assemble a debut album. Merging approaches reminiscent of Flying Lotus, Madlib, Samiyam, Jazzanova, Prefuse 73, and Georgia Anne Muldrow with his own Austrian perspective, Between the Dots reached listeners via Ubiquity in October 2009, when the producer was twenty-three.