Musical duo Hybrid Child to make their live debut on campus

The results of a musical partnership forged at the University of Northampton will be performed in public for the very first time next week.

Hybrid Child is a 12-song collaboration between PhD student Anthony Stepniak and graduate Matt Jarman that’s been two years in the making.

The pair will be performing the piece at Avenue Campus on Wednesday 25 January, as part of the University’s Subject Futures Week – a five-day showcase of graduate career opportunities within the creative industries.

Anthony said: “The music is heavily inspired by our shared interest in a variety of music and also in academia, especially gender theory and the idea of gender identity – it is these themes that the album is based around. However, the tracks and music do function as standalone tracks to be enjoyed from a non-academic perspective.”

Lyricist Anthony and multi-instrumentalist Matt will be joined by musicians and vocalists for their performance, which will also include a question and answer session.

You can watch the video to Hybrid Child’s debut single, Streetwalker, below:

Listen to Hybrid Child’s album on the website.

To reserve your place at Wednesday’s performance, get in touch with Hybrid Child via the contact page.

Hybrid Child has already received glowing reviews, including the following, by the University’s Associate Professor in Popular Music, Dr Nathan Wiseman-Trowse:

“Is Hybrid Child a band, an album, a concept?  All of these things seemingly.  Were I to suggest an album’s worth of meditations on gender identity glimpsed through a postmodern lens, you might justifiably feel nervous.  Yet Hybrid Child beautifully melds a sophisticated and melodic pop sensibility to a complex web of stories about the things that matter most: sex, love and who we think we are at the deepest levels.

Hybrid Child is a collection of songs that work beautifully in their own right, but it’s also a series of interrogations of gender identity and power.  Songs spin out a way of seeing identity as a mask forced upon us from without, constructed by a culture that seeks to atomise the self.  Desire becomes as much a means of separation as union, although the album as whole moves towards a seemingly optimistic view of the way forward.

The songs themselves often hinge around a subject and an object, be it the runaway lover and his beau, the prostitute and her john, or the self observing its own gendered identity.  These oppositions mark out the central theme of the album, that of splitting and division as the formative component of identity.  These divisions can manifest themselves in the music too, be it florid romantic piano trounced by dubstep beats in opening track Cultural Contract (‘Exposing the cultural contract will be the key to rewriting it’) or the vaudeville pianos and Brian May guitar of Streetwalker.  There’s a musical hybridity to most of the tracks, a kind of schizophrenia of tone that is belied by the melodic accessibility of the music.  Genre-hopping it may be, but there’s a distinctive Englishness to the music too, reminiscent of XTC, The Lilac Time or The Feeling.  In heavier and more idiosyncratic moments one hears Porcupine Tree, The Cardiacs or Muse, all channelled through a distinctive singular sound that belongs solely to Hybrid Child.

Listen closely and the album maps out the struggles of love and identity.  Individuals are contained by the simulation of their own selves.  Lovers seek union through desire and evasion but it never seems enough.  Hybrid Wins the Game and Unorthodox Instrumentation hint at possible ways out, particularly through the former’s androgenised vocals and Knopfleresque guitar (the pastoral two-step of the latter is a wonderful montage too).  But in the last two tracks some kind of transcendence is achieved.  In Broken Love two seem to become one (or perhaps none as insinuated by album-closer Keep it Contained) and the listener is left to ponder how they feel about it all.

Hybrid Child is a dense work in some ways drawing heavily on poststructuralist and postmodern philosophy.  But it’s also a beautiful collection of great songs, each one deftly written and arranged, always engaging and surprising to listen to. It’s a great expression of song-writing and musicianship, but it also represents a very profound set of questions about the things that make us what we are and the things that keep us isolated from each other.  Perhaps in the Hybrid child we might find a way to confront the propaganda of the mind.”