McPhee’s tracks have a worn, nocturnal feel somewhere in between Burial and the classic house and disco records he so cherishes; think Theo Parrish gone broken beat with a hefty dose of UK-referencing vocal sampling, something like that. Though his first release “Get In With You” on [nakedlunch] hearkens back to his early days producing dubstep -- slowly loping, spectral dubstep -- since then he’s made a wholesale move to house (displayed on another forthcoming release for Bristol’s Idle Hands), but he’s not just jumping on anyone’s deep house bandwagon. McPhee’s songs employ rickety, homemade breakbeats that crunch and clack as individual parts bash into each other, a fascinatingly fluid quality that only becomes enhanced when they’re mixed in and out of each other. He’s got a way with vocals, too, and while the way he cherry-picks R&B samples is nothing new, there’s something to be said for how the vocals ring out in his music with absolute clarity, the very warmth of their humanity setting the inhuman beats aglow.
A local Toronto DJ with growing prominence, Kevin McPhee is the consummate opener/warmup guy; though it's ostensibly partly due to his role as a local newcomer, his heavy-lidded house plays it to a tee. I asked him to do a mix for Futureproofing, and he’s delivered about the best thing I could ever ask from him: an all-vinyl mix of his own tracks -- forthcoming releases and dubs -- and some of his favourite contemporaries, his own personal vision of house. He’s got well over twenty wonderful tracks in his own right, and this mix shows off quite a few of ‘em. McPhee also makes for a fascinating study case, a true product of the internet age: only coming onto electronic dance music recently, McPhee's music processes and internalizes not only the rapidly-evolving world of bass music but also an entire history of house music as he discovers it all.