63 Minutes With Mount Kimbie Right Before Their World Tour

"It's like a bunch of idiots barking at each other," Kai Campos says over the heavy bass throbbing through the walls like an underwater earthquake. Thankfully, he's not talking about our interview, but rather the current state of Dubstepforum.com, where Kai and his counterpart Dominic Maker fished for new ideas during earliest days—before they became Mount Kimbie.

We're all sitting somewhat tensely on scuffed-up leather sofas in the dressing room of New York City's Bowery Ballroom, where a sprinkle of baguette crumbs, some cheese and a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette are all that stand between us (Mount Kimbie apparently has bourgeois taste in snacks).

Downstairs, the notoriously mysterious "witch house" producer Holy Other has just started his opening set, playing to a packed house in almost complete darkness. And in exactly an hour, Dom and Kai will kick off the first show of their world tour—where they'll dutifully trot out new material from their just-released second album, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, night after night through December.

But for now, Kai is on a rant (as he seems prone to do) about the deteriorating state of Dubstepforum. "The level of conversation going on there now is very low," he says. "It's like YouTube comments, where everyone's talking at the same volume and it's totally unfiltered." Next to me, Dom—the strong and silent type—nods in agreement.

I suppose it makes sense that Mount Kimbie feels a bit overprotective over the nondescript music forum. After all, Dubstepforum did play a seminal role in nurturing the UK bass scene that exploded in 2007, catapulting dubstep from the "weirdo" stage at electronic music festivals directly into the mainstream. The forum was also where they first connected with the Berlin-based producer and Hotflush label boss Scuba, who released their first album, Crooks & Lovers, in 2010. The rest, as they say, is brief and dazzling history.

Critics and fans alike pounced on Mount Kimbie's floating, melancholy-saturated alternative to the industrial grind of that era's dubstep. It helped that their music had both emotional heft and technical pedigree. By the end of the year, Mount Kimbie was a familiar name to lots of dance music fans, yet Mount Kimbie remains critical of the album that started it all.

"There was something about the energy of that time. It didn't feel like a big leap to make our [first] record," Kai explains, "We felt like we were already part of something that was going on around us. In terms of technical ability, we didn't know what we were doing, really."

If breaking out of their post-dubstep shell was the goal, then they've achieved it. Somehow, in the three years between Crooks & Lovers and Cold Spring, Mount Kimbie found their voice—quite literally. While vocals on their first album were often samples (sometimes of their old friend from university James Blake) that were chopped, pitched up, and scattered, Cold Spring found both guys writing lyrics and crooning into their mics with the soulfulness of '90s boy band stars.

They also added saxophones, trombones and guitars to their collection of drum pads and MIDI controllers, and even recruited an old friend, Tony Kus, to play drums. In a way, Mount Kimbie became more like a traditional band—echoing the same reverse course towards "becoming more human" that Daft Punk, who famously eschewed computer programs in favor of live musicianship on Random Access Memories, is also taking.

Suddenly, a bald-headed sprite bounds into the room. Kai and Dom stand up and slap him on the back—"Great set, man"—and I realize that I'm staring at the mysterious Holy Other, whose face I hadn't recognized because, well, there aren't many pictures of him on the internet. He's exactly the opposite of what I'd expected: instead of a brooding, tortured soul, he's a ball of excited energy. I approach him and demand to know why he bothers with the shroud of anonymity when so many other DJs are chasing celebrity. "Because of my awkward face!" he squeaks, pointing with both fingers at his nose.

The room starts to fill up with managers, long-haired hippie chicks and a gruff bouncer who tells me later that the Mount Kimbie show "rocked the world." Kai looks anxious. They need silence and space to do their vocal exercises. So he politely shoos everyone out of the room.

But what will they be doing after the show, I ask as I slide out the door.

"Probably just go bowling."

Michelle nicked Mount Kimbie's beers while they were busy eating bourgeois snacks. For more backstage gossip, she is on Twitter - MichelleLHOOQ

All original photos by Christopher John Fussner.