Pete Um - Joke Teeth

Pete Um ought to be as big as Elvis, or maybe Vivian Stanshall or Gruff Rhys. I thought he was Gruff Rhys for a moment, a long time ago, when someone played me a tape of him doing something with a tin. It might not have been a tin. Could have been the string off a giraffe, the tie that binds. The thing is, with Pete Um there's a Formalist cry of "Just Because" and, of course, "art for art's sake", at least, I think that's what it is; it's difficult to tell. He's probably not pissing around with cod-psychogeography like IX Tab (this isn't false modesty; that is IX Tab, if mostly accidentally) or cracking at the social edges like Hacker Farm or reinventing folkweals like Kemper Norton or burning vinyl rubber like Nochexxx or sculpting Tele-Tubby sound like Ekoplekz. He's just doing and each doing is a done, a film-sized clip, a mind-map on 1:1 scale. I think.