FAIK - Swole

The man formerly known as Stay+ and Christian AIDS returns with some ravey new music.

FAIK is a new name for a familiar face. First known as Christian AIDS, then as Stay+, then as Stay Positive, FAIK is the latest alias of day-glo producer Matt Farthing.

Farthing gained a reputation as a new school prankster when he was starting out as Christian AIDS four or five years ago, playing with the press by shrouding the whole project in a slightly daft anonymity and conducting interviews via balloons, eventually culminating in him receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the actual Christian Aid – antics which seemed to detract from the fact that the music itself was always fairly straightforward.

Stay+ ended up releasing with labels as diverse as Ramp, Black Butter, and OWSLA, and collaborated with the one-and-only-Cooly G. He's has since explained what happened to the Christian AIDS and Stay+ monikers in a very considered piece by former Dummy editor Aimee Cliff over at The FADER.

What FAIK will eventually become in the future is anyone's guess, but for now, Farthing has three video game-inspired tracks online that you can download for free. Of those tracks, Swole certainly shows that he's still got a sense of humour, a taste for rave aesthetics, and an urge to mangle samples in cartoonish ways. Mostly, it just sounds like he's having fun making music again.

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