The claws have come out in the music production scene with SBTRKT‘s team accusing Disclosure of ripping off his artistic vision. The series of tweets that were protaganised by SBTRKT’s art director A Hidden Place compare the artwork of Disclosure’s soon to be released album Caracal to the 2014 SBTRKT album Wonder Where We Land. A Hidden Place didn’t stop at the album artwork though; he continued to extend the “copycat” behaviour to practically everything possible; the mask theme in the first albums, the song Wildfire (supposedly too close to Disclosure’s festival name ‘Wild Life’) and even an app.

The Tweets by A Hidden Place have since been deleted, but in them, he called Disclosure “really cute wanting to be like SBTRKT. But what’s up with going from face to mythical creature?” and @tweeting Pitchfork Magazine. He went on to tell readers “Don’t cop our creative that’s so personal to us” and described the work by Disclosure as a “quick cut and paste of artistic ideas. Perhaps cos they can’t afford to pay creatives?”. SBTRKT himself also weighed in, but on a slightly more restrained level.

The Disclosure cover, named after the wildcat species that appears on it, actually bears very little resemblance at all to the SBTRKT album (take a look for yourself in the photo gallery above). Maybe the immediate media attention that their comments motivated both SBTRKT and A Hidden Place to quickly retract their comments (or at least proffer a copout “Disclosure are great guys” response). I don’t want to tell A Hidden Place how to suck eggs, but if you don’t want to start a shit show, maybe don’t go off at other acts via social media and @tag a major music publication.

Luke Karakas.

More SBTRKT:

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