Kid Koala is for the children
Years ago when living in Montreal I rented an absolute shithole of an apartment for $225 a month. And when I say shithole I mean worse-than-halfway-houses-for-broke-students shithole: The balcony jutting out from my room slanted at a near-45 degree angle bottles would frequently roll off it nearly shattering on passersby below. The floorboards were non-existent. My cat battled raccoons who’d find their way inside — this happened more than once. He had rabies shots.
But I loved the place. And I loved its mythology too: There were spray-painted koalas adorning its backyard. My tiny room was outfitted with peeling Ninja Tune stickers. And it was as legend had it an apartment once occupied by Kid Koala.
But those were rumours. Fantastic ones at that. So when I had the opportunity to ask Koala the nom de plume of Eric San for confirmation I leapt at the chance.
“Oh man I totally lived there — there was tons of mojo in that apartment! 3701 Ste. Dominique right?” he says. He’s correct. I describe the mint-green room in which I lived. “That was my record room but I have no idea where the graffiti came from. Man I didn’t even have a shelving unit back then there were records all over the floor. That takes me back — that was before I signed to Ninja [Tune his record label] and that room was my little four-track studio!”
It’s difficult envisioning Koala crammed in a crusty shoebox bedroom mostly because now he’s one of the world’s most celebrated and inventive DJs. Renowned for his artful manipulation of the form his latest LP 12-Bit Blues has Koala scratching his way through crates of musty Delta blues armed with an SP-1200 isolating the music’s raw emotion one sample at a time. It’s perfectly Koala: Here he uses a revered if arguably antiquated sampler to bring out the best in crates of forgotten LPs.
“[The SP-1200] is part of the arsenal for so many hip-hop records” he says. “Because it’s a 12-bit sampler as opposed to a 16-bit but it has this grit to the sound — it’s not quite lo-fi but anything you put through has a specific tone. Some people in the beat world swear by it and I’ve wanted it since I was a kid — but it cost $5000 when I was growing up and that’s a lot for a 12-year-old with a paper route.”
He laughs. “And blues are the next chapter of my career — and [it makes sense] because a lot of hip-hop DJing traces back to the Delta. I mean even in my early recordings I was always trying to bend notes on a turntable [like bluesmen]. You can make turntables sound like anything — the challenge is to see if you can play them tastefully or in different fields or to see if you can get them to emote differently. It’s the great thing about turntables: They’re chameleons.”
Koala isn’t lying — in fact he’s also pushing new boundaries with his latest live outing The Space Cadet Headphone tour which lands at the National Music Centre on Thursday December 13. Along with the Exploratorium — a gallery featuring artwork and artifacts from Space Cadet the graphic novel and album he created for his young daughter — the performance will also feature a fully immersive concert with audience members reclining together in inflatable pods experiencing Koala’s live scratching via wireless headsets. It is he notes a fully private concert experienced in a public setting.
“It’s spooky because if you ever take your headphones out it’ll be dead silent” says Koala laughing. “But because it’s pretty antisocial we try to get audience members onstage to play along with instruments. The challenge at the NMC is to see how we can fit the existing space and the instruments they have into the performance.”
As for the music itself Koala says that many of the songs were written to be deliberately downtempo — they were assembled in a studio with his daughter’s crib nearby. “Everything on it is delicate subtle and created on headphones — we didn’t even use the studio’s monitors” he adds. “So the most honest way to experience these songs is through headphones.”
To add to that experience Koala also enlisted the National Film Board’s Elaine Chan to provide animations bringing Space Cadet ’s illustrated component to life. “We wanted to have a completely different experience than a standing-room-only show. I got tired of going to shows in all one format. So we opened up this show to a cozy immersive format — it’s a whole new palette for my music.”