Welcome to the planet of sound. " If a girl breaks up with me, I actually have to go hole up in a studio somewhere and listen to 900 spoken-word records to get it off my chest." (Photo: Nufonia)

[by Scott Thill]

Sonic wizards come in all shapes and sizes. And Kid Koala's kind can't stop producing, whether that is DJ sessions, computer and puppet animations, graphic novels and more. From his recent release Your Mom's Favorite DJ to the launch of his online moviehouse Nufonia.com to his Seattle rock band Slew and parts outward, the Canadian virtuoso has been anything but a slacker. Better yet, he's done it all with both throwaway and bleeding-edge tech, and kept his sparkling sense of humor the whole way home. He's Morphizm's kind of artist, which is why I talked to him for so long for both my online mag and the print mag RES, which died recently I hear. (Too bad.) Anyway, here's our uncut rap from the dying embers of 2006. And here's hoping Koala's 2007 is just as busy.

Morphizm: Talk about your narrative approach to turntablism. Where did you develop it?
Kid Koala: If I had to go back really far, I'd say it had to be my experiences with the '70s storybook records. They were worlds of story, narrative, spoken word, music, sound effects, so those ideas were planted into my brain very early in life. And as I got into hip-hop and instrumental music in my high school years, that became a part of it as well. I was also deep into the production of comedy records, from Monty Python to Cheech and Chong and so on. The production that went into those records was impressive. It comes down to all of that, which drove my decisions to work with narrative in a musical fashion. You know it's funny: I was always jealous of the guitar guys….well, maybe not jealous, but perhaps in awe of their skill. Because they have it easy: They have the talent for words and melodies that I don't necessarily have. If a girl breaks up with me, I actually have to go hole up in a studio somewhere and listen to 900 spoken-word records to get it off my chest. And that is really what you are listening to. When people listen to my records, they might be thrown off at first, but when they dig in and discover why things are put into the order that they are, why some records were selected over the thousands of others that I listen to, they start to see the energy that is there. And that's the Holy Grail for DJs: We're using machines, using pre-recorded music or others people's voices saying things that have nothing necessarily to do with what's on our minds, but it's about how we use all of it -- and scratches -- together to transmit our personalities. It might be the most foreign of foreign languages, but at its roots, it's still very simple.

Morphizm: I'm doing a piece on your studio. What does your workspace say about you?
Kid Koala: Well, it's a mess. I like to make messy recordings. Things that sound sort of broken, know what I mean? I have a lot of old equipment -- most of it older than me actually -- but I can't get mad at it, because I was taught to respect my elders. But let's put it this way: We have a board here called Becky, which is an old film production console that I picked up. In fact, this is the first album I recorded it on. And while we were mixing it, we realized that it may be technology but it breathes, in that we could leave everything in the same place and mix one – I think because it's old and some parts need to be replaced – but we could just leave all the faders, levels and EQs where they are, do two passes and it'll sound totally different. So mixing the album was kind of like surfing; half of it was making sure I got all my fader slides in, but on the other side, it was the oceanic nature of the machine. It was all about whether it wanted to give me a wave or not, know what I mean? I did this whole record on reel-to-reel tape fed into a console, so it there were several, several things that could go wrong. And also those things sound good to me: the tape head get magnetized so all of a sudden the tape starts sounding like a guitar, which is pretty cool.

Morphizm: Which seems to be important in the age of digital tech. You don't get those kinds of mistakes or opportunities with digital.
Kid Koala: Exactly. You have surprise yourself in the studio, I think. That said, I don't try to sneak up behind myself and say “Boo!” or anything. But you do kind of have an idea of what you want to get down, and when you're using all this old machinery, including records, you'll get a skip into another part of the record that's even better. How you recover from that beat juggling can end up becoming the most wicked fill on the record. I kind of let all that happen.

Morphizm: Yeah, it seems like that volatility and unpredictability would increase your technique.
Kid Koala: It just has a grit to it. I don't make sparkly records. I mean, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was done on a four-track cassette, so this is like the 10-years-after version, done on a reel-to-reel machine that was once in line, but fell out at some point. And that point is when everything got interesting. There's something about it. I don't want to get too pretentious, but if you spill paint on the canvas, you have to deal with it. Whether you like it or think it sucks, you have to deal with it. You can't just hit the "Undo" button. Either you cover it up with more paint or you decide that it is no longer a painting of a house, it's a painting of a dinosaur. Which happens a lot to me, musically speaking: "This is no longer a jazz tune, it's the soundtrack to a car chase."

Morphizm: You turn mistakes into opportunities.
Kid Koala: Exactly. Roll with the punches. And usually I get pummeled in the studio. I would say that outside of animation, this is the most tedious way to put your craft together. I think the animators are heavier gluttons for punishment, but DJs are close second.

Morphizm: But you seem to enjoy it. What keeps you coming back to these old machines?
Kid Koala: It forces me to make decisions more, even though multi-track tape offers more than, say, mono. But with that there are still parameters: I wasn't about to get into tape splicing or anything on this record, which is a craft or art unto itself. I wanted to make layers on multi-track tape, and that in itself wasn't going to be the goal. I was going to put down what I put down on tape, and just deal with it. It's a much more tactile thing for me. And the other thing is that there are boundaries: One reel only has like 15 to 20 minutes on it, so you have to what you have to say in the time allotted and get out of there. So that's why each side is about 15 minutes long. Well, the second side has a bunch of silence and an extra track, but we did that in mastering, so whatever. It was an experiment of sorts: I had 15 minutes to build an arc out of a pile of random records.

[Next Page: "I can't speak for the whole movement of electronic music, or the smaller movement of the scratch population, but none of us would have jobs without the technology..."]

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