There are some artists for whom imposing restraints and limitations upon their art would have a negative effect, making them unable to fully express themselves. Zeppelin wouldn’t have been the band they were had someone told them ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ should be 3 minutes long. Yet there are those who actively need restraints – laying down rules and structure can help them to channel their talent – for example The White Stripes’ with their three colours, three instrument rule.
Kid Koala is a hugely talent turtabalist who has toured and played with Radiohead, Gorillaz and DJ Shadow. For his 5th album, he gives himself some limitations in order to focus his skill. As a boy growing up in Montreal learning to DJ and discovering hip-hop, his holy grail of music making equipment, his shiny Gibson Les Paul, was the SP-1200 – favoured machine of Public Enemy, Pete Rock, Dr Dre and KRS-One. Now finally able to get his hands on one of these fabled machines, Kid Koala has used the restraints that this machine brings.
As he said: ‘It loads on little three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks, it only stores about 10 seconds of sound and then the longest sound you can have is about two seconds’.
He decided that by going back to production basics he would continue this deconstruction by going back to musical basics and create an album built around the root of 20th century popular music – the blues.
The DJ is in the unique position of being able to create a very modern type of art – creating a singular piece of work made up from fragments of the work of others (DJ Shadow’s peerless the best example of this) and 2 Bit Bluesis a re-imagining of the blues for the 21st century. Kid Koala samples and mixes blues records in order to create something of his own, in the same way that a bluesman uses the set rules and form of the blues in order to impose their own unique feeling and take on the blues. As Jimi said ‘the blues is easy to play, but hard to feel’. Koala takes the very basic blueprint of the blues and his SP-1200 so that he is at square one – and from this he creates outwardly, using his own artistic medium to reinterpret the most basic form of popular music.
12 Bit Blues is an off-kilter journey through the delta and the deep south, but led by a strange guide. The classic blues stomp of ‘2 Bit Blues’ is layered with the cracked and disconnected wireless voices appearing from the past that become pitch shifted and cut up in an alien way, while still keeping true to the inherent rhythm and structure of the blues.
On top of the rootsy blues landscape Koala adds his own personality – he is the one who sustains horn stabs and harmonica notes, pitches up fuzzed bass notes to create his personal melodic lines. On ‘7 Bit Blues’, his turntable scratches mirror the blues beat – the two merging as past meets present, without it ever feeling like there is a stylistic clash.
Yet out of these self-imposed restraints also arises the main problem with the record; while certainly an interesting concept and an expertly crafted one, it can often feel like an artistic exercise and although a unique take on the blues, at times it misses out on what gives the blues its power – the soul and hurt. The tracks which have the most emotional impact are those in which the vocal takes centre stage – ‘5 Bit Blues’ and ‘6 Bit Blues’. In the latter a lost vocal flounders over a downbeat rhythm, mournfully singing about ‘needing my baby by my side’ before the track builds to a crescendo of falling harmonies. The result is quite brilliant, and one of the moments where he truly locates and ‘feels’ the power of the blues, rather than just playing it.
Kid Koala has always romanticised the past (everyone should check out his breathtaking version of set closer ‘Moon River’), and 12 Bit Blues is a love-letter to the blues in the form of a production exercise, and for all of its charms and inventiveness, it comes across like a love letter that displays this affection, yet fails to consistently reproduce the feelings and emotions it celebrates.
Kid Koala’s Moon River:
