Kid Koala: "I'm not a dancefloor type of guy!"

Kid Koala, aka Canadian DJ, composer and graphic novelist Eric San, is one of the quintessential Ninja Tune artists. He has always taken a playful approach to turntablism, constructing abstract narratives from obscure vinyl, often accompanied by stunning comic book artwork, as on 2003’s Nufonia Must Fall, and the seminal Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (2000). After working with artists such as Gorillaz and Amon Tobin, and touring as a turntablist rock band with The Slew, San returned to a special project which has been eight years in the making.

The result is Space Cadet – an elegiac, wistful graphic novel about a robot and his space-explorer companion. San has reached new heights of innovation and musical experimentation, soundtracking the book with beautifully composed piano, scratches and found sounds. He has designed a live headphone concert involving a ‘pop-up planetarium,’ which comes to London in November. 

With frequent lapses into giggles, San helped illuminate the process behind this very personal, moving, utterly charming and high-concept work of art, and gave us the inside dope on working as a composer from everyone from the Adult Swim network to Edgar Wright, and of course hip-hop’s Sesame Street, the mighty Yo Gabba Gabba.

The last time we spoke you had just released Your Mom’s Favourite DJ. Since then, you’ve worked on a number of collaborative projects, including The Slew, the band you called the ‘Nirvana of turntablism.’ How does it feel to be working on your solo music again, and doing graphic illustration?

This book started even before Your Mom’s  Favourite DJ was released, back in 2003, but I  guess the technique I was using for each page was quite time consuming, which was why it took so long. But even when I was on tour with The Slew, there was always an hour a day when I’d be working on this project. I just wasn’t telling anybody, because I didn’t know exactly how long it would take…. And the answer was eight years!  

Was the fact you were using scratch boards for each page the main reason the project took a while to complete?

Definitely. In the end, the joke was on me. I knew the story was set in space, so I decided to go with this white-on-black scratch board format, thinking that I wouldn’t have to colour in all of space with a black marker. But little did I know that the minute you do an indoor scene, or anything with any kind of background or detail, it takes… I don’t know… [laughs] It takes considerably longer!

Can you tell us a little about what Space Cadet is about?

It’s a story about a robot. He’s a guardian robot, and he’s programmed to raise a human child. His ‘daughter’ is raised to become a really celebrated space explorer, an astrophysicist. But he’s just a one-program robot. So the story starts with her going on her first solo mission, and through a series of flashbacks, we piece together their relationship. They have this unique bond. Even though they’re light years apart, and she’s just floating in her one-person craft while he’s stuck in this city on Earth, they still have this parallel life somehow.

The storytelling in Space Cadet is very tight – a departure from your more abstract work such as Nufonia Must Fall. Was this intentional – did you know the shape and conclusion of the story before you began?

I did a pencil version of the storyboard while I was on tour, just in sketchbooks – that was done in 2004. I pretty much had the plot I was gonna unfold back then. After that it was just the slow process of doing each page and panel on the scratchboard, and it took some time! But yes, the story was written many years ago.

The themes of the story are quite deep and personal – you’re talking about family, loss and belonging, childhood memories. Was there anything specific that influenced the story, such as being a dad?

Yeah, that was one of the things that really began to resonate with me recently. Three years ago, my daughter was born, and at that point I had nearly finished all the boards, but it really inspired me to do the music. It was just an amazing time in my life. Also, my wife and I had lost some of our grandparents, so we were all reflecting on those types of things. Missing them, but also realising that they’re still here, in a way.

Are there any specific artists who also use the etching style who you looked to for inspiration with the art?

Y’know, it was one of those things where I just found this board in France, I was in an art store there, and I’d seen some of this kind of work done before, just in random art galleries, and things like that. But definitely since then, people have been showing me a lot of amazing stuff in this medium! I think at this point I can’t not mention someone like Thomas Ott, because when I saw his stuff I was like: ‘Woah! He’s on a whole other level!’ But I think what informed my storytelling more were things like Charlie Chaplin films. I just have this real affinity for that type of storytelling.  There are sweet moments, funny moments and melancholy moments, and they’re often underscored with this piano-based music. I was raised with those films – my parents loved them, and we watched them all, as a family. That was probably the primary influence.

There are references to the city the robot lives in being Nufonia. Is it meant to be read as though this is the same place where Nufonia Must Fall was set?

No, I don’t think so (laughs). Nufonia is a random mishmash of cities. A lot of this was written on tour, and sometimes it’s kind of a blur. There’s a panel in Space Cadet that’s directly inspired by Oxford Street in London. You can see a double-decker bus in it! At another point she [the astronaut] is re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. You have this image of the buildings and the architecture in the city that she’s approaching, and if you look closely there are buildings from Montreal, from New York and San Francisco. So in Nufonia, all of these places are there… I think because often I don’t settle in one place long enough to really get a full concept of it. I get a really short glimpse, and then I try to integrate it into the artwork somehow. But then, by the time I’m finishing that drawing, I’m five countries away (laughs). Nufonia is a blanket city – I just toss things in that don’t really exist together. It’s everywhere and nowhere!

The music for Space Cadet is very rich and organic – you use pianos, music boxes and large helpings of your beloved pops, clicks and static from vinyl. Tell us a bit about the generative process for the album – has it also been in the works for eight years?

I started recording the music once my daughter was born. We had a lot of time in the studio; I took time off the road, and usually it would be on my watch – so she [San’s daughter] would be in the crib in the studio, or at other times she’d be in my arms. I’d be rocking her in my left arm and trying to play chord cycles on the piano with my right without waking her up, so I think by default it had a kind of lullaby feel to it. She had a big influence on the music! There were all kinds of things running through my head, kind of flashing forward, thinking like: ‘She’s just a tiny baby now, but probably I’ll blink my eyes and we’ll be sending her off to college.’ So it was really about trying to catch those moments, because they’re so quick. I was just really compelled to spend time in the studio, and the piano was the instrument I was drawn towards, because it was the only one I could play with one hand!

Did you make a conscious effort to write something more traditionally ‘musical’ to go with ‘Space Cadet’?

A lot of the music I would listen to while I was drawing Space Cadet was instrumental, score-type music, or downtempo records or whatever, when I was trying to get into the zone. I felt like, because there is no dialogue in the book, there didn’t need to be any dialogue in the music. But really I just had these melodies in my head, and I was just trying to find ways to create those melodies… so the first thing was the piano, then after that trying to create all these counterpoints, and adding layers with the turntables. It’s really stealth though, now that I’ve taken a step back and listened to it – I can see why people would say, ‘Wow, there’s no scratching on it at all,’ but actually there are turntables on every single track. Just quite stealthy ones! Which is fine – I didn’t really feel it was really focused on the turntable work.

The music you composed for this project fits very well with the more composition-focused artists on Ninja Tune, such as Bonobo and Cinematic Orchestra. Does the use of lots of instrumentation on Space Cadet indicate the start of a new phase for you musically?

I have been doing more work scoring over the last ten years, for the National Film Board of Canada, and also for Adult Swim and Cartoon Network, for animated stuff. But I’ve always been a fan of film score music, people like Carter Burwell and Morricone… a lot of that stuff really moves me musically, so it’s a bit of a challenge to me to see if I can bring turntables into that realm, and have them live comfortably there. I guess at one point for me musically, it was about being in a live scenario and trying to play them differently, just because I didn’t want to get stuck in this dancefloor-oriented world the whole time. I don’t actually… [laughs] I’m not a dancefloor type of guy! My music is written in the middle of winter, in Montreal so… you’re in a different zone altogether. I started scratching in 1988, so there are always peaks and valleys when you’re into a certain style of practice, you know? You learn a certain way of practicing on your instrument, and then at one point I was just like, ‘Yeah, there’s got to be more to life than this.’ So I just kind of pushed myself to see if I could play differently.

Given that the project is so cinematic, with each track queued to a particular page, why did you choose to do a comic book and album as opposed to an animation?

I did a lot of animation in high school. I know that’s the most tedious of tedious arts. Obviously I have a long attention span when it comes to working on a project [laughs], but I think, with animation, if I’d have gone that route… you probably wouldn’t have heard about it for another twenty years [laughs]. A lot of my friends are animators, and they’re much better at it than I am. I would love to one day maybe, hopefully, work with them on a Space Cadet themed project… I think making music with bits of records is the equivalent of animation! Sometimes you’re boiling it down to the most miniscule elements and trying to patch them together to build it into this whole. But the reward is always there when you see animation. It’s like magic, especially if you’ve been there for the whole process. But for me, the book was written as a book. I guess someone could use it as a screenplay, if they wanted to make it as an animated film, but when I wrote it I definitely wanted it to be something you could sit with, and flip through at whatever pace you felt was necessary. Because there’s no dialogue in the book, and also the music itself has a lot of space involved, it leaves it up to the reader, hopefully, to interpret what’s going on in these character’s lives, or maybe perhaps relate it to their own lives. I like that; I don’t necessarily like things where you have to have everything spelled out for you. I think that’s very important, at least it’s key to me, even in the live show scenario. Bringing Space Cadet on the road, I still want it to be very interactive experience, and personal – I want people to be able to be able to contribute to the music and to making the story happen at the gig.

Will the touring version of Space Cadet feature the ‘pop-up planetarium’ featured in your promo video?

Yes, it’s this ‘headphone concert’ which I’ve been developing for a few years, and it just seemed that because of the pacing and style of the music, that having these inflatable, reclining space-pods for people to sit in, and creating this comfortable little universe for them to experience the story in was the way to go. We actually bring a lot of things for the audience to do, which help add to the atmosphere and layer the sound. The music boxes; we actually hand those out to the crowd, people play them, and we have boom mics that pick those up and send them back into a loop. It’s one of those things where everyone has headphones, and they’re having their own isolated, in-their-head experience, but at the same time you’re in a room full of people having the same experience, so there’s still that connectivity there. So the themes of the book and the story are very much still kept in mind during the show. I think for me, the conflict when I released my first few records was that I was playing these crazy, party, dancefloor sets, and then people would bring home these relatively cerebral or narrative / comedy-type records [laughs]. And they’d be really confused, y’know? So I think now, when I have a project like this, with a comic book, I get to develop a show that’s in the zone, or the theme of the project, and I get really excited! So yeah, the pop-up planetarium has been in development for a few years, and so far it’s been really well received. We’re excited about bringing it to other cities. We’ve just confirmed a London gig for November [the 11th, at Village Underground], and while we’re there we’ll do Paris and Brussels too. Because it’s a bigger production, it’s not gonna be the type of tour where I’m in one place one night and then another place another night: we’re gonna install for a week.

You’ve worked with Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Edgar Wright (on Scott Pilgrim), do you have any other big scoring projects coming up?

I’m doing some score work for this film called Looper, which is with a director called Ryan Johnson – he wrote and directed a film  called Brick, and also Brothers Bloom. It’s kind of a science-fiction-time-travel-assassin movie.

Would you be interested in scoring a whole film one day?

Yeah! No-one’s asked me [laughs]. I’m working with Nathan Johnson, who is the composer for all of Ryan’s films, and there were a couple of scenes [in Looper] where he thought I could do a track. So I was very excited to work on that. It was the same thing with Scott Pilgrim – I got an email from Nigel Godrich, and I was just like: ‘No way!’ [laughs] It’s pretty exciting – I’m a huge fan of cinema, I just love that craft, and the experience of going to the movies and escaping for ninety minutes. It’s great fun!

What’s your next album project, and are you getting The Slew back together any time soon?

The new album is called The 12-Bit Blues, and it’s a solo record. I’m almost finished with it. I’ve been in the studio with Vid Cousins, who was the producer on Space Cadet, and I’ve been working with him since The Slew project, and on Your Mom’s Favourite DJ. That record will be out next year. As for The Slew, we’ve started the second album already, but we’re still in the very preliminary stages. When we took that project on the road, we decided to bring Myles Heskett and Chris Ross [ex-of Wolf Mother] to play drums and bass, so we went into a studio in Montreal and were just jamming on ideas. So we have maybe eight hours I need to go through and find the bits that I think could be the genesis of some new Slew tracks.

Tell us about guest-starring dressed as a koala on the Yo Gabba Gabba road show. What was that like?

That was excellent, because my daughter was two at the time… It was cute because I don’t think she understood what I did for a living, it was just that every once in a while I’d have to go away on tour, then I’d come back… and finally, it was a show that she could attend. The funny thing is now, whenever I go on tour, she thinks that I’m on tour with the Yo Gabba Gabba puppets! So I’ll call her from the hotel, and she’ll say: ‘Let me talk to Muno!’ And I have to say: ‘Well, I’m not on that tour… and if I was, I doubt Muno and I would be sharing a room.’

My wife actually made me that costume… it was literally the night before the Yo Gabba tour happened, and she said: ‘What are you gonna wear?’ I said: ‘I dunno, a tee-shirt and jeans?’ She said: ‘You can’t do that! It’s Yo Gabba Gabba! Nobody looks like a human on this show!’ We started looking at these clips of other musical guests, and it’s true – like, Mos Def had a huge cape on, Money Mark had this silver space suit, and I’m like: ‘Oh, you’re right!’ So she says: ‘I’m gonna make you a koala suit.’ She literally made it in ten hours, that night – by soundcheck the next day I had this koala suit!