Electric Feel: From the Studio to the Stage with DJ and Producer...

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Electric Feel: From the Studio to the Stage with DJ and Producer Kid Koala

To see more of Eric’s studio and stage work, check out @realkidkoala on Instagram. For more music stories, head to Instagram @music.

Is your recently purchased Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer in need of love? Then perhaps you should give DJ, producer and electronic matchmaker Eric San, aka Kid Koala (@realkidkoala), a ring at his studio in Montreal.

“It’s like I have a dating service,” says Eric, about all of the randomly paired musical equipment he keeps in stock. “It’s like, this pedal sucks on just about everything except this OMNI port. It’s almost to the point where, OK, these two things are married, let’s just duct tape them together because there’s no way I want to hear those apart.”

Eric is always digging for new gear — amps, guitars, synths, pedals – mixing and matching new and old gadgets, trying to figure out which ones mesh with each other. He admits his current set up could never function as a professional studio — though it’s hard to believe him considering all of the projects he’s had a hand in.

Eric has been performing live for more than two decades. Best known for his turntable and production work with Gorillaz and Deltron 3030, he’s also written a graphic novel, designed album covers, released solo material, composed short films and created his own experimental and immersive audio projects. Mostly, he’s big on taking a standard format and flipping it on its head. That’s why he started DJ’ing in the first place — it’s an art form where you’re allowed to sample, scratch, mix and create sounds off of an already existing work.

“I was drawn to the turntable when I was 12,” he says. “It seemed to have such a wide range. That’s what was exciting to me: actually, yeah we can use it as a rhythmic adrenaline-inducing thing; we can cut funky.”

For his latest trick, Eric has embarked on an expansive stage production based in Nufonia Must Fall, a graphic novel he released back in 2003, about a robot that’s trying to write love songs but can’t sing. The project is ambitious to say the least: a reproduction performed live with puppets, filmed, then projected onto a movie screen. There are 12 people on stage throughout the performance, including a string quartet, a team of puppeteers, a camera operator, a video engineer, a sound engineer and Eric himself, who plays “a plethora of weird gizmos.”

“I have been doing gigs for 20 years now and this by far is the most dangerous show for me because so many things can go wrong; there are so many moving parts to it,” says Eric. Still, he considers the risk exhilarating: “It’s the most high-tech / low-tech show you’ve ever seen.”

For the production, he’s teamed with designer K.K. Barrett, best known for his work in films such as Her, Lost in Translation and Being John Malkovich. Eric admits his career has been full of pinch-me moments, but getting to work with K.K., ranks toward the top.

“He came to my show in Los Angeles and I met him after the gig,” he says. “A mutual friend said, ‘You two should work on a project together.’ I was like, Oh wow, what could that be?”

Eric eventually sent K.K. a copy of Nufonia. He always considered the book to be a screenplay to a silent movie. K.K. liked what he read, so the two began brainstorming ideas for a full stage show. Now they’re in the process of touring across the world. (The premiere, in Australia earlier this year, opened to favorable reviews.)

If one massive audio project weren’t enough, Eric is also workshopping something called “Satellite,” a concert series where everyone in the audience is seated at their own turntable, where they play records that have their own custom sounds and inflections.

Just like Nufonia, Satellite is about taking something already established and flipping it on its head. Because what fun is there in showing an audience something they’ve seen a million times in the past?

“In my mind, I haven’t strayed from that core motivation,” says Eric. “When I started scratching, if I were to go to a battle, whatever you do on those turntables that night, it would have had to been something that you hadn’t heard … If you gave me an hour to play records I probably wouldn’t just play one tempo the whole time. I am not that kind of DJ. I like the storytelling aspect of it and see if we can go on a little bit of an audio adventure.”

– Instagram @music

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