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THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Guitar, drums, bass ... laptop -ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN Mary J. Blige does it, but only in public. Bjork does it too, but prefers her bedroom or kitchen. Even Etta James, the self-styled matriarch of the blues, does it, with more gusto than you might expect from a woman of 64. They all make music with computer programs, especially ProTools, a software package that can generate, record, edit and even automate musical sounds in any form or style. ProTools and competitors such as Cubase and Logic have in the past few years insinuated themselves into almost every corner of the music industry… Seven years ago, Kirby Anderson was a visual artist making works in modular forms that could be rearranged in any number of combinations. Today he also works in similar fashion at a computer in his Toronto studio, creating dance-music tracks (under his nom-de-disque, k.i.a.) that have appeared on a successful debut album and on TV series such as Queer as Folk and Popstars. "I know nothing about chords, or anything to do with the technical side of music," he said. "But I know when something sounds right." He also knows how to build intricate pop compositions from the menus and bar-graphs of his Cubase program, using samples, synthesized sounds and vocal tracks recorded in his bathroom by a hired singer with a simple microphone. The computer is Anderson's only instrument. "I have a cut-and-paste brain," he said. "The music that I've heard in my head all my life couldn't be made until this technology came along." "The computer is an engine for coming up with things you might not have thought of already," Anderson said. But he believes that the important thing is not how you get your result, but that you recognize it when you hear it. "The real trick with programs like this is to show restraint," he said. "You have to know what to leave out and when to stop. You can sit there making sounds for months, but no music." He once produced 30 different versions of a dance track, each with a different beat, feeling, and degree of complexity. The one he finally chose was quite simple, but he believes he had to work through all the others to know what the song needed. Unlike word processors, music software is partly driven by fashion. Every time someone has a commercial success with a new sound or beat, program developers make plug-in simulations for the computer market. After Cher popularized the voice-altering vocoder on her 1998 hit Believe, for example, most programs began packaging that sound. But once everyone has the new sound, its novelty is finished.
"You can't think in terms of what other people are doing," Anderson said. "If it takes six months to make an album, by the time it comes out you'll be out of date."
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Shinjuku ZULU/shinjuku ZULU Rating: **** The land of pop electronica can be a brittle place, where all angles are right and air is not an essential element of life. The beat becomes the pulse of a deadened sensitivity. Shinjuku ZULU, the extraordinary debut disc by Toronto sound and visual artist K.I.A. (Kirby Andersen), comes from a different place. The utopian precision is there, but so are the trade winds. They bring complicating voices from Africa and the Middle East. The groove rules, but it's a constitutional monarchy. In That Groove, Larissa Gomes's vocal is instrumentalized, but its living traces remain, warming a plunging central riff that's always gathering and shedding different rhythmic counterpoints. In Segue, a chain of syncopated gasps and a soaring African chorus changes a brooding bass line into the root of something earthy, sunny and intimate. Brando, a cover of Neil Young's Pocahontas, brings something else into the mix, the implication that every sequential element is, in some dimension, happening simultaneously. The opening blurts of sound, the rhythmic whispers, the expertly cramped Gomes vocal and the Indian chanting -- by the closing statement it's all one, contracting to an ideal moment and expanding without limit. Middle Eastern traces appear in Dervish, in which one note from a short vocal fragment pierces the rubbery, viscous beat machinery like the utterance of a comic demigod, and Cyclamen, in which Gomes's vocal is shattered and reconstituted over a rollicking drum line.
The most symptomatic number is Funkriot, in which a hermetic dance track
suddenly empties into a jumble of street sound, which is immediately
absorbed into the revivified groove. It's like someone just threw open
the dance club's fire-door, and let the fresh air in. (Web distribution
at http://www.nu4ya.com.)
MONTREAL GAZETTE
SHINJUKU ZULU GOES WORLDWIDE There's something to be said for ambition. Calgary-born, Toronto-dwelling electronic-music producer K.I.A. has ambition. He also has some sweet ideas. Living in Tokyo and L.A. and seeing other exotic parts of our planet have filled out his worldview and made this debut album a bold introduction. Heavily soaked in the dancier side of electronica, the songs pound to the beats of deep house, breaks and drum-and-bass. Add some exotic vocals (courtesy of Toronto singer Larissa Gomes), reggae bass lines, African chants, percussion and a recurring pop aesthetic and you've got an album with many levels of potential, plus enough depth to warrant repeated listens.
K.I.A. stays heavily involved in the mix. Gomes's dreamy vocals rarely emerge unaltered by the producer's tweaking. And tracks rarely drone on with loop-fueled laziness. This is a complex record that reveals surprises each time it is played. That it is not easily digestible, which at first seems a drawback, proves to be it's merit.
FOUR STARS. -T ' Cha Dunlevy
CALGARY HERALD
SOUND AS TEXTILE As music critics we are inundated on a weekly basis with towering piles of albums that eventually reveal, after hours of filtering, maybe one disc we'll want to come back to on our own time. Of course it's rare when it's from a Canadian and even more so when it's from a Calgarian. But Shinjuku Zulu, a.k.a. K.I.A, a.k.a. Kirby Andersen is slowly beating the living daylights out of anything else that's come our way this young year. His eponymous debut, released on his label Neuphoria, is an eclectic exploration in electronica, if that word isn't passe yet. To describe it would be to say it sounds like Kevin Yost spinning Everything But The Girl records with Mad Professor remixes, although its worldbeat flavour has led some reviewers to simply call it eclectronica. "I certainly like the references," the 33-year-old Andersen laughs from his office in Toronto. "I think it's somewhere between Philip Glass and Grandmaster Flash, because there's a hip-hop influence, a minimalist composer influence, a reggae dub influence, a dance influence and a worldbeat influence." Although independently released, the disc has already started making some waves. The Globe and Mail listed it as one of its top ten records of 2000, and other publications that didn't filter it out have given it four star ratings. All that endorsement is incredible considering Andersen has no formal music training. Having graduated from the University of Calgary with a degree in English literature in 1988, he felt the overwhelming need to travel. In Tokyo, he was fascinated by the juxtaposition of 22nd century structures alongside 400-year-old temples, and he wanted to replicate the flood of neon and steel onto canvas. Again, with no formal training, he became a visual artist, cutting and pasting strips of paper in multi-layered collages, parlaying that into jobs in Los Angles and then Toronto. "Because I'm a visual artist I've always felt that everything I do should be visual and aural as well, so when I create visual pieces, there's always a musical theme," he says. "The paintings are designed so they can be remixed and rearranged, the same way a song can. So I always knew I wanted to make music, but because of the way my brain works, in that cut-and-paste compositional sense, I couldn't do it quite the way I wanted until a few years ago because of the technology. The computer is now my violin." His cut-and-paste method of layering sounds and samples atop one another has led to some fairly interesting creations. The self-titled opening track could be called drum 'n' bass, but there are no drums or bass to speak of. Instead it's an aural collage of 20 different sampled voices along the lines of a Rahzel wordplay, laid down to a backing beat of more voice snippets that resemble a rollicking bass line of low beats and high cymbals. "Yeah, people ask me to classify that track and the best description I can give them is a capella jungle," Andersen says. "All those instruments are just percussive voices, even the ones you think are instruments." Some of the tracks, like the Moroccan roll Cyclamen evolved purely by him messing around on his computer. "My vocalist, Larissa Gomes, was just doing some voice stretching exercises before singing," he says. "I took a sample of that, stretched it, flipped it, edited it to itself, stretched it some more, and then chopped it up into many portions. It was a throwaway bit that I eventually made into a Middle Eastern chant." While that may sound easy enough to create on your personal i-Mac, it took Andersen close to three years to fully produce this album. "Everyone thinks a computer does all the work, and all I do is push a button," he says. "Electronic music is both the easiest and hardest music to make, because it's easy to make it, but hard to make it sound good. These days anyone can throw a bunch of beats together, make a booty music video with a lot of chicks in thongs, and sell millions."
Andersen believes he will make it in todays manufactured musical climate
despite a lack of marketing dollars. After all, he reminds me, I was the
one that called him. So what's he going to do when people catch on to his
sound and the money starts rolling in?
"What do you think?" he laughs. "I'll make a booty video."
THE TORONTO STAR
If you can re-mix music, why not art? -PETER GODDARD Artists have lofts. K.I.A has headquarters. K.I.A. is the artist formerly known as Kirby Ian Andersen although, unlike Prince, he hasn't entirely rejected his given name. Besides, K.I.A. is how he signs his "large reconfigurable paintings with technological/tribal/musical themes" at Gallery 401, until April 27, where their original shapes will be altered by hand throughout the run of the exhibition. (K.I.A.'s smaller pieces are at John Steinberg's studio salon 585 King St. W. to April 30.) K.I.A. serves all sorts of functions. For starters, it's is a brand for a range of projects and products. K.I.A also has an internationalist, exotic feel to it. He is big on worldbeat and tribal culture, and samples everything from Japanese manga cartooning to cave drawings for his visual work. Most of all, K.I.A. is about art-making, music-making and idea-spinning, and those points where the all three inclinations intersect. Next Wednesday, for instance, K.I.A. plans to re-mix/re-assemble all six different re-mixable pieces at Gallery 401 into one single large work. Each painting is made up of a series of identically sized small lightweight and interchangeable aluminium rectangles. In the re-mix, bits from one work can fit another. (There are six other works at the gallery that are not re-mixable.) It's the ideas behind the re-mix thinking that are more provocative than the pieces themselves which, K.I.A. admits, have an audience-friendly pop sensibility to them. Masaimatical, to name just one, starts out as a large, shield-like oval bearing bold strokes of red against a field of mathematical symbols. (The "Masai" part of course derives from the East African hunting clans, a reference to the piece's initial shield-like shape.) Manipulated by K.I.A, Masaimatical's rectangles can be re-mixed into increasingly distorted yet unique shapes in the process changing dimensions from two-dimensionally flat to three-dimensionally sculptural. After all, if music can be re-mixed for a new effect, why not art? Complication is built into K.I.A.'s multi-task art life. Wednesday's mega re-mix will also serve to launch ...adieu shinjuku zulu... a CD that K.I.A. wrote, arranged and produced, bringing in a posse of friends to meet special musical needs, such as singing. Not one to leave any loose ends anywhere, the new CD refers back to K.I.A's debut CD, Shinjuku Zulu - Shinjuku is a section of Tokyo - released in 2000 to a number of rave reviews. In fact, a recent quick visit to his lower Bathurst St. headquarters, which doubles as living quarters for the 36-year-old artist/musician and designer wife Zanesha Gowrali, gave me a better idea of the burgeoning K.I.A. idea-factory. Images, symbols and glyphs of one sort or another were everywhere. Music symbols are the core design element for PolyVictorian , another re-mixable painting. K.I.A. is big on words and word games, like calling one group of his singers, "The Arctic Zulu Ensemble." When he was still just plain Kirby, he finished three years of English studies at the University of Calgary before heading to Tokyo in 1987 where he taught English to support his growing self-taught art habit. Lacking any formal art or musical training seems to have been an advantage. "In the pre-computer days of '87, '88, I was already thinking in this cut-and-paste way," he told me. "I had so many ideas I just had to get them out there somehow."
"I just had to wait for the means to come along so I could do it," he said.
THE GLOBE & MAIL
SHINJUKU ZULU. Shinjuku Zulu, Neuphoria. THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Year End TOP TEN From Bach to Eminem: pop, poetry, blues, groove The best discs and shows of the year seem in retrospect like so many detonations that changed the perceived landscape in ways that couldn't have been foreseen and that seemed obviously right once they had happened. Here, in almost no particular order, are a few of the albums and events that enlarged my life in 2000: Radiohead, Kid A...Genghis Blues, Paul Pena...Shinjuku ZULU, Shinjuku ZULU. (Neuphoria): The groove rules on this debut album, but it's a constitutional monarchy conceived on a global scale. These smart light-filled tracks absorb voices from Africa and the Middle East, as well as from K.I.A.'s Toronto, into one of the year's wittiest, most organic dance albums...Marshall Mathers, Eminem...
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