“It sounds very fantastical, but it’s a inspired by things I noticed in either real life or things I learned in nature documentaries,” says San when asked about the album’s genesis via phone from his Montreal home. Kid Koala performs with Lealani on Wednesday, July 26, at the Beachland Ballroom. “During the pandemic, I was watching a lot of nature documentaries with my daughter. We learned about all these creatures from every area of the planet. We realized at the end of every episode, there would be this warning that they were the last of the creatures on earth — no matter how beautiful and inspiring that episode was. The idea was if their time on earth was a whole day, they might be in the late afternoon of their existence. That was one of the catalysts for the concept.”
San says his daughter also began painting the creatures, and after every episode, she wanted to paint the animals she learned about. He was painting alongside her; his paintings, however, depicted creatures that were playing musical instruments.
“In the workshop area in my house, there were probably a dozen canvases,” he says. “I was noodling around on the keyboard or guitar or cutting up some stuff on the turntable and staring at these creatures. They became muses, and I thought about what kind of beat a frog would play, for example. It opened up after that and became a fun sandbox. After a-year-and-a-half, it congealed into this whole narrative that you may or may not be able to follow. It’s a double album because it has these genres, and the songs became music cues for this stage production, and I started drawing storyboards based on the musical cues. The idea is to eventually do a live film with puppets and live scoring and a string quartet.”
San’s career began inconspicuously enough in the 1990s when he made a cassette mixtape that circulated at McGill University in Montreal, where he was a student, and then found its way to the folks at the cutting-edge Ninjatune imprint. They reissued it, and San’s innovative approach to matching beats and using samples from things like the Charlie Brown Halloween special caught on.
San has continued to experiment and innovate, and Creatures, which includes a built-in board game, eight vinyl-only board game tracks, inserts with game pieces, dice and 150 game cards, follows immersive visual projects like Nufonia Must Fall and The Storyville Mosquito as well as San’s graphic novel Space Cadet and the breakdance video game Floor Kids.
Featuring the stuttering vocals of guest singer Coelacanth, the lurching “1000 Towns” finds San scratching over an aggressive piano melody that stops and starts.
“It came out first as an instrumental that was this walloping, strutting song,” San says of the track. “When it came time to recording it, I was staring at one of the characters that was a Coelacanth, and I realized that Coelacanth had to do the vocals. That’s my voice on the track. I recorded it and cut it to vinyl. I scratched it in live. I was making my own lost vocal dub plates. It’s like Jim Henson and those old Muppet movies and things like that. Those were some of my favorite parts were those moments when you’d be singing with Kermit the Frog.”
The exhilarating and funky “Things Are Gonna Change” features guest vocals courtesy of indie singer-songwriter Lealani, and “When U Say Love” mixes old-time R&B with contemporary hip-hop.
“I played bass and drums and would process stuff and throw stuff to tape and back just to get the grit,” San says when asked about “Things Are Gonna Change.” “There are samples of symphonies and horns and sometimes it’s just a sine wave on a vinyl record, and I would pitch it up so it would sound like a backing choir harmony. I was just having fun in the studio. The goalposts were to make a jukebox jam reminiscent of the ’50s and ’60s but through turntables. I would have a snare drum and use era-specific spring reverb to see what it would sound like. As it started to congeal, the track would tell me which direction it wanted to go.”
After performing at theaters and other spaces suited to his immersive concerts, San says he’s excited to return to the rock club circuit and play places like the Beachland Ballroom.
“The Cleveland show is actually me getting back into the rock club and seeing what Lealani is capable of musically as just as one person,” he says. “She’s a master of the Akai MPC and will play stuff with no safety net and with every sound assigned to a different drum pad. It’s like she’s typing or throwing gang signs. She can do every layer of the tracks. It’s crazy. For me, I thought it could be a cool combination in the tradition of the Black Keys or White Stripes and the duo bands that make this amazing noise. She will have her MPC, and I will have three turntables. She also has her own all-girl punk band the Pezheads, and I will accompany them on the turntables. It’s a raucous, high-energy party set.”
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This article appears in May 31 – Jun 13, 2023.
