A Splendid Talk with... Kitzl | First Contact
Artist: Kitzl
Location: Guelph, ON, Canada
Peanut Gallery: Sound
Hey Kitzl! How have you been as of late? Any special shenanigans about?
Hey Nicholas, I’ve been having fun digs getting ready for my albumb (sp?) release and eating fruit by the foot… … . basically stuff like that.
It was such a pleasure to have you on The Sentinel’s Marvellous Kaleidoscope (SMK) with Dru Jacey and myself earlier in January, our first musical guest this year! It was both your first live radio interview and performance, correct? How did you feel about the overall experience? I hope we did everything we could to make it a pleasant audience.
Yeppers, it was my first time live on the radio. You guys were really welcoming and gr8! It was really fun to learn all about the radio. I learned about radio things and stuff like that, mostly. Did you know that radio is very widely used in modern technology, in radio communication, radar, radio navigation, remote control, remote sensing and other applications?
Your music is uniquely striking in the best possible way. How would you describe your musical work?
Thank you! I think kinda Hilary Duff meets Frank Zappa. I combine a lot organic and electronic elements. I like outer space and the ocean and stuff like that, mostly.
As a listener, I get sonic sensations from the textures you bring to life. How do you achieve the sounds we hear from your electronic children? What tools and equipment do you use, both in studio and on stage?
I use maschine software and hardware to compose and arrange songs, and also for performing live. It’s a super fun, intuitive tool for composition and you can do so much with it and hardly have to look at your computer screen. I also use lots of soft synths and virtual instruments. I used the korg minilogue in some of my newer tracks (I don’t use it for my live set right now because my rig is already a lot for me to transport around without it). There’s a lot of the minilogue in 'Armadilla'. I have some classical guitar samples and electric guitar in my songs too. I like to play with harmonies, pitch/shifting, and autotune and vocoder effects on my vocals. I use the Perform VE by TC Helicon for most of my live vocal effects, and a RC-505 looper. And then of course I use lots of samples of organic matter and animals outside, and sounds I've collected around my home and around town to get some unique textures in my stuff. So yeah basically stuff like that.
Kitzl @ Silence, Guelph - Photos by Nicholas Cooper / Scope Overseer Photogenics
It has not always been the case that you have produced electronic-based music. What is your background in music? How did you become attracted to electronics?
For a long time I played/wrote on just piano and guitar. It was more singer/songwriter-ish. More folky and poppy. I think at some point I started to feel a bit limited in what I could produce with that. I still like listening to that kind of music and singing/playing along, but I love being able to make music that feels sonically foreign. I wanted to get into soundtrack work and that’s when I started exploring sound and producing music. I think I kind of just started playing with all these new instruments and making weird soundtracky stuff and then forcing vocals on it and it became this stuff- stuff like that.
Who have influenced you in your musical journey thus far? What lessons or neat tricks do you place in your cerebral arsenal to help you through difficult patches?
Right now I really like some peeps like The