Symbiosis Episode 55 – Kid Kameleon

Hey folks,

I’m really pleased to be finally putting out this mix that Kid Kameleon sent me back in February this year. We were introduced by the ever on-point Jon Philips late last year and I was amazed that I didn’t know Matt’s work before then.

Check out Kid Kameleon’s mix intro below and our chat beneath that from a couple of weeks ago.

So.. without further ado.. here is Symbiosis Episode 55.

Cheers,

Simon

Symbiosis Episode 55 – Kid Kameleon

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“Wandering through my music collection increasing seems like a hopeless pursuit. At least for someone who thinks that every tune worth its salt screams for your full attention, to be cherished and interacted with, it seems unreasonable now to pick out 10 or 20 or even a 100 tunes for inclusion in a mix. This time I started with 1000, and scattered them out parcels of anywhere between 4 and 30 songs. The whole thing will probably make upwards of 20 mixes, of which this is the first, just a chunk of tunes that happen to work well together. Epic? Perhaps. But what else can you do when you can’t shake the hold music has on you, when music uses you as its voice.

People have always told me they like my style but to really get anywhere I’ll have to sstep up and produce my own stuff. And in someways it’s true. Watching the music that I love being performed on the west coast is to observe a death of a breed – the DJ. EVERYONE is a producer. Everyone plays from Ableton. I had to beg to have turntables at San Francisco’s biggest club last year. And I do whole heartedly support the live medium and also people playing their own tunes. But I worry that if DJs disappear, so to might the art that comes with NOT playing your own tunes … that is, the freedom to always play whatever the hell you want because none of the tracks are your tunes to begin with. To come up with something like the mix here, where people don’t just claim that they play “all kinds of music” for the sound of that phrase, but in fact do it. It’s the same way great DJs and audiences have been doing for 30 years.” – Kid Kameleon

Tracklist

Three 6 Mafia – Sippin’ On Some Sizzurp (Scott Melker Pianofied Remix)
501 – Mind Control 501
BD1982 – Space Boots (Slugabed Remix) BD1982
Chris Brown feat. T-Pain – Kiss Kiss (NastyNasty remix)
DZ – The Fireman
Cotti feat. Doctor – Calm Down (Witty Boy remix)
Raffertie – Do That
Starkey – Hair Redone
Terror Danjah – Pro Plus feat DOK
Joker – Zariak
Eskmo – Let Them Sing
Self Evident – One Love
October – Elephants
Zomby – Helter Skelter
Zomby – Bubble Bobble
Autopilot – Less Talk, More Bass
Origin Unknown – Valley of the Shadows (DFRNT remix)
XXXY – You Always Start It

KID KAMELEON [Surya Dub, XLR8R, SF]

Kid Kameleon has been mixing, mashing, and maximizing bass genres for 12 years, ever since he got his start with DJ Spooky and the Soundlab collective in New York in the late 90s. A champion of outsider music styles and eclectic mixing techniques rooted in a core of hip-hop, jungle, and dub, these days the Kid’s sets take in ever-widening genres from breakcore to b-more, dubstep to dancehall, club, pop, juke and even rock. He’s proudly performed in over two dozen countries, from Canada to Estonia, and has shared the stage with Kool Herc, U-Roy, Asian Dub Foundation, Alec Empire, Squarepusher, Dizzee Rascal, The Bug and Warrior Queen, Bassnectar, Boreta of The Glitch Mob, 2562, The Gaslamp Killer, Kode 9, Boxcutter. Vex’d, Plastician, Flying Lotus, Kid 606, Maga Bo, Ghislain Poirier, Daddy Freddy, Drop The Lime, Mathhead, Flosstradamus. DJ C, Wayne and Wax, and Tinker, just to name a few. As a staff writer for XLR8R magazine, he takes readers to the furthest extremes electronic dance music, as do the numerous mixes he’s made for Shockout, Mashit, and dozens of other sites. He’s also a founder of San Francisco’s eclectic club night Surya Dub at Club Six, which won SF Weekly’s Best Club Night award in 2007 and the SF Bay Guardian’s “Best Ambassadors of Dread Bass” in 2008. He is also a blogger (kidkameleon.com) and scholar (working for the EFF and others on issues related to P2P file sharing). Ultimately, his eclectic sets have bar tenders dancing on their own bars, and put smiles on faces of all types of club goers. Mixes and words at kidkameleon.com, or find him at Myspace.com/kidkameleon.

http://kidkameleon.com
http://myspace.com/kidkameleon
http://soundcloud.com/kidkameleon
http://www.facebook.com/kidkameleon

Kid Kameleon Q&A Interview – 26/08/2010, 3pm Melbourne time

I caught up with Kid Kameleon around late afternoon Melbourne time after he had just enjoyed a hearty dinner. I found out that he had actually been living in Melbourne for around 10 years – it’s a small world!

S: So we have Kid Kameleon on the line for Symbiosis today.. the self-confessed “poster child for postmodern” (as his Twitter says ). How’s it going?

KK: I’m good.. how are you going?

S: Good.. the weather is greying over a little so it’s good to be inside! So first up.. where do you find yourself artistically right now?

KK: In a brief nutshell, musically, I’ve been a journalist, I’ve been a DJ, I’ve been a party promoter, I’ve dabbled a tiny bit with production – although nobody knows that – and so, I have always thought of it being a conduit. Basically what that means is being a connector; whether that be for people coming through my city or for shows or travelling to other cities to introduce people to music.

So, part of it is that, and part of it is really that I think of myself as a DJ evangelist. Really, sort of, pushing the idea of arrangement and selection that a producer can’t do. I still like doing journalism and exposing, through words, some of the music that is out there. So, I don’t know – that’s a snap shot.

Notice it’s not one thing, that generally people say. Like, oh I just made an album or oh I’m a DJ. I have never been able to focus on just that. It’s to my detriment sometimes but maybe to my strength at other times.

S: I think it’s definitely a great time for that. Over the last few years a lot of genre barriers have broken down. And I mean, you would know as a journalist, that one of the first things you try to do is get a handle on someone. So it’s incredibly frustrating on one hand but on the other hand I have total respect for it and I think it’s a great place to be.

KK: Yeah, it’s a hard road sometimes but it’s really super rewarding. And not a lonely road but it’s just that a lot of people are more generalist than they think they are. You just have to coax them into admitting it.

S: I’m really interested to find out your approach when you create mixes. They are really diverse and eclectic in terms of genre.

KK: Part of it comes from a non-diversity. I’m really obsessed with scenes as a way to incubate really amazing production. I mean, I was a jungliest for years – I mean I always listen to other things but for a while I was really into jungle. And I saw people, like, rise to this level because they were so focused on being in one scene of doing really amazing productions. But then, I didn’t see that as just a thing that was unique to Jungle – it happened in hip hop, idm etc.

So, I was always really interested in scenes as incubators. But I was always too ADD to focus on just that. So either I would try to jam like five sets of genres into one mix or I would go out and make five mixes at one time in a different genre. And that’s what I did for a long time.

Then, I got to this point when I was DJing out where I couldn’t stick to one genre very much and I was trying to push the envelope of playing as fast as I could. Then at a certain point I was starting to produce mixes in sections and then cut them together. I caught some flak for that online with people saying “this isn’t real, you wouldn’t be able to do this live”. And I was like, “first of all I can and, two, who cares?!”

A mix is different to a live gig.

I’m really influenced by someone like Girltalk where the idea is “as many ideas as possible” (clicks fingers fast) and also DJ Food and Coldcut were big influences on me.

I just love that idea of putting as many ideas as possible into as short a chunk of time as you can. And there were just too many good ideas out there to focus on one genre.

S: It’s quite restrictive to imagine DJing as just putting wax on a turntable really. To me it’s about making the dancefloor move and however you do that, who cares?

KK: Yeah.. there are so many reasons why people DJ but there are also so many vectors on which DJing is judged. And this is a pet peeve of mine too which is: so many of the scenes that I like are all about newness. To the point where it just becomes bravado of “oh I have these tracks and you don’t”. To the point where people don’t really need to listen to the mixes.

For these super hardcore dubstep folks when, at least when other musicians and djs are judging them, it can be like, “oh I see your tracklist and I understand what you’re doing.” Is that everybody? No. But I really kind of detest that.

I don’t have any problem at all with people getting new tunes or exclusive tunes. But to make the point of a mix exclusive tunes… that’s sad to me. There are so many awesome released tunes out there. And at the end of the day, as you say, the dancefloor doesn’t care. But we as DJs and music makers spend so much time reverberating ideas back and forth amongst ourselves that we forget that.

So that’s definitely something that I’m out to smash. I keep thinking of making a mix of all my favourite rock songs that I grew up listening to in high school to prove the point. But then I wonder what the point of that would be.

S: Yeah there have been a couple of great influences mixes in the last 12 months or so. You should do it!

KK: Cool.

S: So how do you bridge the different BPMs in your sets?

KK: It’s all about that intermediary track. It’s all about ambient a lot. Ambient in a broad way – this background sound. So what I’ll often do is take a chunk of 3 or 4 songs and find something to play in the middle. I have a whole collection of stuff that doesn’t have beats, of intros, and even beyond that you can do spinouts and there’s kind of a great tradition of party DJing where you just let a song end and start a new one at a different BPM.

I have recently just started using Ableton, and of course with that you can tweak the BPMs.

S: So what’s coming up for you for the rest of the year?

KK: Well, I’m working on a mix for Electronic Explorations which is now two months overdue! But thankfully Rob has been patient. It’s focused on loops and on the idea of disguarded loops by producers – kind of, the stuff that’s left behind. I’ll leave it at that as a teaser.

S: I really enjoy Rob’s show.

KK: Yeah.. we were speaking about influences mixes before and I really enjoyed the Mount Kimbie mix of their influences on there.

S: Yes, it was great! And what else can we expect?

KK: So in addition to the mix, I am going on tour to the UK. And it’s the first time that I have been back there in 3 years. It’s partly a musical pilgrimage because so much has gone on in the UK and I just want to travel around the UK, meet people, perhaps do a bunch of interviews. I’m also putting together a few gigs and I’m going with my wonderful partner Tinker who has been a great inspiration for me and is a fellow DJ, and my love as well.

And we’ll be in the UK and Ireland mostly for the second half of October. So that takes a bit of planning.

And then I guess the final thing is – and I did say I was going to take the rest of the year off promoting – but there this exciting new club that’s opening here in San Francisco called Public Works. It’s not open yet – it will open in a month – and I know some of the people who are involved in that. I would like to have some input, in my traditional Kid Kameleon background way. But there might be a monthly night that some of us will do there and I’m really keen to see a good, new mid-sized space.

S: It sounds like a busy end to the year.

KK: Yeah, and you have to realise that, for me and pretty much everyone I know, we have to fit this in around a full time job. And that’s just the reality of America and I never miss a chance to rail on America for not supporting the arts. So this is all kind of extra time for me and it has been for a decade. With a few times in there doing it full time. It’s just the sad reality of America that people have to work a full time job until they become the Glitch Mob and then they can do what they want.

It’s really inspiring to me the way that people work full time and do this stuff. And I’m not sure a lot of people outside of America get that.

S: I think we do. It’s the way I work.

KK: Good – well big up!