A born creator, Phoebe Kiddo, is carving her own conventions of being a musician and performer. Her novel insight on somewhat globalised music artistry is captivating. Born in Melbourne, Kiddo has shown the world her talent and passion for sonic expression. Having just returned to Australia, she is excited to be amongst the scene from which her infatuation stemmed. And now on the same bill as Mr. Carmack, she has come a long way since her first EDM experience at a Melbourne warehouse party!
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Kassie Junkeer: So it’s been three years now since Red Bull Music Academy. What was the hardest thing about it for you at the time?
PK: The endurance. I had been warned. A friend of mine Mark Pritchard had got in touch to say “Hey congratulations, that’s really great, just be warned… it’s really full on.” But I didn’t really understand what he meant by that. And now I understand, and I would say the same thing to anybody else. Take some time to recuperate afterwards and really prepare yourself before you go because it’s such a short amount of time and so much happens. It’s hard to keep yourself awake, aware, be able to soak it all in and make the most of the opportunities that are there. So being completely unprepared for it really swept me off my feet. I think most people would say the same thing. I think if I had have known that it would stay like it was the first 24 hours for the entire time then I might have been different. I don’t know what you could do to prepare though because it is just so exciting. But definitely having the endurance and clarity to make the most of it was the most difficult thing. To really know and realize that you’re there, for example if you’re super fatigued but one of your heroes is giving a lecture. It’s hard to fully take in the experience. It’s surreal though, kind of like heaven on earth for producers.
KJ: And I’m sure the acquired endurance would have been worth it! So what was the best thing about it?
The best thing for me was the lasting friendships that I developed with the other participants. I can’t stress that enough. My best friends are in Berlin, in LA, all over the world. We just forged such friendships. And that to me was just incredible. Just to walk into a place and then be like ‘Oh wow, cool, there’s like thirty homies’. We’re all the same but different and all really passionate and interesting people. It was such a diverse mix and for some reason we just had a really lucky group of people that got on like a house on fire. The other stuff is super amazing as well and really cool. But I think a lifetime friendship is a really special moment. Peers across the world who are incredibly talented and interesting is for me the most important part of it.
KJ: And you seem to be quite a nomadic artist travelling frequently and living all around the world. Is that a source of inspiration for you?
It has been, definitely. It has been a really eye opening experience, but also quite exhausting. It has its ups and downs, and its pros and cons. It’s been amazing, I now live in Berlin and I’ve been living there for I don’t know how long, but for the foreseeable future. That’s my home now, for now. That feels really good. I’ve only just resolved myself to that, even though I’ve lived there for two years. I’ve felt like a visitor, and someone who can leave at any moment. I feel as though I never really committed myself to it fully until now. Coming back to Australia is for me, just taking a break and reconnecting with my family and friends before I really go back to live. Everywhere I have been has just been with a bag of synths and a bag of clothes. I’ve been to lots of different places, and now I’m packing the last of my things and moving somewhere, which feels great! It feels like a new phase in my life. I love to travel, and I will always do it. I think everybody who has the opportunity to should do it. It’s a richening experience being in different cultures, recording with different people and in different environments. It’s something that I hope I can always do. But the idea of having somewhere to go back to as a home is equally something that I’m really happy to have finally found.
KJ: It must have been quite challenging at first. How did you cope with all the moving around?
We moved around a lot in my upbringing so I think that I was kind of fit to do it. I was talking with my nan, but it seems like we come from a line of people who are very adaptable and adventurous. I had travelled quite a bit before anyway. I was just ready for a new experience, so I left when I was just ready to broaden my horizons. I think really, if you’re an adaptable person then anybody can do it. You just need to be able to change with your own environment. And to be able to change your plan because when you’re moving around or even just in life in general, stuff comes up and things change. You have to be able to deal with it and change with it. I think it’s a really important quality for everybody. But especially if you’re going from country to country, or studio to studio. Maybe having moved around a lot already prepared me in some way. And having travelled a bit prepared me.
KJ: What have you been listening to recently?
A lot of rap. My favourite record of last year… well one of them, probably my most listened to, is ‘Traplord’ by ASAP Ferg. I love that. So that’s been getting a spin quite a lot. Some of the most interesting rap and footwork have been some of the most interesting electronic music for me to be exposed to more recently from moving around. I didn’t really know anything about footwork before I left Australia. Everybody of my age who is into electronic music was brought up on hip-hop at some stage, so that’s a pretty common thing. But I never really followed it after I discovered techno and dance music. It had kind of dropped off as something that was nostalgic, not something that was super modern. Some of the rap production is really modern, and same with the footwork. I love the aesthetic of super inhuman or cold sounds with beautiful melodic stuff. And then really intense vocals and rhythmic use of voice. I am a massive fan of rhythm or various rhythms. So both of those types of music have been really inspiring and interesting for me. Otherwise the usual kind of experimental things which maybe fall more closely to what I make, for example Dean Blunt’s record The Redeemer, which was really great, I loved that. I think if you just look at experimental music that’s making it to a popular kind of status, you know you give all those things a listen. But the things that have really bumped me have been things like rap and things with vocals that are a bit weird somehow, or a bit tense.
KJ: Yeah, I’ve heard that footwork is really big in Europe, and it sort of took a while to reach Australia and become as popular as it is now.
PK: Yeah, I first heard it a couple of years ago. It’s one of the reasons why I really appreciate living where you’re exposed to things before they start to come into published form, as things are rumbling along and becoming interesting. You hear about it. Whereas in Australia, I felt very naïve to a lot of things. In Europe, we hear a lot more from American artists. There’s so much stuff that I didn’t even know about or never even heard of. I had to Google footwork. In the same way, Detroit techno wasn’t popular in America but it was super popular in Australia. Trends move in weird ways. I’ve never been a big Internet blogging follower. So I’ve been getting into more of those kind of things, like really edgy American music. Then also, stuff that I totally missed in Australia with my interests. Being introduced to things like grime and even new school grime. Fatima Al Qadiri surrounding Nguzunguzu. They’re kind of American versions of UK music. There’s all this sort of cross over. They’re very interesting evolutions. I think they’re very fleeting in a way. There’s a sound now and it moves so quickly. Being in Australia, years later, it takes a long time to filter into what’s popular. It’s not that people don’t know about it. But it takes a while to get those artists to come out and for a culture to form around it. The distance of where those artists are delays it. The interest level takes times to build. I’ll be really interested to go out in Australia and to see what people are playing and what records are going on. So it’s been really inspiring living in the different places and hearing what people are interested in and being not apart of those cultures. They become new dots and connections in my mind of the musical map of planet earth.
KJ: And do you still listen to folk music and psychedelic rock you were brought up with?
PK: No I don’t. I have a soft spot for it. My brother and I, only for the sake of nostalgia really, will play songs. Our parents listen to a lot of really great music, and they’ll get a spin and I’ll be like “oh my god this is a song from my upbringing.” But not so much, there are songs that to me fit into the broad term of ‘folk’. I think rap is a form of folk music of a particular place. It’s just people’s music and song. So that’s interesting to me. But I’m more interested in expanding. I’m not such a nostalgic person. Not at this point, hopefully never, but then you look at your parents and your grandparents and you wonder if that happens to everybody. We’ll see, ask me again in thirty years.
KJ: You’ve spoken about your interest in the Melbourne Warehouse Party Scene as one of the ways you discovered electronic dance music. Do you remember your first warehouse party in Melbourne? What was it like?
I think the first one would have been was an Every Picture Tells a Story party. I think, it’s all a bit of a blur (laughs). Anyone who’s in my age bracket would know about these parties, they were really famous. It was at a very special venue. There were around ten thousand people dancing. And at the time everyone was into the Melbourne Shuffle. So you had all these people doing this crazy dancing, all the walls of the entire building just rattling with the bass and the kick drum. It was wild. I felt really intimidated because I was, you know, underage, in Melbourne, living on the coast at the time. So we had to take a trip on the train. I was going with people as naïve as me to go and seek out this new music. It was such an exciting experience to walk into something that already existed that was huge! It was so popular. There were thousands of people all a part of this culture. I’d never really had that experience of something so big. It was like a counter culture to pub rock Australia. I was like, “yes, this is it!” I’ve found the answer! But maybe everyone thinks that when they do ecstasy (laughs).
KJ: So how does it feel to have gone from that to being a support act for Mr. Carmack?
To be honest, Mr. Carmack is not an artist I was familiar with before being billed. In terms of how does it feel to be the one standing up in front of people performing, as opposed to that first experience of ‘wow, what are they even doing? It’s amazing!’ It feels really cool to have worked toward overcoming all the obstacles of technology, knowledge and artistic development. It feels great to be at a point where I can be the one contributing meaningful work and playing shows. It’s also really nice to present work and participate in that way because I’m not one to go out to warehouse parties these days myself. I certainly like to go to shows and see artists, but not stay out late. It’s a change for me in terms of what my priorities are. Music is and will always be the highest of my priorities. So participating and offering something back is really cool, especially after I have absorbed so much of it. To give back to that community is a very fulfilling thing. Whether it’s through recorded music or through performing, it feels good. It feels like the right thing, when you take so much to give as much as you can in return.
KJ: So if music is your number one priority, where does your visual art stand? Do you still get a chance to create visual art anymore?
I don’t really. As soon as I made the decision to prioritize sound as an artistic medium, I haven’t had time. It takes so much to create meaningful good work. It’s full time. I know there are some artists who are able to do both. I don’t know how. Maybe at a later stage, I certainly hope that I can incorporate those two things. But I don’t feel like I’m at a point where my sonic work is developed enough to be able to focus on anything else. I think I’ll always suffer from being a jack-of-all-trades. I’m very interested in a lot of things. My entire life, I’ve learnt to do a lot of different things. I can make clothes, patterns. I can paint and sculpt. I can make music programs, drum machines, synthesizers blah blah blah! But to become a master at any of those things requires a really applied amount of time. This is my music time. I think if there’s a point that I get to where I feel like I’m more able to express myself visually or if I find myself with the time to invest in it. Until that point, I’ll just admire other peoples amazing visual art and just hone my own skills in production, recording and composing.
KJ: How has your tour been going so far, what have your live sets been like?
Really good! I’m so happy with my live sets. I’ve played live so many times and in so many different configurations. It’s an ongoing project. This entire live set was written as a lead up to playing at Berghain in Berlin, which is a big deal, it’s a milestone. I really put myself into it and just wrote. I’ve tried before to play songs somehow and I’ve had some successes like that, but mostly I don’t find it very interesting. If you’ve created, recorded, mixed and released a project, by the time it gets to the world and then you are touring, you’ve moved beyond that. I find it is more inspiring for me to just write, create, and put out all my stuff and just jam. Then I work out what I want to play, the aesthetic and the direction. I used to always work like that in Melbourne. Playing the same city, and playing live means you always have to create new work. You’re always going to play to the same people so you have to quickly write something new. So I got quite good at that and then switched to kind of trying to play songs, and then decided that it just didn’t suit me. I prefer to play live; like drum machines and synthesizers. I want to improvise. I want to be terrified that it’s going to fuck up and really do my best job because of that. Rather than playing other peoples’ records, which is great – some people do it as a real craft, but it doesn’t at all thrill me. Or playing back songs in some way, which most live artists do. There are some really great live artists out there, but I think for the most part, people go to see someone play and often they’ll just play their songs. Electronic music is very different to a band. Unless you can make your configuration in a way that can be improvised, then it really is like you’re a bit of a jukebox. I find it really uncomfortable to stand on stage not really being busy doing a lot of things. Some people are very good at engaging with the crowd, dancing and hyping the people up. But that’s really not my vibe, I’m really more interested in transmitting sound. So finally I feel like I’m getting really close to my perfect configuration of machine, controllers and computer interaction; a level of ability to improvise reliably. I kind of know what I’m going to play but I can play it in any way. I have a lot of music to choose from now so it could be more like this or more like that. It’s been received very well, which is great. It’s really nice to pull yourself into something and for it to be appreciated. So we’ll see! I think for Australian audiences, having not been here in such a long time, it will be interesting to play to some of my friends, but also to a totally different scene and environment. Somewhere that’s really quite separate from where the music was created. I’m really glad to be having the opportunity now to be playing in a bunch of different places around the world to be able to try it out. You know.. ‘it works in Berlin.. it doesn’t work in China’ kind of thing. I think it will become better and more refined because of it.
KJ: And what’s next on the list of creative projects?
Not long in Australia really, I’m back to Europe after that. I think I’ll do a couple of sneaky DJ gigs with my mates in Melbourne before I go, just for the fun of it. I’m finishing some projects now. My poor friends… I’ve returned to Australia and haven’t even seen them. I have a real backlog of recordings. I was just in Shanghai recording with Cha Cha. So I’m finishing that and finishing an EP that has emerged from my live set. I did the first one yesterday. I want to finish that before I do the next shows really. I’ll be recording with my old duo, which will be a pretty experimental project. Jason Montero and I had a band for three years before I left Melbourne. We played lots of shows. We always improvised. I kind of bring in the electronic and maybe grounding element to his experimentalism. I am already, well my friends would say, an experimental artist. But he takes it to another level of avant garde. I’m really excited about us getting back together but we have a very short time. I’m very curious as to what will emerge having been apart for three years.
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Phoebe Kiddo is supporting Mr. Carmack at Revolt Melbourne Artspace on the 24th of April. An amazing lineup not to be missed!