Bridging the gap between the worlds of classical, ambient, avant-garde and even rock (via a pair of remarkable collaborations with Mike Patton), John Eric Kaada (known simply as Kaada) is a Norwegian singer, songwriter, producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist. His back catalogue is a remarkable collection of solo works (the most recent of which, closing statements, being the subject of this interview), collaborations and soundtracks not to mention a series of recordings with the respected experimental outfit Choloroform.
It is, however, Kaada’s solo work that is the primary focus of our discussion today. A playful, evocative, sometimes heart-breaking collection of tracks that put music to a series of final words (or closing statements), it is an album in which to lose oneself. The titles range from the banal to the whimsical but the music… the music sees Kaada pushing his compositional abilities to blur the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic in order to create something that truly stirs the senses. It is a record that is at least as much felt as heard and so I was excited indeed when he agreed to an interview. We open with a brief discussion, greeting one another and so on before mentioning to Kaada how we came across his work (via the stunning Mike Patton collaboration, Bacteria Cult,) and how that bought us to his solo material…
I’m hoping that this new stuff, this ‘closing statements’ album is accepted in your environment because of the death theme. There’s a link there, it kind of pulls it in the right direction somehow.
The death theme is fascinating to me because when you speak to artists (whether they’re involved in metal or blues or whatever), there’s usually that preconception that blues is depressing or metal is angry, but, as with your music, although the theme is death, the music is not depressing. It’s emotional and evocative but in many ways playful – so there’s a really interesting dichotomy between the theme and the music that emerges from it…
Yeah, yeah yeah. That’s right! Who wants to make a depressing album? No one really wants to do that – no one actually wants to make people depressed! Not even in the death metal scene… I mean you can make people angry, but not depressed, so let’s not go there!
In terms of starting out, you’re a multi-instrumentalist and you’ve done a number of records solo – the one that immediately flagged up was junkyard orchestra. I come from a rock music background and, when you play in a band, there’s a necessary compromise between the original vision of the songwriter and how the music then gets filtered through the other members of a band and there’s a constant tension (I won’t say battle) between what the song writer expects and how the other musicians’ influences affect the music. For you, when you’re composing for an orchestra, you are filtering your music through the abilities of many people, both players and the conductor, so what are the differences for you between playing solo and writing for an orchestra?
You know, it’s interesting because I noticed that the older I get, the more I think it’s important to play the stuff myself. I find it incredibly boring to write down sheet music and notes. I am just really, really tired of it! [laughs] If you write for an orchestra, there are thousands of those dots that you have to place and, if one of them is wrong, then it all collapses when you’re recording or at the concert. So it’s just incredibly boring and, yes, it can be a really nice experience to have a hundred people play your music, but still, it’s not the way to spend your days, writing notes. It’s much better to pick up an instrument and… you don’t need to play well, but it’s just that you’re more alive and more into the music if you’re performing it yourself. So, to answer your question, I think… I’m hoping to get more into that stuff myself. I’m more going in that direction.
I guess, thinking about how difficult it was to make music outside of a studio until relatively recently, the difference between when you started around 1996 and now is that you can more or less replicate anything whereas back then you might have struggled to get the sounds you wanted?
Yeah but still, you know, my debut album, that was made on a Macintosh that had less than power than an iPhone and it still maybe one of my better works. So, I don’t know if we’re that dependent on great instruments and technology as we might think. Sometimes the limitations can be better than having all the instruments in the world in the studio. I don’t know, it still fascinates me that some of my coolest music was made on really crappy equipment.
I take your point that limitations do force innovation – as with the early Pink Floyd and the Beatles…
I remember all that planning that went into it – those days. If you had an idea you just went for it, and only that small idea. Everything was just put down into small capsules, in a way, and I remember when I made a song, I had to delete all the other songs because I could only work on one song at a time in the computer. It was like, at maximum… if I had a project that exceeded about 400mb, it all just collapsed. So, sometimes I had to convert stereo files into mono files, just to have them all in Logic or Pro Tools. It’s much better. I guess I’m all through with going toward that big symphony / orchestra thing. I don’t enjoy it that much really. No. So, I like to go to work in the morning and just pick up an instrument that I don’t really know what to do with and just stick to it until something comes out. It’s also a question of how you want to spend your life and when you’ve done it for twenty years and you have to make certain… OK, I can look back and I can see I spent a year on that, I spent three months on that crappy movie and that was a total waste of time! I don’t know, maybe it’s my mid-life crisis, but still I want to have a job where I play – where I’m doing stuff with my hands – not where I’m in a computer. I hope that in the future my music reflects that kind of mind-set.
For me, that’s where the most interesting musical ideas come from – where you force yourself out of your comfort zone. Sometimes, when I think about bands that I admire, it’s bands who were doing really different stuff. Bands like Sonic Youth who deliberately de-tuned to force themselves out of that comfort zone. I guess if you’re forcing yourself to work with the unfamiliar, then interesting music will always be around the corner…
I hope so. And also, now I’m more aware of what kind of music I listen to also. I have noticed that, even though I don’t mean it, sometimes, if you listen too much to a certain kind of music, it just goes into your subconscious and all of a sudden you’re making music that is somehow related to what you’ve heard, even though you don’t really mean to. So now, if I’m listening to music that I really dig and really admire, I try to avoid it as background music and that kind of stuff. I remember when we had a child nine years ago and she was… we were listening to all this children’s music and suddenly, when I was writing, I was thinking “something’s familiar with this melody!” You have to be aware and you have to make certain choices and some framework to try to keep yourself interesting and interested. It must be for yourself and for others. That’s something…. I guess that’s from writing too, isn’t it. If you only read a certain kind of style, then all of a sudden it becomes a part of you, but if you’re curious and interested in writers then it will be different.
Totally. I try never to read other reviews, these days, because it’s almost impossible to write a review if you’ve read someone else’s opinion, even if you totally disagree with it, it skews your view and you start to second guess yourself. I like… if I get a record, I don’t want to hear the extracts first, I want to hear the album as a complete piece, as it’s meant to be and without reviews.
Yeah – that was what I appreciated with your writing about my stuff, I felt that it wasn’t just quoting and old clichés – you find your own ways of doing it.
Thank you. What I really liked about ‘Closing Statements’ is that I’ve always had a thing for albums with thematic weight. I think if you put a concept behind an album then you can move, or perhaps have the potential to move, beyond genre, and ‘closing statements’ has a really interesting theme – but some of them looked familiar and lookin gat the song titles and they looked literary – where did you find your various statements.
There’s a story behind each song. They are… the things you say before you die, so many of the quotes are from famous people, you know famous last words, and others are less famous. So, yeah, I guess I just found them. I was looking for titles and it served the whole theme. There is a personal story behind it as well, but it’s just a… I was just, I don’t know, it’s like when I made this album, there’s a worry in me that people don’t actually listen any more. You now, when you’re releasing an album, and that was a worry. If you’re talking to people – do we really communicate like we used to? When words meant something and when music meant something? Everybody is just shooting in every direction all over the place. Words – travelling – bang, bang, bang. That feeling of… what if you’re saying something that’s really important? I’m not saying this album is really important of course. How can you… at what moment in life is something that you say really important? And that was the link. Death row and death – what if this is the last thing that I’m saying? What if this is my last song, then someone has to listen because this is the last thing I’ll do, I won’t just continue and so on. That was very much behind the concept. It’s not that easy to put into words without sounding banal or whatever, but it was very much a “what if…” That was the concept.
Trying to explain a musical concept in words is very difficult without wondering into cliché territory. When you’re trying to write a piece of music and you have an idea in your head, it usually comes out better musically than in words, so I know that was a horrible question. I think the only thing I read about ‘closing statements’ in advance was the idea that you wanted to blur the boundaries between the organic and the digital – I listened so carefully and I couldn’t spot what was what. There were things where I had an idea that you were manipulating things, but I like the idea and I was wondering about some of the technicality behind that and how you approached doing that?
It’s just… at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter! Digital or if it’s manipulated or whatever, it’s just a matter of making things sound interesting and cool and listenable, but I think one of the results of having done this for so long is that I don’t have any respect for an audio file that is played by a great violinist or whatever. It goes through a guitar amp almost immediately anyway and then into a plug in and maybe back through an amp and blah blah blah. I should probably leave that stuff out of press releases, because to me it doesn’t matter. If it’s electronic or organic… no.
But, I guess, I’m always struggling, or it’s always a big thing for me to make things sound organic. So, I guess, it’s more that way that things go. If a synth is playing, then it always goes through an amp. There’s something about sound waves that have gone through the air – from a speaker to a microphone – there’s just something that happens. So, all the time in the studio, there are always amps rigged up with microphones and everything just goes through that and you get a better sound. I don’t know…
I think it’s interesting thing to put in the press release because there is a purist “ah it’s got to be done this way” and then there’s the other perspective that it doesn’t matter what techniques are used to capture a song – it’s the emotion of the piece that’s important. The concept fires the song and how you achieve your end, that’s up to you…
You have to be aware. When you are reacting like “oh this was cool!” and how you need to get to that, If you’re not happy with the recording, I don’t leave a track in there if, at a certain point, it hasn’t got that “wow!” You need to do something with it so it sounds somehow interesting and soulful. It will be exciting to see how other people react – your review was pretty early!
I was super-excited! It’s so cool to not only play music that’s outside of your comfort zone, but also to listen to music that’s outside of what you know. If I only wrote about the eight death metal albums I’d heard this week, I don’t know, it’d be hard to summon the enthusiasm, so when you get something like ‘closing statements’, it’s special and you treasure it! Both my wife and I are very geeky when it comes to music and so we love to sit down with records and listen through from start to finish…
I’m glad that you sat down and listened to it – just hearing that somebody sits down for an evening with your album – that’s what you want to hear. We’re in the central theme of the album again. That’s what you’re hoping for – that someone will sit down and spend time on it. That’s where you want to be.
You have to – for me, music has always been about the experience and the journey. I don’t enjoy listening to something in pieces, the shuffle button is the invention of the devil… I’d rather listen through two or three times because otherwise you miss so much and, again, there’s that theme – and I think that a lot of people do feel isolated by the way that everything has to be broken down into bite-size pieces whether it be music or politics or whatever. As a society we’re missing the point of so much by only looking at the smallest piece of the puzzle.
That’s my worry too. I totally agree. So, is there anything else you’d like to know?
Certainly – one of the things that got me attracted to ‘Bacteria Cult’, and it’s the same with ‘Closing statements’, is the way you’ve created pieces of art to go with your work. ‘Bacteria Cult’ is stunning – and I’ve always appreciated that music is packaged in such a way and I wanted to ask how important it is to you personally that your music goes out as a complete piece in that way?
You know, of course I certainly appreciate it when I see that other bands do that. It just comes naturally somehow. There’s a universe that comes with some music and sometimes I imagine colours, sometimes it’s a feeling and I guess, it feels almost as important as the music. I like making stuff, I guess that’s the point. I like doing things and I don’t know what else to say – it’s just a fun part of it I guess.
You alluded to the fact that you’ve done a number of soundtracks and the idea of doing a soundtrack, whether it’s for the best art movie or the worst horror movie, sounds very interesting because you’re doing music in a different way. Scoring a movie where you’ve got someone else’s visual palette – when you’re scoring movies, do you have the film simply running the background or do they give you cues where they tell you “Ok, we’ve got a three minute section where someone’s running through a wood”… How do you approach and how is it different to composing an independent piece?
Well, in the film music business, I guess I’ve been usually very, very lucky because I’ve been the one they’ve called when they want something strange. So, certain film composers are called because they can do a little bit of everything and they’re called in to make something specific, but I’ve been lucky because mostly I can bring my own stuff to the table. But, when you’re making music for a film, or whatever, it’s not about your music anymore. It’s all about making the movie as good as possible, so… no egos are allowed, no narcissism – nothing of that. It’s just about making their movie great. But it’s good. I believe that, for me, it’s been the best school because sometimes you have to do stuff that you’re not that comfortable doing and sometimes you have to make music that you wouldn’t make otherwise and it’s not a big deal. You learn from it and suddenly you have five bassoons in your studio and it’s a cool thing. You just have to make the best out of it and enjoy that you’re making music. When you’re making your own stuff, it’s more difficult because you have only yourself to satisfy, in a way, but when you’re making music for others, then I’m happy when they’re happy. It’s not that easy, but it’s something that you do and when the deadline comes and the movie has its premiere and it works and you’re all happy, it’s kind of much easier. It’s complicated to make your own stuff and especially complicated when you’re also trying to figure out how to perform stuff when you’re going to go out on tour
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