12 bit Blues (2012)
12 tracks, 41 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes
The first time I’d heard of Kid Koala was through his remix of Yusef Lateef’s ‘Bamboo Flute Blues’ (you can hear that on YouTube here). It wasn’t your usual remix of changing bits of the song around, repeating bits and adding a new beat and synth-line to it. He’d turned the piece into an almost musique concrete. The original piece was sparse, led by the eponymous instrument with just small and subtle interjections by the double bass, piano and drums; Kid Koala’s remix kept it that way. The sounds used in the remix only come from the original track. They’re manipulated with some light delay or tremolo now and then, and he introduces his own personality to the piece by using the instruments as samples for his turntablism, but the mood and the feeling of the piece remained exactly the same as the 1965 recording. Not many DJs would approach that piece in that way. I knew there was something different about Kid Koala.
Then he released a blues album and I knew it was going to be special. 12 bit Blues is like that Yusef Lateef remix but on a much bigger scale: the sounds you hear on this album are from a shop's worth of vintage blues records, all chopped and changed and looped and stretched and morphed in various ways to create an album that is as much blues as it is instrumental hip-hop.
The whole album is made in the spirit of getting back to essentials. Just as he looks to early blues as a way to look back to the roots of American music, his music making process also goes back to the roots of modern hip-hop production. No computer software was used in the creation of the album; instead, every one of the hundreds of samples were painstakingly loaded up into an E-mu SP-1200 sampler so beloved of early hip-hop producers (and which works in 12 bit, hence the album’s title), and played back those samples live, building up multitrack layers of music. After these tracks were solidified, he added his own turntable scratches and cuts onto the top for extra flair. In this process, Kid Koala managed to find the middle-ground between the ultra-analogue world of the blues and heavily computerised world of contemporary hip-hop by ‘playing’ the samples as if they were a classic instrument of the blues.
The range of sounds and samples on display is astounding, and shows the passion and knowledge that Kid Koala holds for the blues. The album starts with a growling monologue from Son House and goes on to encompass so many different blues frames of reference: from pre-war country blues to Chicago boogie, from jump-blues to piano blues to early soul to full-on, balls-out, horn-led R’n’B. Consequently, the album’s mood is similarly broad, with some tracks being a riot of sound, and some more contemplative, but all made with care, joy and a tricksy spirit. With 12 bit Blues, Kid Koala succeeds in something that generations of people who tried to combine blues and hip-hop failed at – he managed to combine not just the music in an authentic and pleasing way, but also the personalities of the scenes in a way that would make total sense to both a hip-hop fan and a blues nut. It’s really impressive from a technical and emotional standpoint, and totally immersive from a musical one.
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