Kid Koala Gives Props To Your Moms

09/28/06 5:30pm

by Phil Villeneuve (CHARTattack)

Kid Koala's new Your Mom's Favorite DJ album was recorded on reel-to-reel, which explains how the effort is divided into two tracks of about 15 minutes each (that's how much time is on each side of a tape.) This is going to piss a lot of iPod users off, but Koala doesn't make records for iPod users.

"I don't understand that technology so much, but I was told that if you have an iPod on shuffle, you can have songs fade into each other," Koala kindly explains. "Well, we had some crickets on the end of the album just 'cause I thought it'd be funny to put crickets on the album.

"Then we decided to have it as an actual track later on [secret track three], so if someone decided to upload this to their player, their shuffle playlist would be coming out of 'Hey Jude,' and then there's one chirp from the cricket and it starts fading out into another one of your songs. That would be Kid Koala's contribution to your shuffle.

"The side A and side B thing is to push the point that each side is one track. I never felt like making an album with songs for the radio, and I always liked making cool little audio adventures."

Audio adventure indeed; YMFDJ is a classic Koala album with scores of jazz horns and strange spoken-word clips over hip-hop beats, but brought to a whole other level with some rock. The gritty guitar-based "Slew Test" tracks will also be used on a future project called The Slew that Koala describes as a kind of "Sabbath style blues-rock record, but assembled a la The Bomb Squad."

He also brings on the swampy southern blues — the root of all music that the Montrealer loves. But Koala, who recently got squeezed in before The Flaming Lips at Toronto's Virgin Festival, had another motive with this record.

"This album is just me reaching out to the women over 40," says Koala. "I don't really know if they're gonna reach back.

"We've actually got a lot of feedback from people's mothers, and they've been saying they really like what I'm doing. People might not think that's being hardcore, but just for the record, there's nothing more hardcore that giving birth."

So why, with this being his fourth studio album and having a reputation for being one of the craziest turntablists in the biz, is the Kid still having to defend his genre?

"People ask me, 'Are you a musician?' I answer, 'Sometimes.' It really depends, because the thing with a turntable is that it can tell stories. It can also be a production tool for folly. It could rock a party or set the pulse at a wedding. I like to visit all those parts, except for the wedding, because I've done it before and it's very stressful — especially if you don't bring tango records."