by RAF KATIGBAK

From his early dates rocking some of Montreal's very first all-night techno parties to his critically acclaimed releases on a host of local and international labels, for the last decade the name David Kristian has been synonymous with the Montreal underground electronic music scene. He's kept a relatively low profile on the live tip the last few years. The past six months, though, have seen Kristian emerge from hibernation in typical Canadian fashion - bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready to rock Montrealers again, as witnessed by his killer sets at Blizzarts and Saphir not long ago. His latest batch of plastic is a 10-CD retrospective of the last decade on local imprint Wikkid Records, getting rave reviews all over. The Mirror recently got a hold of Kristian, as the big Wikkid label launch (one of the last events at the old SAT) draws near, and this is what he had to say.

Mirror: I've noticed you're out more these days, taking notes. Have things changed a lot musically in the past 10 years?

David Kristian: I think the live club scene has become more sophisticated. People are looking for a little more melody and that's really important to me, hearing melodic hooks. Now when I go out, I know I'm going to get to hear something different.

M: So melody is important, huh?

DK: I think any sort of two-minute song that is going to be played and remembered forever, like the Beach Boys or Simon and Garfunkel, that's the sort of thing I think is what everybody should strive to achieve.

M: That's funny, 'cause a lot of people have you pegged as the abstract electronic guy.

DK: It is funny because I would say only about 10 to 20 per cent of what I do in the studio is ambient or abstract. That's a very small percentage - everything else is beats.

M: Which brings us to the Music From the Mermaid Room retrospective.

DK: Exactly. Basically, it's all the music that I've been dying to release over the last 10 years but couldn't. It's like them going back, going, "Whoa, look at all this stuff that should've come out over all these years."

Immortality 'n' chips

M: So what is a mermaid room, anyway?

DK: Mermaid rooms were actually rooms in hotels where they had women swimming indoors and you could watch them swim through the window.

M: Creepy.

DK: I've always been fascinated by Japanese mermaid lore, which is very different from our mermaid stories. Not all the mermaids are in water, some are on land, and if you eat the flesh of a mermaid you have eternal life, or you can also turn into a demon, or a bakemono. Actually, the name of my abstract side project is Gentle Bakemono.

M: Besides the upcoming CDs, I hear you also want to put out more vinyl as well.

DK: I really like vinyl almost as a fetish object. I think records are beautiful. When CDs came out it had to become a new style of artwork. You no longer had giant gatefolds with gear lists. I really liked that. When you're a kid and you're lying on the couch and you have the sleeve open in front of you like a book, you're just staring at it transfixed and you're examining the minute details in the artwork, you just don't have the same kind of intimate experience now. Now everything is disposable and attention spans are getting shorter by the minute, but at the same time it's evolution, things have to change, move forward.

Deriving thud from a spud

M: Laptops are certainly popular in Montreal these days.

DK: But they're also dangerous too. Shows are disappearing at an alarming rate. You think you're going to go see something really major and you go there and it's like watching somebody at an Internet café. To be completely fair, in the end it's not what you use to make music, it's the music you make.

M: I understand you like using toys.

DK: Toys are amazing. They're simple, but when you process them they're not so simple. It's nice to work with limitations sometimes and to see what you can do to make it sound like your own thing. I just modified an old Speak & Math toy so that when you push this red button it sounds like R2-D2 on Ex-Lax.

M: What's this I hear about you playing a potato?

DK: That was a drum & bass show in 1995. Back then I didn't have a real sampler, all my rhythms were from drum machines that I programmed manually. For samples I used a modified Walkman. To modulate it I would do things to it like dropping alcohol or saliva on it. At some point I used that old potato experiment, where you have a potato in a Petri dish with water and probes. I was taking the electricity from the potato to short out components on the Walkman, and that produced basslines. So while I was playing live, these huge sub-tone basslines were coming out of this potato. Of course, it was at one of those early drum & bass shows that nobody was at. Except a few record label guys, of course.

With Capital J, Black Market, Pivot and DJ RCola at the SAT tonight, Thursday, April 24, 9pm, $10

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