Guitarist Kaki King is famed for rejecting musical conventions and lauded by Rolling Stone Magazine as a “genre unto herself.” Yalla had a chat with the iconoclast and implores you not to miss her regional début this November
“There are some guitar players that are good and there are some guitar players that are really good. And then there’s Kaki King.” – Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters & Nirvana
Who are your musical influences?
I grew up listening to Brit pop, everything from Blur, Oasis, the Cure, early U2, the Clash to Fleetwood Mac, singer-songwriter Dick Drake and, going even further back, the Yardbirds and the Beatles. PJ Harvey was a huge influence when I was learning to play guitar. That’s the music that helped me disassociate from my surroundings as a teen. It was about differentiating yourself. There was never any hope of me fitting in or being average or normal, so I deliberately sought out things that were foreign and in my mind were a bit more of an oddity. I also really love pop music.
You have pop influences?
Although my work is instrumental and therefore abstract, I often follow the pop formula of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and bridge with a lot of repetition of motifs and themes. Early pop influences stayed with me, and, in my early work, I wanted to make something concise and catchy and to make memorable melodies.
Tell us about your recent work.
It’s really different now. Incorporating the audio-visual aspects and these triggering aspects and triggering sounds, literally using the guitar as a trigger has me on a new path. I am in midair in the rabbit hole, descending into musical parts unknown. Sometimes, I have no idea where we are going to end up with my music. So, the Abu Dhabi show is the product of that. It’s very high tech. I have lines, I am reciting lines, so I am sort of an extra in my own show. I am working on video work and overseeing the design of the show. There’s a lot more to what I am doing now than just playing guitar. It’s very fun, and it’s extremely challenging, like let’s just build it and see. It takes a lot more thought. For years, being an instrumental artist didn’t involve a lot of intellectual activity; it was visceral and much more emotional. Now, there’s this context of having a concept that we want to impart to people. So, everything is upside down: my thinking, my knowledge of what I am doing technically. I have learned one thousand things just in this year alone. It’s a new journey, but fundamentally it’s all about me and the guitar.
What is “guitar triggering”?
Here’s a simple breakdown. My guitar signal goes into a computer that turns the signal into MIDI, which is a form of code. That code can be sent to any part of the computer and told to do anything. It may be instructed to tell a light to blink on and off or a colour to wash over what’s on the screen or it may trigger a video clip, and the note next to it is a video clip with a spiral that is told to turn blue. The sky is the limit. Everyone’s doing it with electronic instruments, but not a lot of people are turning acoustic instruments into controllers. We’re projection-mapping all of these things onto the guitar itself so there is this closed circuit. I play notes on the guitar, It generate the code which travels through the computer only to go through all these things that we’ve created to show you an image of what I want you to see on the guitar itself which is what I just played the note on. In a way it’s very elegant and very beautiful, but it’s also a very complex series of processes. That might sound boring, but what I make is gorgeous and moving, and it’s a way to see a guitar in a way that you’ve never experienced before. It’s a way to open up the instrument and the idea of the instrument in a way that’s never been explored before.
My early guitar work was about pushing boundaries to see what my guitar was capable of, and I am still pushing my guitar to see what it’s capable of and to change people’s idea about how it should be played and how it should sound.
Describe DATA NOT FOUND.
It’s meant to be beautiful, exciting, and lush. The music itself is deeply emotional, fast at times, gorgeously slow other times, but there’s a lot of thought behind the compositions. We’re creating visuals that reject the rectangle. Instead of your standard rectangular projection screen or scrim, I have a white tent with an arch in the middle that I use for my projection screen. The arch shape removes the rectangle and gives the images a different kind of “window” to be perceived in. And the tent onstage allows the images to be closer to the audience instead of a large screen that hangs behind everyone. I am trying to create something you’ve never seen before, and I want to take chances. It’s not about me about me versus what’s out there, I like to hear new things, so I create new sounds and concepts. In the guitar world, I am very comfortable with what I do, but in the multimedia world, I am still quite uncomfortable, but uncomfortable is a great place to be, because that’s where you grow, and you learn. I am happily uncomfortable.
You delve into big data and other philosophical matters in your work. Where did this come from?
When you do what I do, and you travel the world, you are alone a lot. I was listened to and not listened to a lot. Plenty of people travel for a living, plenty of people play music, but I just had all these things going on at the same time, and I was very young. So, I just thought more about the world in general. I feel very global. I’ve seen the similarities and the differences in people, but my outlook has always been different. I approach thought very cautiously and carefully. Travelling has made me certain that I know nothing about anything; I’ve known that from an early age. Once you’ve seen the world, you understand how very little you know. I explore what I do not know as an artist, and I try to make sense out of it.
NYUAD Arts Center, The Black Box | 13-15 Nov, at 8pm
Multimedia concert by visionary guitarist and composer
DATA NOT FOUND explores a broad range of contemporary issues, including artificial intelligence, the natural world, “big data” and personal empowerment, using her guitar as her proverbial magnifying glass. With direction by Annie Dorsen, whose works explore the intersection of algorithms and live performance,_ DATA NOT FOUND_ is an ongoing investigation and collaboration between a talented cast of performers, contributors, and researchers.
DATA NOT FOUND is a joint co-commission made possible by the The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi; International Festival of Arts & Ideas, New Haven, CT; the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech; ARTS@TECH at Georgia Tech; and Krannert Center for the Performing Arts/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Developmental support provided by MASS MoCA. Technical support provided by POTION Design. Co-Producers: Greg Kastelman and Vickie Starr.
