THICK MAGAZINE

EIGHT PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW BUT PROBABLY SHOULD



KITUNDU*
*revolutionary turntable artist

Thick: I first heard about you through your involvement with the group Plate, Fork, Knife & Spoon. Explain who's in the group and what everybody plays.

Kitundu: Plate, Fork, Knife & Spoon consists of Kat Ouano on Rhodes, Ethan Parsonage on bass and Max MacVeety on drums. I play phonoharps and other instruments that I've built, and turntables as part of that group. We were recording at Wide Hive Records in San Francisco, in the Mission District, that's where we've been working on an album.

T: Let's get right into the instruments that you play, maybe start with the Phonoharp and talk about some of the things that double as art, as well.

K: I started out playing turntables, so that's the foundation of everything that l do. The Phonoharp is the extension o f an instrument that I built called the Stylophone. The Styiophone was a one stringed instrument that I would tuck underneath the needle and be able to play the string with my fingers, and the vibrations would get carried into the needle and be amplified by the record player. I started to build multiple stringed Stylophones, the natural progression of that led me to build the Phoncharps which are multi-stringed turntables. Instead of being in contact with the needle the turntable itself is the stringed instrument, so when you play the strings the vibrations get carried into the body of the turntable, into the record and the needle picks the vibrations up off the record itself. On the other side of the turntable instruments there are elemental turntables that I've built that run on wind and water and fire. I've designed ones that should run on the power from earthquakes, I'm working on some balloon powered ones. ThoseŠ instruments connect the turntable, which is at the forefront of electronic music today, to it's original source, to vibration, sound and to the natural elements. When I take say the water-powered turntable for example, and I put a record on it, it's a fountain and as the water flows it spins a pool of water and that pool of water spins a record platter and that plays the record. It doesn't play it at any regular speed, it plays it really slowly and changes your sense of time. It's highlights more a natural and geologic sense of time, than a social and cultural sense of. In terms of being a visual artist, I'm trying to connect turntables to nature so that people can realize that they're not that far removed, especially when you're living in urban environments. You go to the grocery store and you get a package of mushrooms, there all wrapped in plastic and you don't know where it came from, there's such a disconnect from the natural world. That's what I'm trying to communicate when I build the wind-powered turntable or something similar.



T: What other groups have you worked with or are you working with?

K: Right now I'm working on a duet project, the working title of it is Bridge & Tunnel, it's a duet project with Melissa Dougherty. She's this amazing vocalist, guitar player and musician. She plays computer, sampler, guitar, vocals, mbira and some other instruments, I play my Phonoharps. It's a new music project that's really pushing the boundaries, there's a lot of improvisation involved in it. We're going to be playing a lot more in the future, people in the Bay Area and beyond can look out for that. We're trying to do some touring as well. Outside of that, I've had the honor of playing with some cats who were associated with the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) in Chicago. Douglas Ewart, who is a multi-instrumentalist and reed player, has invited me to play with him whenever he's come out to the west coast. I've also played with Carei Thomas who's in Minnesota, he's a pianist, educator/composer, a leader in the music scene there. I've been really fortunate to work with musicians that have such a historical legacy, and to be able to absorb and learn from them has been really challenging but it's been a blessing. I've also been working in the Bay Area with choreographers, doing some composing for productions, such as for Joanna Haigood and Sarah Shelton Mann, who's company Contraband was one of the leaders of contact improvisation movement in the Bay Area in the late 80s and early 90s. It's a busy time, but it feels good to be active.

T: Plate, Fork, Knife & Spoon, not to encapsulate it in a genre, but what sound does it lean toward?

K: The group definitely has some funk roots. The range of the group is pretty extraordinary. There are reggae and West Indian influences, definitely jazz influences in the music. I bring a kind of experimental sound side of things into the group because I'm really interested in working with sound, bringing in things that are non-linear or textural. Kat definitely has her roots in classical music and the drummer Max MacVeety has a whole list of different places that he can pull from, everything from Latin styles to jazz styles, African styles. His facility on the drums really lends good sound to the group. A lot of the stuff we create is improvised on the spot too. It doesn't sound like it because they're so strong on their instruments, and they've been playing together for so long that their communication is so strong. I'm often amazed when I'm playing with them - I get to go along for the ride.

T: Talk about the installation piece you did.

K: I did this installation at the Luggage Store Gallery on Market street in downtown San Francisco. They allowed me to come in and build whatever sound piece I wanted to build. I had been walking through the gallery and realized that Market street is home to a ton of pigeons and I really wanted to build a piece that would interact with them. So, I built a piece that was about 8ft. x 7ft. x 7ft. up against the central windows of the gallery space, and had the windows removed so the birds could come into the structure and rest and eat, and do what they do. On the outside of the structure I built in these different sound elements, and turntables, and sound structures. When the birds flew in and landed all the ledges were weight sensitive, so when the birds would land to eat something or when the birds would land to groom themselves they would trigger turntables and instruments inside of the structure according to their behavior. It took a little while for them to get used to it, but after a couple of weeks they came in regularly and the whole structure would activate and sounds would start to play. It was only up for about a month though. It was interesting once we took it down the birds kept coming, there was kind of a ghost image of the installation that remained after it left. To give you an example of one of the sound pieces that was built into it, I had one record that was suspended by strings and there were pigeon feathers hanging down In contact with the strings. When the birds would land inside they would trigger a small fan that would disrupt the air and move the feathers, and they would strike up against the strings and play this crystalline sound that would come out of the top of the structure and into the gallery. I just wanted people to re-evaluate their relationship with the birds they see everyday. Back in the day pigeons used to be used in wars to ferry messages, they saved lives. Doves and pigeons are part of the same family, doves are important historically and are also significant in a lot of religions as well. So they've had this position in history, and now everyone thinks of them as rats with wings ­ they're quite disparaged, people don't like pigeons. I wanted to illustrate that things can change over time, humans have the: capacity to really love something and then despise it over the course of just a generation or two. We do that culturally and in many different ways, the pigeons were just one example so I could get people to start thinking about larger issues.

T: Do you have any other experimental instruments that don't have to do with the turntable?

K: Most of them do. I'm working on a kalimba turntable that actually plays reels that you can change the melodies on. You can put a lock groove record on and it will play different melodies on the kalimba in time with the beat. I'm also working on a stylus-glove, which is a glove that has a needle on each fingertip. So, you can play a record in four or five different places at the same time. And if I got a record pressed up with a bunch of bands (grooves) that just had one note on them I could play chords on it, and do different melodic and harmonic things with it. The record player has been my medium for a while and I just want to re-imagine it in as many possible ways as I can. Today a lot of people are caught up in how you're supposed to do something and how traditionally things have been done. I think we limit ourselves by not experimenting. You watch kids if you give them an object, the way they play with it in every possible way because they're just trying to discover it and figure out what its capable of. That's what Iım trying to do with the turntable, find out what it's capable of.