Gourmet Spaghetti Boy
Gourmet has been spending the lockdown period engaging with the music and listening with feeling. He has been working on a 14 track album for the last two years and finished final mixing and mastering while locking down in Cape Town with his parents and girlfriend. He’s a true creative polymath, with projects spanning film, music, production, design, direction and drawing. His newest venture is Caramel Palace, a ‘creative house’ project that focusses on giving a platform to new, diverse and interesting talent. He releases a new track every week and also has a monthly radio show.
We caught up on the phone one sunny Thursday afternoon, he in Cape Town with a floating soundtrack of birds undercutting his magic wisdom and I in Berlin with old tapes of ambulance sirens whispering into mine. We giggled a lot and spent a lot of time afterwards planning a live show exit featuring the David Blaine frog trick and remembering a time when you didn’t have to be instagram famous to get into a nightclub.
The first thing I looked at before I looked at any of the work you sent me was your Instagram. Which is a super lame thing to say but I also think it can be one of the best intros to a young creative we have now. It became obvious to me straight away that you are so involved in every stage of the creative process and the direction of each project just through each one of these snapshots. So I wonder where and how you began your experience across film, music, drawing, direction and whether you had imagined that you would find one of these to be your primary focus ?
I’ve been drawing and tapping pots and listening to music since I was a kid. When I was in my early teenage years, I was in rock-y/punk-y bands and then when I was 18 I started this project. I initially wanted to study music but then decided on design because I figured I would be doing music anyway. Some friends and I then went on to start a record label where we also did the design, art direction, videos, mixing, mastering etc. I got really into it all while we were doing that and since then I have just felt like you are able to see a much fuller picture of an artist when they have their toes in everything. I’ve developed a fascination for this pseudo-religious form of ‘mass creation’...engaging with the inner child; creating and trying to add beauty to this kind of endless mildness.
You mentioned that you starting working with friends at first. I know that you work with Thor [Rixon] and Janina [Zais] so are the majority of your projects and collaborators people with whom you have existing relationships or friendships ?
I think all the people that I work with are my friends, to be honest, or at least in my personal capacity. When you have a connection with someone it gets deepened when you have a creative relationship with them. It’s about feeling comfortable enough around someone to be vulnerable and create honestly. But there is also something to say for working with people that you don’t know at all.
Yeah I hear that. There can be these incredible moments when you meet someone on set or at a project for the first time and you learn a new language together in colour and form and sound, over the course of your day or a week or whatever as your ideas grow.
Yes, there’s always something quite amazing about creating something that doesn’t exist yet out of nothing....you know, pulling those feathers out of the bag with someone else can be so interesting.
Have you found it difficult locking down in Cape Town ?
I have. I actually moved back in with my parents because they had to really seriously lock down so I wanted to come and help out with some stuff.
Do you create work with your parents too ?
No, I don’t. They are very encouraging though. My dad was a drummer when he was younger and his band actually opened for The Who when he was in his 20s. He had to stop playing the drums after that because the experience was so hectic. I think it was a little crazy being in the shadow of this huge band.
Super intense. But also such an incredible time to be a part of that. So, since you haven’t been able to play live or meet with people in studios or face to face, have you been doing Zoom sessions ?
I haven’t been creating with people on Zoom but sometimes I have extra social days on loads of calls despite the distance. It hasn’t been so bad since all of the work on this project I do myself, including mixing and mastering. It is actually quite an internal process. I am always more comfortable internally than collaborating.
Do you think that’s so that you’re able to envision and control all aspects of your output ?
Yeah, and I also think when you’re trying to find a sound for a long time and you actually put your finger on it, it can be almost addictive to want to try and pursue that.
I was thinking about this when I was watching some of your videos earlier, kind of in relation to synaesthesia.
I was actually talking to someone about this yesterday, synaesthesia.
I felt like there was some kind of shape-sound, image/form-based synaesthetic aspects to the visuals in your work. Like the repeated imagery of hands, for example. I wondered if this was a conscious process or if you had even noticed it.
So, I don’t have synaesthesia but I use a kind of referential synaesthesia-esque process to create all of my visuals. I don’t see things when I am making sounds but I go into a slightly meditative state just listening and looking and researching. Obviously certain things just connect more than others; certain colours, certain feelings.
It feels like a really personal visual is always being created by you that is entirely yours in some way; like it hasn’t been funnelled through anything. Do you want to do more with the “short film” aspects of your work ?
The album I sent you [14 tracks releasing in early 2021 as seven A/B side pairs over a three month period] will be finished with a 14 minute short film, the idea being that it will end up as a sort of seven episode series with each song pairing. I wrote the whole album over the last two years in both Cape Town and Berlin and then mixed and did all of the post-production for this record myself as well during lockdown here in Cape Town.
Have you missed Berlin since you went back to stay with your parents ?
Definitely, there’s such a crazy energy about that place. And there’s nothing quite like a Berlin summer. But I am now planning on moving to London since I was born there and lived there until I was 10 but have hardly spent any time there during my adult life. It would be great to develop my music and visual work further while in London and I think there’s a bigger space for my work there.
Do you have any musicians that you are finding really exciting at the moment ? Not that you see yourself as similar to but that are inspiring and making you move somehow.
I am constantly excited by music. Although I did have a weird kind of epiphany while in lockdown where I was really “fuck music, I’m just going to make films.” There’s an endless amount of exciting, good music but I really feel that there are very few good new films. It really seems like an open market. But, anyway. I have recently been getting quite into some 70s shit like Weldon Irvine and some George Clinton stuff. Jai Paul just started this record label with his brother and it’s called Paul Institute I think. This is a hard question to answer, I don’t know why. I think I have also been enjoying quite a lot of jungle stuff, and some Brazilian. I just discovered this 19 year old kid in Jo’burg called Uncle who is blowing my mind with his music. My girlfriend and I and another friend have started this record label/ creative house/idea garden called Caramel Palace and we’re lining up some releases that include this guy. All of my new work will be released here as well. It is really good to be able to show and explore this really exciting and weird and interesting music coming out of South Africa and make it accessible where perhaps it wouldn’t have been before. There’s some really interesting energy out here since I have been back.
Is there anyone that you would love to play with or make music with ? It doesn’t even have to be a musician, it could be Andy Warhol on the panpipes or whatever. Someone whose creative energy you’d love to get involved with, dead or alive.
It would be cool to jam out with Jesus, you know, that would be wild ! Get the surprise of a lifetime. That’s a good question...there’s a bunch of people that I would just love to see under the hood of what they do. Jai Paul for sure. Someone like Quincy Jones and maybe D’Angelo would really be the dream. Wow, me, Jesus and D’Angelo.
Let’s focus on your upcoming album. Did you decide to slow release your album in order that you could break away from the ultra fast consumerist culture we find in all creative outputs ?
Yeah, I also think that, from the video and short film perspective, that you can put so much energy and life into these projects and they somehow end up like dust when they are left only as promotional tools. I really wanted to create something more out of this combination of film and music. There is just so much to take in and digest and see and hear all the time so I think we should make an effort these days to quiet the noise and be more ourselves. It’s really easy to consume everything very quickly and it all loses substance when it’s like that. There’s so much value in an entire album but it is a really hard thing to do to release it all at once unless you’re entirely well known, largely due to algorithmic reasons...
Do you think the algorithms work in your favour or not ?
No, definitely not. I hope it is coming to a stage where it will change but it is really hard to know. I think the majority of it is about being in more places and making it a full time job for someone. But it should be really honest and authentic and as organic as possible for the long term.
I feel like there’s a real scenic divide between your A and B side tracks; how you have layered and left expectations (or not) for the listener. Was this a conscious choice and created trajectory ? Tell me a bit more about that.
This is interesting because someone said a similar thing to me about this. But the tracks should actually read ABAB rather than AA BB. So the songs are paired as they are released, with the A of each one as the single and then the B making up the more chilled side. But perhaps actually I should release it over 14 weeks instead of seven. It could work better like that...we’ll see. But it should really be about listening with feeling; connecting the dots.
Connecting the dots makes so much sense with this collection of work. I’m going to listen to the whole thing again. Thank you so much for doing this dude, it has been great and I’m hyped to hang with you at some point in the future.
interview SISI SAVIDGE
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