Mocky has just released his fifth album.Vice Cooler
Known as the producer of Feist's four-time Grammy nominated album The Reminder, the songwriter and instrumentalist Mocky (born 40 years ago in Saskatchewan as Dominic Salole) has just released his fifth album, the sublime, relaxed Key Change, a deftly textured acoustic departure from his previous electronic efforts. The Globe spoke to him from his home base in Los Angeles.
On your Bandcamp site, a listener left a comment saying that the album sounded like Mocky. That's a curious comment, but is there a Mocky sound?
Yeah. When I first started out, I played matinee shows at zoos, as a fulfilment of a lifelong fantasy to experiment with animals and music. My first approach was a louder approach – jumping around, making a lot of noise. As I went along on my tour, I noticed the more I chilled out, the more I found my voice. I took to a kind of crooning, over a little Casio keyboard. The monkeys would get drawn into it. They would come to the side of the cage, reach through the bars and touch the keyboard.
You took that as an endorsement?
I was playing the zoos in the afternoon, and I would play at a club at night. I would try the same technique on humans, and, lo and behold, it had the same kind of effect. So, in doing that, I discovered my own sound. It's a sensitive kind of sound, ultimately, whether it's my early albums doing something electronic or electro-rap stuff, straight through now to my acoustic phase.
To me, the album sounds like something that could have been imagined as futuristic in 1971.
I was just thinking about that yesterday. That if you go back and look at musical evolution and its big-bang moments, there are these musical paths not taken. Now you can go back and reimagine the what-ifs.
When it comes to this record, how about what if Shuggie Otis hadn't gotten sidetracked?
You nailed it. I hadn't thought about him in a while, but you nailed it.
How would you describe the record?
The objective in making the album was to maximize the amount of humanity and human feel you could feel on the record. There's a lot of good music coming out, but I wasn't finding there was a lot of space for stuff that hasn't been corrected by a computer.
Would timeless be a better adjective than retro-futuristic?
Sure. As a musician, what I'm interested in is creating a sample that never was.
Given that, and your reputation as a producer rather than a solo artist, can we say that this is Mocky's time now?
I think so. If you do what's natural and you resonate as a human first and foremost, but also as a musician, then you're going to make sense – to yourself, and to the universe. That's the kind of attitude I took into the studio. I think that's what this is all about.
Mocky plays Drake Underground Thursday, 8 p.m., $10, 1150 Queen St. W.; HAVN Gallery, Wednesday, 9 p.m., $10, 26 Barton St. E., Hamilton.
Brad Wheeler