Canadian turntablist Eric San started deejaying in clubs in Vancouver in the late 1980s, and by 1997 had released two singles on the club circuit in Montreal, "Scratchappyland" and "Charlie Brown." Known for his scratching skills and re-mixes with a quirky sense of humor, he has also released the album Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (2000) and the single "Drunken Trumpet," and appeared on several compilation albums for the label Ninja Tune. In 2001 he toured with Radiohead and with his band, Bullfrog.
Representative Albums: "Carpal Tunnel Syndrome," "Some of My Best Friends Are DJ's," "Your Mom's Favorite DJ"
Biography
Chinese-Canadian turntablist Kid Koala was born Eric San in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1975. Classically trained on the piano, San instead put his fingers to work on a pair of Technics 1200s starting in the late '80s. He was a college pub DJ and bedroom turntable manipulator for nearly a decade before landing a recording deal with U.K. experimental hip-hop duo Coldcut's Ninja Tune imprint in 1997. San's eclectic approach to sound collage is actually closer to the latter's far-flung beat experiments than the old-school New York and L.A. references that most often form the canon of the scratch DJ's art. It's also a circle-closer of sorts: San's nascent mixing aesthetic was influenced early on by classic Coldcut records such as "(Hey Kids) What Time Is It?" and their "7 Minutes of Madness" massacre of Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full." In fact, the coincidence of Koala signing to his heroes' label (despite the fact that it's based thousands of miles away and home mostly to instrumental trip-hop and computer funk producers) was less a coincidence than it would at first appear; San managed to arrange an "inadvertent" car ride with the group when their label's Stealth tour passed through Montreal in 1996, making sure his mixtape, Scratchappyland, was in the car stereo well beforehand. Excerpts from that tape doubled as Kid Koala's identically titled solo debut when Ninja Tune, duly impressed, released it as a 10" in July 1997. Koala also appeared on the second volume of The Bomb's Return of the DJ compilation with his track "Static's Waltz," another excerpt from his mixtape. Subsequent Ninja Tune releases included Kid Koala remixes of DJ Food's "Scratch Yer Head" and (fittingly) Coldcut's classic "Beats and Pieces," plus the 2000 full-length Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The follow-up, Some of My Best Friends Are DJ's, appeared in 2003. Two years later Live from the Short Attention Span Audio Theater, a CD/DVD set, came out, followed by Your Mom's Favorite DJ in 2006. ~ Sean Cooper, All Music Guide
San attended Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School in Vancouver, BC, Canada, but graduated from Thomas Sprigg Wootton High School and went on to study elementary education at McGill University[5]. He is well known for his enigmatic style of turntablism, which uses an unusual collection of samples. He has been known to use samples of music from Charlie Brown television specials, old comedy sketch routines (including those which mock turntablism), people sneezing, and people reading a menu in Cantonese. He is well known for his cheerful demeanor at concerts and having a good sense of humour.
San is also an illustrator and an artist, having designed all of his own album covers. A comic book he drew is included as the liner notes to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Following the release of the album, Kid Koala toured extensively, during which time he opened for some of his favorite artists, including Radiohead and Björk[6][7].
He has also released a full length graphic novel, Nufonia Must Fall, which includes a soundtrack CD he composed. Some of my Best Friends are DJs includes a chess set as part of the packaging.
This album was supported by a cabaret-style tour throughout North America, Europe and Australia known as The Short Attention Span Theatre, which featured an unpredictable opening act—3 Djs (Kid Koala, P-Love, and DJ Jester the Filipino Fist) on 8 turntables set up like a band, and a bingo game at intermission among other tremendously quirky surprises. Following this tour Kid Koala has performed DJ sets all over Asia, as well as in Iceland, Eastern Europe, Russia, and South America whilst working on a new book (apparently about a mosquito trying to play a clarinet) and a unique puppet show set to take place in 2008.
San popularized a method of playing the turntable like a melodic instrument, where a long, single note is dragged under the needle at different speeds, creating different pitches. Since this method of adjusting pitch is imprecise, the resulting notes waver and bend. Thus, in the song "Drunk Trumpet," San uses this method with a trumpet note to simulate a drunken trumpet player; interspersing drunken vocals to complete the effect.
San released the Kid Koala album, entitled Your Mom's Favorite DJ (ZENCD127), on 25 September 2006.
As of October 2006 San was married and had recently embarked on a 90-city tour.
In 2008 he toured as the opening performer for DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist's "The Hard Sell" tour where he ended his set with a now legendary mix of "Moon River" where he essentially creates and edits in an extended violin solo by playing various long violin notes from the song's instrumental section at different pitches on four turntables, all live.
^ Bryant, Luke. "The new faces of music: Kid Koala's got all the technical moves but more important, he's making new music" The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia), March 20, 2004, Pg. D3
