Eric (Kid Koala) San never thought it would come to this. A self-described “chameleon in the music world, ” he is best known for being a virtuoso scratch DJ; but when you're a talented artist you tend to want to push limits and boundaries.
Eric (Kid Koala) San never thought it would come to this. A self-described “chameleon in the music world, ” he is best known for being a virtuoso scratch DJ; but when you're a talented artist you tend to want to push limits and boundaries.
San did just that by tackling a graphic novel entitled Nufonia Must Fall and when Oscar-nominated production designer K.K. Barrett wanted to collaborate, San thought back to Nufonia - his robotic, headphone-wearing, lovesick protagonist.
The mixed-media production involves puppetry, model sets, animation and the Afiara String Quartet accompanying San's original score on piano and turntable. The progressive production will premiere at The Banff Centre's Eric Harvie Theatre on May 31, then San and Barrett will showcase Nufonia Must Fall at Toronto's Luminato Festival in June. Nufonia will then tour internationally, with productions taking place in Europe, South America and Australia.
“I got hooked up with The Banff Centre through Adrian Fung, who is part of the Afiara Quartet, who had been telling me about this facility and had nothing but good things to say about it and was constantly talking to me about whether we could do a collaboration of some sort, ” San said.
“They're from the classical realm and I'm from the more electronic and film school realm, so I was always thinking what a good project it could be where musically we could join the two worlds and not force it too much. ”
Timing lined up for San when he met Barrett about a year ago. “He came to my show Vinyl Vaudeville in Los Angeles when I went down there to promote 12 Bit Blues, and he came up to me after the show and said he really enjoyed what we were doing.
“I've been a fan of K.K. since I can remember, all his stuff with Spike Jonze and Sophia Coppola, he's just a really big inspiration to me in art, so that got the discussion started as to whether we could do a project together.
“I thought about what we could do and I knew he had just done a show called Stop the Virgins with Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which was more of a theatrical opera dance show. I thought maybe we could do something in the performing arts. I had this book Nufonia Must Fall, a story about a robot trying to write love songs, but can't sing. ”
Nufonia was published in 2003, with San also writing an accompanying soundtrack. “It's basically a 350 page, silent graphic novel that I wrote. Kind of a love story, but it read like a screenplay to a silent film, ” San said. “The publisher asked me to write a book, and that's kind of a funny story because they asked me for a 10,000-word, 100-page minimum book and it was 2000-01when they approached me about it. What am I going to write about? Turntable mechanics? Something nerdy? ”
San just started doodling and ended up drawing a few characters born out of his brainstorm sessions. “One of them was this Nufonia robot. Fast forward three years and the manuscript I turned in wasn't a 10,000-word, 100-page book, instead it was a 350-page silent book with zero dialogue and I knew I was breaching all the contracts and they didn't have to accept it as a manuscript at all, ” San said.
“I thought, Aw man, they're going to make me return the advance, but I worked on it for three years and really enjoyed the process. I nervously gave them the manuscript for Nufonia Must Fall - they read it and the loved it. ”
Since the start of Nufonia's inception, San has gone on to do film work with the National Film Board of Canada and Hollywood films such as Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Looper and The Great Gatsby .
“Nufonia was my first score, my first graphic novel, but it was a score for a graphic novel, so what does that mean? ” San said. “I had to think about certain key scenes in the book and then write little music cue scenes for it. If you read that first copy of the book and listen to the music, it's sort of a primordial version of what we're doing here and what I think we're going to attempt to do with this show.
“Bring it up a level, we have another decade of experience and we're bringing in some pretty heavy hitter talent to pull this off. ”
San said he didn't trust himself to direct it due to being so close to the material.
“I lived with this story too long, I want someone to come in with fresh eyes who can adapt it to the stage, but we still want it to feel cinematic, ” San said. “In essence, what we're doing here is making a live film. Live animation, interdisciplinary puppet animation of a graphic novel scored live, filmed live and projected live and edited live.
“It's more than a three ring circus, it's more like a five ring circus, but hopefully at the end of the day you'll watch the screen, you know what's up there is kind of a captivating, good old-fashioned love story about a robot - I never thought it would come to this. ”
