“It would have to be something with a narrative interesting enough to cross into music, and that definitely is one,” he said. Ghost in the Shell: Though Micay isn’t eager at all to get back in the film-remix game, he concedes this seminal 1995 animated Japanese film might be the only property that could one day lure him back. “Whether or not it was good, I don’t know.” Star Wars: Well, Rick Rubin beat him to it, and although Micay hasn’t heard the hermetic producer’s take on the space opera, he’s not going to revisit that galaxy so soon. “That’s a near-perfect soundtrack already, in my opinion.” Samurai Jack: The critically celebrated animated series has also been raised by fans as a possibility to Micay, but he has a simple reason for cutting them down. Since Capsule’s Pride started streaming, fans have reached out to Micay requesting he work his magic on other beloved properties. “That first bout taught me lessons about the safety of parks in England, but I also learned about the industry. “People talk about how the Internet is such a fast way to go from zero to hero … but it doesn’t mean much unless you have something to follow up,” he said. So, he’s ready, and he’s realizing that perhaps the future isn’t such a dark place after all. “I had physical lists of every little detail,” said Micay, who now lives in Berlin.Ĭapsule’s Pride will be followed by a “dancefloor-oriented” EP on Aus Music in April, with more releases planned for June and November. That year, Micay didn’t just write music, he wrote a game plan, jotting lists of potential labels, agents and management teams. Upon graduation, he pitched his parents on a plan to move home - “I’ll do the dishes, I’ll clean, I’ll make dinner,” he promised - and steer his career back on track. In his fourth year, he resumed writing music. So he returned to Kingston to finish his degree. “I couldn’t keep up with the hype and demands that were suddenly thrust upon me.” My head was killing me all the time,” he recalled. Still, determined not to squander his new-found steam, he continued gigging across England. Micay grew up playing hockey, and this was his eighth concussion. Losing his phone and iPod would turn out to be the least of his problems. On Halloween, he was walking home from the library when he was suddenly knocked out by a pipe and mugged. That September, he moved to Leeds on a study exchange, and his run of serendipity ended. He downloaded that Ableton software around January 2011, and by August a hype storm gathered around his slickly addictive, Ciara-sampling dubstep tune “ Baby, Let Me Finish.” The scene’s potential new darling, he scored a record deal with Mad Decent. His breakthrough happened almost too quickly to fathom. As a student at Queen’s University, he was sufficiently alienated by the “climate of keggers” to get serious about writing music. Naturally, he was musical, learning the viola, banjo and guitar. He grew up in the Annex, the son of a music-teacher mother and a jazz aficionado father. And that’s important, because this marks the beginning of what Micay, 25, hopes will be a fruitful second act. The record is novel, yes, but not a novelty. The real trick with Capsule’s Pride is that it works astonishingly well on its own terms. Albums derived from geek-culture landmarks are having a moment, from the Rick Rubin-curated Star Wars Headspace compilation to Materia Collective’s six-disc Final Fantasy VIII remix collection. Motorcycle crashes and female screams were also pieces in the sonic puzzle. On “Capsule’s Pride (Bikes),” the high tone glowing in the background was derived from looping a half-second clip of a choir until it sounded like a single, sustained synth note. The shimmering “K&K (Lovers in the Night)” uses the sound of a cup striking a table for percussion. Roughly 65 per cent of the album is specifically derived from the film. It’s a vindicating result for an arduous process that saw Micay feed the entire film through Ableton and repurpose dialogue, music and random sound effects as instruments in his 43-minute manga opus. News of his Akira adaptation shuttled faster than Tetsuo’s motorcycle, earning headlines in the Guardian, NPR and XLR8R. And the early response to his Capsule’s Pride EP has confirmed it. Yet Micay was also confident he was the right man for this manga. “With dance music and anime, they’re zealous about loving things and they’re zealous when they don’t like things.” “This overlaps two of the most passionate culture consumers in the world: underground dance music and anime,” Micay said. Of course, Bwana, whose real name is Nathan Micay, was himself a zealous fan of the landmark 1988 Japanese thriller, so he knew that fumbling with the cyberpunk saga would mean a trip to his own personal dystopia. When Toronto producer Bwana decided to fashion a dance record from the hallowed cult ground of Akira, he knew the response would be, well, animated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |