Connan Mockasin looks like a delicate man with bleached blonde hair, some almost feminine features, bright shiny shoes and a pale sky-blue electric guitar. I guess his name doesn’t fit him well at all according to the American mythology, but Connan couldn’t care less as he is from the far away country of New Zealand. He gave to the Amoeba crowd its first 2014 free live show, but had instantaneously sold out the Echo the night before. But who is that guy I thought seeing people already saving their spot at the front more than an hour in advance of the show.
With his band, he produced a spacey, trippy, surprising and very funky sound, sprinkled with R&B and danceable groves, stretching into extended jams, wandering around jazzy minimalism but… I am not sure I even knew what I was exactly hearing, his music was a head trip, that could lose you in its subtle, hard-to-describe, and almost psychedelic meanders – his 2010 ‘Forever Dolphin Love’ was labeled as an oddball psych album. He definitively breaks the rules of songwriting and lives in a sort of parallel universe where Prince and Ariel Pink could have composed a song together. I don’t know if it actually makes sense, but one thing was sure, he was much more involved with his audience than these two, and even invited a girl (a cappella, brave soul!) to sing a part of a song, being all-smile and very courteous all set long. Curiously, the song, entitled ‘Faking Jazz Together’, also had a strong Radiohead-ish flavor, but it is not totally curious as he toured with Radiohead in Australia and New Zealand in 2012. To realize his musical range, you have to know that he also worked with Charlotte Gainsbourg, he and his musicians were her live band after composing the song ‘Out of Touch’, which is featured on her 2011 album ‘Stage Whisper’, and to mix even more the Mockasin cards, I read that he wants to collaborate with Tyler the Creator? He said so in an interview and I caught this conversation on Twitter today:
Tyler the Creator:
‘Ayyye @ConnanMockasin New Album Is Sick. I’ll Be At The Show Tonight Breh’…‘@ConnanMockasin Do ‘Why Are You Crying’ Or ‘Faking Jazz Together’’….
Connan Mockasin:
‘@fucktyler will do both for you my man, looking forward to it’. I guess Tyler was at the Echo last night…Seriously, is this guy all over the place (in a good way) or what?
Now that I have listened to his new album ‘Caramel’ online, I quite understand the connection, just by watching this video for ‘I’m The Man, That Will Find You’, you get the idea: it’s all about the slow-paced mellow ambiance, the deep voice monologue, the seemingly-LSD-or-ecstasy-induced trippy sound, the aquatic wah-wah-pedal parts and the dreamy falsettos, seducing all kinds of people at the same time. At Amoeba, I was listening quietly, a bit fascinated, a bit falling asleep at times, and it is possible that the song ‘Why Are You Crying?’ is the most relaxing thing I have ever heard, in a very skewed funky sort of way, but ‘Caramel’ is probably the funkiest thing released recently with no less than five songs entitled ‘It’s Your Body’! He played part 1, with mysterious electronic slow jams that stops and suddenly starts again, ending with dramatic and sensual vocals.
The music is strange and familiar at the same time, but the pace of ‘Caramel’, that he recorded alone in a Tokyo hotel, decorated with all these noises-sounds-fake-crying-and-laughing-voices, certainly sounds much slower, weirder and more soporific than his live performance at Amoeba. His guitar playing seemed intricate even when he crouched in the front of the stage to play the last song, and his voice was still heavily distorted by the mic when he announced the record signing after the show. On stage, he was an eccentric and a joker, he seemed to do whatever he wanted during his labyrinth-like songs and I bet he will probably get this collaboration with Tyler.
