Music columnist Tristan Grant — also known as Wolf Castle — speaks with Jon McKie
Jon McKiel is ready to go on tour, and he's taking some stories with him. The musician's latest album, 2020's Bobby Joe Hope, is set to be toured across Canada and the U.S. throughout the year.
I spoke with McKiel, who's based in Baie Verte, N.B., about how he ended up collaborating on the album with a mysterious voice.
Turns out it all started with a simple Kijiji deal back in 2015.
"I bought this machine that came with a box of tapes … one of the tapes contained some sort of short snippets of … unfinished ideas," he said.
"We started to take these and elaborate on them and create songs around them."
McKiel said it started to work really easily.
"We started to call the process of doing that, 'Jamming with the unknown dude.' I guess our job was to use that as the paint brush to colour up these tunes."
"The rule was the 'unknown dude' had to be on every track." said McKiel.
I asked Jon how using the mysterious samples sparked inspiration and shaped his vision for the album.
"A lot of what I do is collage. I do tape recordings all the time and this is the first record where I was directly using samples. Certainly I am informed and inspired by a lot of hip-hop music and psychedelic folk music that uses samples," he said.
"It shaped how we did it because that was the character or something and it became a very real character to me. I even called the record Bobby Joe Hope as a way of naming this thing."
McKiel told me he won't be on the road alone. Joining him on the string of dates is Jay Crocker of Joyfultalk, a longtime collaborator of his who helped in the creation of the album.
The duo have joined together to bring the music to life, bringing the mysterious tape machine along with them to play live.
"With this run of shows that we're doing in the spring in Canada and the U.S., Jay and I ... are going to be touring the Bobby Joe Hope songs as a duo. I have a guitar and he has a sampler and he's got them all loaded up and can play them."
As we talked, McKiel expanded on his excitement about using the samples and embracing them in his music.
"It sounds really incredible as a duo and you get to hear the samples in strange and new ways," he said.
"There's nothing boxed in about using that sampler live. I got a new appreciation for that instrument [sampler] after I made this record with Jay. The way that he can use it is incredible. It doesn't at any point sound inorganic."
Source:https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/nb-music-tristan-grant-jon-mckiel-album-1.6820596