Paddy Free flying solo for city gig
Constant collaboration a key feature of electronic specialist
Electronic musician and composer Paddy Free, one half of longrunning Kiwi duo Pitch Black, will be touching down in Whanganui this weekend to play a oneoff show.
Free said he would be playing music that he’d made with “a whole bunch of collaborators” over the past few years, along with Pitch Black tracks and songs from his latest remix release In Dub II.
“There’s stuff that I’ve done with Tiki [Tane], Moana Maniapoto, and Toni Huata,” Free said.
“There is a lot of te reo in there as well, which is a bit of a unique thing.
“I don’t think there are a lot of pakeha producers doing a set that’s about 80 per cent te reo, and it’s definitely a set that could come from nowhere but New Zealand.”
Piano lessons as a child started his path in music after which Free said “one thing led to another”.
“In the 80s I got into synthesisers, then synthesisers became computers, and computers became recording studios.
“I ended up learning how to become a recording engineer and ultimately, a record producer.”
Pitch Black released their first album, Futureproof, in 1998.
“We just happened to be of a certain age doing a certain thing,” Free said.
“The longer you hang around this business and this life you realise that everything is cyclical, and you see the waves of generations come through.
“We were the young guys once, the new school, but perhaps now we’re the old school.
“I’m not stopping now though.”
One of the key aspects of his career so far had been constant collaboration, Free said, something that wasn’t always necessary when it came to making electronic music.
“It is a style you can do by yourself, you can do everything for better or worse.
‘‘That can be empowering, but there’s also no one there to police your own cliches or kick your arse. There’s no one there to ask ‘what if?’.
“If I’m playing a work in progress to someone in a room, even just a friend, all the good and bad points of that tune immediately come into stark relief.
“You hear it through their ears, it’s a weird, telepathic phenomenon. We get people in sometimes and use them as ‘dance test dummies’.”
That spirit of collaboration has also extended to working with other established acts, Free said, including Salmonella Dub and Moana Maniapoto.
He was behind the desk for Salmonella Dub albums Killervision, One Drop East, Freak Controller and Inside the Dub Plates.
“In the case of Salmonella Dub, I was a fan of theirs long before I worked with them.
“In my mind I had the ideal Salmonella Dub gig and I was trying to create that, especially with Inside the Dubplates.
“As musicians, we don’t know what we look like. We are the one person who can never experience us in that way. Free also joined the band on stage for “a brief couple of years in the late 2000s, and he said playing live was still a massive part of his musical persona.
“Electronic music is associated as more of a studio medium than a performance medium.
“There’s enough old-school covers band in me to wants to perform though, and wants to leap up and down.
“I’m always trying to bring the ‘human’ back into it and have a reaction with the audience, so they know that if they give me a good response I’ll play better.
“There’s a great quote from David Byrne (Talking Heads) on the liner notes of Stop Making Sense, where he says ‘on stage everything must be bigger’, and that’s essentially why we go out to gigs, to hear it bigger, louder, and to hear it screamed with a bit more emotion.”
Today will mark his first gig in Whanganui for four years, and his first solo.
“From the pictures I’ve seen, Porridge Watson looks like a fascinating venue, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what it’s actually like. I’d deeply love to paddle up the river one day, when time allows.
“I’ve lived out at Piha for the last 17 years, and I prefer that low population density any day.
“Except on the dance floor, of course.” ● Paddy Free and Dub Koala play at Porridge Watson tonight. The show begins at 8pm.
"We were the young guys once, the new school, but perhaps now we’re the old school"
Paddy Free