Monkey business
Mocky learned his trade behind Canada’s indie stalwarts — and in front of some of Europe’s grooviest gorilla cages
On a chilly, gray evening in May, people from all over Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods park are flocking to a grove of trees, drawn by the strains of a string quartet. There, they also find percussionists in shawls and wide-brimmed hats, Leslie Feist providing harmonies and playing drums, and beside her, on upright bass, a tall guy with curly hair, singing about having his head in the clouds. His name is Mocky, and he’s the pied piper of the soft sell. Most artists’ promotional shows involve renting out clubs and struggling to be heard over the sounds of music-industry schmoozing: here, you could hear a pin drop onto a bed of grass.
Born Dominic Salole in Regina, Mocky has worked for 15 years behind the scenes in Europe and the U.S.: you’ll see him credited as a songwriter, co-producer, and multi-instrumentalist on Feist’s international breakout album, The Reminder, and her Polaris Prize-winning Metals. He has lent his ears, his drumming, his keyboard playing, and more to the likes of Jane Birkin, Jamie Lidell, The Hidden Cameras and hotly tipped R’n’B singer Kelela, who adds backing vocals to his new album, Key Change. It’s his fifth, but the first he’s actively promoting in his native Canada — having taken his music around the world, he’s eager to “make the circle complete.” His compatriots Feist and piano wiz Gonzales both contribute to sun-dappled songs that sound as if they’ve been unearthed from a longlost ‘60s soundtrack. The album beckons with an understated groove.
On the phone from his Los Angeles home, Mocky recalls how he found his voice in Europe, where he was living semi-nomadically in the early 2000s after graduating from the University of Toronto’s jazz program. While on tour, he performed impromptu, guerrilla (or gorilla)style matinees by the monkey cages in each city’s zoos; at first, he would jump around and play loudly, “and the monkeys would react in kind, but I started to learn that actually they were upset.” When he toned down and began crooning, the monkeys drew closer, even touching his keyboard. “That’s basically how I developed my style. Every night at the club I would try the same approach — what was working for the monkeys seemed to work for people too. “
Having spent most of his first 13 years in small-town Saskatchewan — from Cupar to Strasbourg to Lumsden (pop. 1631), where his father was a doctor — he feels he was “preserved” artistically. “Everything was so far away, on another planet … You [could] just walk out of your house and be on an open prairie; it was the freedom of space in the mind.” Gonzales remembers that the night they met, in 1996, “he told me he had jammed a duet with the wind coming through his window, and for the first time I didn’t scoff at such a hippie idea. Many may claim to have a spiritual relationship with music, but Mocky is the real deal.”
Together, they joined a live backing band for a regular hip-hop jam, which inspired Mocky, then a “jazz nerd,” to start breaking through stylistic cages. “Miles Davis stopped playing jazz in the ‘60s – and he’s one of my biggest heroes. If you want to stay true to that spirit, you have to create.” Eventually, both settled in Berlin, then a “bohemian paradise” with cheap rent, along with other members of what Mocky calls the “EasyJet Set,” including Merrill Nisker (Peaches) and David Szigeti (Taylor Savvy). “The fundamental thing [was that] I don’t think any of us wanted to be in a rock band” — the generic ‘90s option for musicians looking to make it in North America. Emboldened by the fact that “nobody spoke English” in Berlin, they took on alter-egos and started to rap, using “the most ridiculous lyrics, influenced by Andy Kaufman.” For a time, Mocky indulged both his hip-hop and animal-loving bents with The Puppetmastaz, billed as the first “toyband” in the world, “a mixture of The Muppet Show and The Wu-Tang Clan” whose rappers over the years have included Panic the Pig and Turbid the Toad.
By the time of his third album, Navy Brown Blues (2006), he had largely set aside the shtick; the melancholy, sparse, and string-laden “Fight Away the Tears” proved a key to his work since. Feist sang on that track, and Mocky returned the favour the next year on The Reminder, for which they penned the similarly wistful opener “So Sorry.” Feist, by email, says Mocky gives her access to “what would otherwise be a super private vulnerability ... we’ve had a mutual evolution. We’ve been flanking each other’s wholeheartedness wholeheartedly for the majority of our musical lives. I write to him, to his playing or emotional tonality, even when he’s not in the room.”
After recording Metals with Feist in Big Sur, Mocky moved to Los Angeles in 2011; he compares its spirit today to Berlin 10 years before: “There’s so much possibility here ... out of the ashes of whatever everybody thought Hollywood and mainstream record labels [were] going to be.” Typically, among the “relics of architecture” there, he finds and focuses on the sunshine. The sepiatoned, soft-focus video for the Key Change song “Whistlin” depicts him playing recorder in a gentle breeze among the trees outside his studio.
In L.A., he has a host of new collaborators, artists he’s producing that he’s excited to “share” with the world. And while he’s stopped working with monkeys, he lets listeners fill their roles: sometimes, at a monthly jam that he runs in the old United Artists building, “We’ll freestyle a song and the audience will start singing along, even basically co-writing. That’s what I’m all about: music as a communal thing.”
What was working for the monkeys seemed to work for people too