Kid Koala

I saw Kid Koala play last night with Bruce and others. I think this is the fourth time I’ve seen him, but he’s still a memorable performer and I had a great time at the show. He did a longer-format set than I’ve seen before, mostly hiphop mashups with his signature turntablist pieces mingled throughout. I actually quite liked the mashups – he’s incredibly fluid and clearly has a wide range of musical tastes, making for some great mixes. For the Toronto crowd, he threw in a hilarious old “Let’s go to Yonge Street” record, which he seamlessly mixed back-and-forth with some scifi tech-house… very slick.

If you’ve never seen him do his Moon River piece, check out the YouTube video below. I love this performance – it was the centrepiece of his “for the romantic couples set” in a velvety red room in the basement of the Vancouver planeterium I saw a few years back. At last night’s show, the video screens showed him carefully moving the needle around the record to play the right notes in the strings section – so cool. He uses three copies of the same Audrey Hepburn record to put this on, and it looked like the strings part might have been the B side of the same record.

[Update: the original YouTube has been taken down, but here’s a video at Daily Motion]

One of these days, I should check out his latest two albums, I suppose!