I am ‘finding my voice’ in imitating sounds of men of African
descent,” Anacortes musician/producer Karl Blau writes on his MySpace
page. “I am thinking of myself as a sound mirror to this continent and
its many voices distributed throughout the earth.”
It’s a ballsy statement for a white Pacific Northwesterner to make.
But coming from Blau, a prolific, openhearted catalyst in the K
Records/Knw-Yr-Own creative axis, the declaration seems like a sincere
mission statement earned from years of craft, collaboration, and
exploration.
Besides a solo career that dates back to 1997, Blau has played with
the Microphones, D+, Your Heart Breaks, and Laura Veirs, and he’s
produced records by Arrington de Dionyso, the Bundles, and LAKE (his
current backing band on this tour). He’s also released a prodigious
stream of music through his Kelp Lunacy Advanced Plagiarism Society
series, incorporating elements of folk, dub, drone, R&B, hiphop,
and bossa nova into his bare-bones indie rock.
But with Zebra (released October 6 by K Records), Blau has
made his boldest and most interesting record to date, a melodically
gorgeous, rhythmically scintillating celebration of his inspirations.
That being said, Zebra possesses a gentle otherworldliness
that’s more characteristic of Arthur Russell’s work than it is of any
black artist who comes to mind. It sounds as if Blau’s not simply
trying to imitate myriad African-diaspora artists, but rather that
he’s assimilating traits from musicians like Milton Nascimento,
Gilberto Gil, the Meters, Toots Hibbert, Abdullah Ibrahim, and Sun Ra,
and filtering them through his distinctive sensibilities. The project
comes off as respectful and earnest rather than as crass cultural
plundering.
Inevitably, though, when hearing or reading about this new album,
some will accuse Blau of cultural tourism.
“I’m hoping to get some shit for naming my record
Zebra—such a cliché,” Blau admits via e-mail. “It
was the strength of the songs together that gave me the courage to try
something risky for the name. I wanted to make it totally obvious that
Zebra is African influenced.
“I am dedicated to burying treasure all along the way for anyone who
takes a chance with tripping on the music I make,” he continues. “But
also, I don’t want to make it easy at the door, because then the
listeners can feel like it’s their own discoveries.”
Blau’s songwriting process for Zebra—on which he played
and recorded nearly everything—was refreshingly nondogmatic.
“I found out early in songwriting that there is no one way to do
it,” he says. “I prefer to try out almost as many methods to writing a
song as songs themselves. Use the different parts of the brain. Stay
limber. For much of Zebra, I went to the 16-track recorder and
all the surrounding instruments and asked them to tell me what to
do.
“I’m not afraid to start with the drums and then put the bass down
and see if it even needs a guitar on it. The song ‘Apology to
Pollinateurs’ was done in this way. I laid down a 5/4 beat and then I
was saying to myself, ‘What the heck do I do now?’ Then I got the idea
to put a really steady bass line over the drums with a real laid-back
standard 4/4 beat. It was a revelation for little old me—and had
a peculiar funk to it.
“I’m always looking for contrast and complementary sounds. In this
case of making up songs in the recording process, I can tailor the
sounds for the music being made. I guess that a downside to this
technique is that the song can be somewhat inseparable from its
recorded sound. When I made Zebra, I wasn’t thinking about how
to play these songs live; I was designing an art piece.”
Blau is an artistically restless spirit who strives to be innovative
while also showing a reverence for tradition. The tension between those
impulses yields rewarding results.
“I do feel that to give credit to where you have come from is
important,” he muses. “That said, things that are not strong enough to
last we should let die.
“I get the feeling that music is an open field. And mostly we get
stuck in the same old patterns, head down and banging away. I wonder
what is on the horizon. I want to be there to welcome it.”
In light of Zebra‘s exotic pelt, does Blau think that music
can be innately “black” or “white,” or does he think it mostly results
from decades (or centuries) of aesthetic miscegenation?
“You could ask the same question of ‘male’ and ‘female,'” he
counters. “I don’t believe that people of any color own any rights to
any kind of music. Music is as personal as religion.
“Ultimately, music is a celebration of being alive and also a
practice of the death ritual—and that acknowledgment is for
everyone.” 
