Kayla Painter interview: 'I want to tear apart what it means to be a musician'

In the groove: Kayla Painter
Jane Cornwell9 August 2019

Kayla Painter likes to start her DJ sets unnoticed, creeping in behind her laptop and building sounds until, before people know it, they’re moving. Positioned between two semi-transparent screens on and around which neon images flare and bounce, Painter is a mysterious figure, tickling the subconscious with tracks whose slanted beats, unusual instrumentals and sampled field recordings have seen her hailed as one of the most thrilling electronica producers about.

“If you’re going to perform on a laptop you can’t just stand there,” she says when we meet in a side street off Brick Lane, in a vegan café whose basement space hosts sessions by Future Bubblers, the talent development scheme established by DJ and label boss Gilles Peterson. “You have to challenge people, give them something to look at and think about.”

A composer, producer, sound artist and academic, Painter was one of 10 musicians selected as a Future Bubbler in 2017. She has since gone on to release a clutch of compelling singles, support the likes of These New Puritans and Brooklyn experimentalist Kelly Moran, and to unleash her audio-visual project everywhere from The Great Escape in Brighton to the Glade stage at last year’s Glastonbury, where her visuals strafed the surrounding trees and night sky.

Next week Painter will play Peterson’s inaugural We Out Here festival, a four-day event featuring a mix of live jazz performances (Gary Bartz, Nubya Garcia, The Comet Is Coming) and DJ sets largely inspired by the genre. But while this softly spoken artist grew up playing saxophone, keyboards and guitar, it’s her work with synthesisers, and the sounds she creates, records and manipulates, that primarily inform her style.

A first look at We Out Here's isolated festival location

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Painter grew up in Southampton, the youngest of two children born to an English father, an IT consultant, and Fijian mother, a florist and artist, listening to her dad’s record collection — everything from Captain Beefheart and folk rockers Stealers Wheel to early Aphex Twin — and her home city’s garage music. She played recorder and horns in school orchestras before picking up a bass in her teens, teaching herself to play Seven Nation Army and deciding on bass playing as a career.

“I loved the frequency of bass,” says Painter, who performed in local pubs with a female drummer before heading to the University of Wales in Newport, where she joined a four-piece Welsh pop-rock band. “At the same time my interest in bass directed me towards the electronica scene, and I was working on my laptop stuff. I wanted to tear apart what it meant to be a musician.”

A module at university had introduced her to the techniques of musique concrète — recorded sounds used as raw material, as developed by experimental French composers in the Forties — and opened doors to new worlds. Painter’s final-year dissertation How Does Sound Influence Our Existence? led to her being invited back to lecture between completing a masters degree in creative media technology at Bath Spa University. She’s now a visiting lecturer at several higher education institutes.

All this, and Painter insists that her favourite writer is Enid Blyton. Which isn’t so bizarre: the antics of Silky the fairy, Painter’s favourite character in The Magic Faraway Tree, might almost be soundtracked by her music’s rich textures, tensions and storytelling beats.

“There’s playfulness, humour and humanity in my work,” Painter says. “I’m just fascinated by ideas around what is sound, and how sound was used before voice. I mean, everything has a vibration, from this table to the planets.”

That plinking noise on the dissonant Keep Under Wraps, described as “like trying to hide something bursting with electricity”, is dried pasta being dropped into a bowl. In the Witch Elm, a lopsided mood piece, was created from the tapes of late electro-pioneer Delia Derbyshire (the woman behind the original Doctor Who theme tune). Painter’s current single, Precipitation, a slice of misty energy, is buoyed by a rhythmic top-line fashioned from spliced parcel tape.

A few weeks ago Painter was recording in her bathroom in Bristol, capturing her splashes and hollers with an underwater microphone. “That was a fun afternoon,” she says. “My partner’s an artist so he wasn’t fazed but our cats kept trying to get in the bath with me.”

The videos that accompany Painter’s releases are similarly distinctive, many of them featuring bleak landscapes, untamed nature and Painter in a series of guises. Revert sees her walking slowly around Bristol inside a giant see-through ball. Sacrificial Magic, a track from her 2018 EP Cannibals at Sea, finds her wandering barefoot through shaded woods where voices clash and soar and pagan Wickerman-style symbols abound.

“My music is usually very introspective,” says Painter, who has a publishing deal with Universal and has written music for adverts for Disney and Channel 4. “But with Cannibals At Sea I wanted to explore more about my identity, showing the Fijian side and the British side together by working with a mix of organic and synthetic sounds.

“It’s not the music you’d associate with Fiji, which is maybe ukuleles or harmony singing. Instead I’ve chopped beats, made things sound uncanny. There’s sadness because one side of my family is from a really different world but there’s also a celebration of cultures mixing and stories being told.”

Encouraged by long-time support from the likes of BBC DJ Mary Anne Hobbs and folktronica artist Beth Orton, who selected Painter as one of 12 female musicians for a week-long residency in Manchester back in 2015, Painter has a debut album in the works. In the meantime she likes playing live and appreciating the praise that follows. “I get so nervous before each gig that sometimes I’m shaking,” she shrugs. “But people come up to me afterwards and tell me how a particular part made them feel. Those connections make it worth it.”

We Out Here Festival, Abbots Ripton,Cambridgeshire, PE28 2PH​, (weoutherefestival.com), August 15-18

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