The cross-over kid

When Eric San crosses the American border from his native Canada—something he’s done a lot in recent years—he’s often asked about his profession. It’s an easy question, a giveaway meant to warm up to more pressing concerns—the tender matter of concealed weapons or drugs, for example.

If a mosquito can play jazz clarinet, why can’t Kid Koala wear more than one hat, too?

But for San, it’s not a simple line of inquiry.

“I usually say I’m a DJ,” says San, aka Kid Koala, from his Montreal home. “But, I guess I could say that I draw comics. I’m not sure which one would lead to more questions.” Though he admits if he says “scratch DJ,” the border guards are usually more dismissive than suspicious.

“[They] usually just make some comment about that being ‘kinda ‘80s.’”

If you’ve not heard San since his days opening for the Beastie Boys on their 1998 Hello Nasty tour, chances are your first impression would be the same—it sounds kinda ‘80s. Back in those days, his live work played to an even earlier era—a warm-fuzzy time when RunDMC ruled the airwaves and nobody shot at each other because of which coast they were from.

But, if that’s all you’ve heard from Kid Koala, you’ve missed out.

Because, instead of being stuck in that narrow loop of what scratch DJ-ing is supposed to be, San has spent much of the last decade testing its limits. One of the early results of this rethinking was his ravenously acclaimed debut album, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. That record helped him hook up with Del Tha Funkee Homosapien’s Deltron 3030, placed him as the uncredited man behind all scratches on the Gorillaz’ debut album, and also landed him a series of high-visibility opening slots for Radiohead and Björk.

During touring lulls, San also managed to find time to draw Nufonia Must Fall, a 350-page graphic novel about a robot who works in a sandwich shop and falls in love. That was soon followed by the comic book/album Some of My Best Friends are DJs, which then launched San into a cabaret-style world tour with a collective calling itself The Short Attention Span Theatre.

Not bad for a guy who claims he never expected DJ-ing to even amount to a “semi-profession.”

“I still have to kind of pinch myself when I realize what’s going on,” reveals San. “I can’t believe we’re actually doing this for real. When I was 12, I’d come home and practice from four to six hours a day, and for no real reason other than it was something I was into. It was a way to express myself, even though no one was listening. These days, I can play someplace like Asheville, and have people actually show up. It’s amazing.”

San recently completed a new album, Your Mom’s Favorite DJ, for his UK-based label Ninja Tune. Surprisingly, he admits to making the album for practical reasons as well as for creative ones, even referring to it as “this sneaky, surprise record that I pulled on the record label.”

He explains: “My next project is a graphic novel about a mosquito who tries to play jazz clarinet, which we’re doing with photographs of clay models. Eventually, we got to the point where the money ran out on it, and I was getting a little bit of cabin fever, so I decided to put out a new record.”

San says he recorded Your Mom’s Favorite DJ in just three-and-a-half weeks—easily the fastest turnaround of anything he’s done for the label. But, he says, that timeline is also a little deceptive.

“A lot of the preproduction—the cataloguing of sounds and the listening for source materials—can take months and years [to accumulate]. … A lot of the stuff on this record are sounds that I’ve been waiting to use for the last two or three years. It finally reached that critical mass, and I spooled up the reel-to-reel machine and made it happen.”

So, then, is he a visual artist who also scratches—or a DJ who sometimes draws?

“People always ask me which I’d choose … but I’d be really sad if I had to stop one or the other.”

Kid Koala performs at The Orange Peel (101 Biltmore Ave.) at 9 p.m. on Friday, April 6. Local group Telepath opens. $13/$15. 225-5851.