Crack

Eerie yet soporific, the voice of Connan Mockasin is intriguing. Emerging from a tent on the other side of world (yes, literally), the man who once made shoes for a hobby has developed a sound that is absorbing and strangely edifying.

It’s barely half past seven: the wooden boards of the O2 Academy floor are packed with people, yet we haven’t so much as caught sight of tonight’s support act. It’s clear that the assembled have sniffed something special. Backstage, a narrow-framed Kiwi sits in waiting as he prepares to absorb the crowd in his very own realm of sound, where language is experienced rather than understood, and high-pitched yelps mingle among mellifluous guitar lines. We’re about to be welcomed into the world of Connan Mockasin.

As he enters from the left and picks up his makeshift teardrop guitar (the Stratocaster’s horns were decapitated, he later tells us), his appearance is evocative of the late Brian Jones: blonde bowl-cut mop top, navy turtleneck jumper, cheeks seemingly carved out of stone. His off-kilter yet captivating brew of music, however, bears no semblance to the Stones, and while there are hints of the Beatles and Bowie, it refuses to be put in a box.

He begins with Egon Hosford, a galloping three minute charge into his kingdom of chorus guitar and hazy lyric. But what makes Mockasin unique is his voice, which seems to hang among the morasses before languorously reaching the ear. The inimitable falsetto sounds that emanate from his mouth are genuinely beguiling: high-pitched and innocent enough to be thought of as childlike, yet textured with a dark and brooding quality. For some, it is a voice that is captivating; for others it is perhaps incredulous. Few, however, would argue that it is not memorable.

What is surprising both in Mockasin’s live performance and on record is the way in which his stark vocal blends so elegantly with the silken undertow of luscious, reverberated notes. The instrumental Quadropuss Island washes over the listener with ethereal might, and is a tranquil and subliminal aperitif to the fantastic Forever Dolphin Love, the title track to Mockasin’s debut LP released earlier this year on Erol Alkan’s Phantasy label. In many ways this latter number is an exploration charting the depths of Mockasin’s creative faculties. Its various movements see discordant jangles rise and then dissolve, making way for an infectious bassline which bleeds into a dreamy, sub-aquatic cadence of serenity. The result is a piece of music that is both filmic and eerily timeless.

On stage, it is clear that Connan and his collective feel at home when shrouding themselves in their music, and there is a real sense of playfulness to the performance. Partway through the set, a Japanese girl in kimono enters and takes her place next to the drummer to carry out homemade fan-waving duties, and the crowd is also treated to some endearing horseplay, with Mockasin coaxing his father from the keyboards to come centre stage.

‘We just try to recreate the sound as close as possible with four people,’ he tells us afterwards. ‘I was a little bit drunk, and I think we’re all feeling a little bit sloppy and loose but we enjoyed it. As you can tell, my dad’s not really one for the limelight,’ he says under a wry smile.

It’s not only Mockasin’s chemistry with his father that serves to illustrate his family ties. Having traversed Europe under sundry bands and guises, a despondent Mockasin returned to his native New Zealand feeling at odds with the cut-throat, quick-fire music industry. There he was buoyed by the person he knew would stick by him: his mother. ‘At the time, no one was really interested in what I was doing, but my mum told me to make a record anyway,’ he reflects.

Strangely, it was Mockasin’s own weariness with the industry that created the conditions for him to write the album. And so it began: settling down with a guitar in a tent at the bottom of his parents’ lawn, Mockasin embarked on a musical escapade that has been translated into 36 minutes’ worth of inspiring sound. ‘I wrote and recorded as I went, rather than choosing songs and putting them in an order,’ he recalls. ‘After hearing a bit, I’d go and record it in my parents’ front room while they were at work’. This organic approach has yielded a record that flows seamlessly between tracks; the album’s many directions always seem to enfold naturally, like iron filings being guided by a magnet beneath a thin sheet of paper.

Mockasin’s single-mindedness has also given rise to some curious lyrics about unicorns in uniforms and a three-year-old named Megumi who explores the Milky Way. Perhaps more notably, Mockasin elaborates how words were not so much chosen as much as they were felt. Held against this light, much of the lyrics are derivative of his methods of song production, which has seen them refracted in a stream of consciousness-esque prism. Rather than a paean to all things phallic, album track It’s Choade My Dear is a song, Mockasin suggests, whose lyrics are based around the sounds of words rather than their meaning: ‘Apparently there’s a few meanings to ‘choade’,’ he remarks somewhat suggestively. ‘It was actually a word I just liked the sound of. The meaning of it doesn’t really matter to me, I don’t actually know exactly what it means’. And as far as Please Turn Me Into The Snat goes? ‘Well, I guess that can mean whatever you want. For me, there was a snatty kind of guy we took on tour who was really small and had a funny voice – he was kinda snatty,’ enthuses Mockasin, clearly at ease with his own vernacular.

Having emerged from his solitude in the Southern Hemisphere, Mockasin was put in touch with producer Erol Alkan, a like-minded soul who had previously worked with Mystery Jets and Late of the Pier, among others. ‘I took my record round to his house, played it in his lounge with his label listening, and we’ve gone from there really,’ says Mockasin, who is unreserved in his praise of Alkan: ‘He’s been a massive influence and we get on really well – he called me straight after the show to see how it went’.

With festival appearances lined up across Europe and the UK, separate collaborations with Charlotte Gainsbourg and the Avalanches, an exhibition in Paris and London, as well as an ongoing project with Late of the Pier’s Sam Dust, the rest of the summer looks set to be a busy few months for Mockasin. For a man who used to fill much of his time crafting moccasin shoes with quad bike tyre soles and sheepskin tops, he’s come a long way.



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Words: Fred Yeast

http://www.myspace.com/connanmockasin

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