*INTERVIEW FEATURE*

STARSANDHEROES talks to KAOS from GHOST CAULDRON

It’s fair to say, in the course of any given year, one encounters a considerable amount of terrible music. Dull, unimaginative, lazy, and sometimes just plain unforgivably awful albums hit the shelves every week, and no amount of hopeful PR-led flannel can hide the sad fact that, shorn of pretty pictures on the sleeve and burbling hyperbole in the press, a dud is a dud is a dud - plain to hear the moment the needle hits the record, the laser makes first contact with the CD or the MP3 rolls around on your player of choice. Some turds you just can’t polish.

This sad fact – and don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t a fact, they’re either lying, deaf or deluded – follows music fans around whether they like it or not, grabbing at their ankles and screaming, “Admit it! It was shit all along! You got sucked in!” And it’s all the more disheartening when you just know there’s some breathtaking new music being made, somewhere out of earshot, but you just…can’t…reach it. Yet.

Why the rambling monologue? Because a genuinely exciting record has just genuinely excited this correspondent, is why. The record is called Invent Modest Fires, it’s by an act I’d never previously heard of called Ghost Cauldron, and it’s right up there with DJ Shadow’s The Private Press, with RJD2’s Deadringer, with Gonzales’s Presidential Suite as a prime example of what happens when an artist is allowed to let his over-fertile imagination run absolutely riot across 70 minutes. Undie hip-hop meets shoegazing guitar soundscapology, lush vocals rub shoulders with crackling electro pulses, a light bulb flicks on as MCs emerge from the noise to brand their personality onto Invent Modest Fires - already a strong contender for album of the year, and it’s only May.

One question remains: who is responsible for this remarkable album? I picked up the phone to find out. His name is Kaos, you may already know him as one third of Berlin-based squigglers Terranova, and as it happens, he doesn’t seem all that interested in talking about his newest creation at all. I only asked him how he was, and this is what happened:

“I was in London last week DJing, and I spoke to this guy from this super-big music magazine, and I asked him, ‘What’s going on at the moment? What do you guys like?’ and he was like, ‘We like a lot of German techno, and lots of music from America, from New York, The DFA are fantastic’ – how boring, everybody knows it anyway – so I ask him ‘What’s happening in England, what’s going on?’ and he was getting so embarrassed because nothing’s really going down in England…”

Here speaks a man with a passion for music bordering on the pathological, and he’s not going to let anybody ignore him - least of all, me. The English press goes in for a further righteous battering: “[UK journalists] don’t know what to hype! You know how London works, it’s just about hype, and at the moment they just hype things up that are not good. You know this new record, ‘Zongamin’? It’s this new thing everybody’s into, like, press is going crazy – I listened to the record, it’s fucking terrible!”

“It’s really cool here in Berlin at the moment – bars and clubs are really packed, for example two days ago Erol [Alkan, from pioneering London electropunk club Trash] played in Berlin at this club called Cookies, 2000 people on a Tuesday night, partying til like seven in the morning…there’s a really good energy at the moment in Berlin, you know?”

As you can tell, Kaos is extremely fond of the city in which he was born and grew up, so much so that it crosses my mind to contact the German tourist board to recommend they stick him on their payroll for the foreseeable future. That said, he lived in London for a while in the mid-‘90s and happily acknowledges that had he not done so, “I wouldn’t do music now. I lived with [currently much sought-after überpop producer] Cameron McVeigh – I was hanging out in his studio and making tea for all these cool people…”

And is that how you started Terranova? “Terranova started as a DJ collective,” Kaos explains, still inexplicably breathless. “We were the first DJs in Berlin playing eclectic DJ sets…” Aha! This perhaps explains why Invent Modest Fires sounds less like the work of one single-minded artist, and more like a seamless compilation of ridiculously disparate tunes, devised in the never-sleeping hive mind of a tireless multi-personality dilettante.

“When it comes to DJing, for me [an open mind] is very important. I play lots of upbeat, fast early techno, Detroit stuff, Carl Craig, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson stuff…when I stopped listening to hip-hop, late ‘90s, I got really into stuff like that, I was like, ‘That’s the future’. I collect shitloads of records – I have a huge record collection – all kinds of stuff, hip-hop, techno, house, old music, wha’ever!” Kaos says this last word a lot, with a glottal-stopped East London accent at semi-comical odds with his otherwise clipped Teutonic tones.

“I’m doing this [DJing] now for six or seven years, and I just realized, when you play club in Spain or France, Germany, wha’ever, people want to be entertained. It’s a fact. If you play too weirdo abstract shit all night, people don’t have a good time.” You mean it sounds good but people can’t dance to it? “Exactly! To be honest I’m not into stuff like Layo & Bushwacka, for example - I could never imagine I’d play stuff like that - but then you hear a song like ‘Love Story’ and it’s amazing! So why not play it out? It fucking rocks and it’s a good tune.”

This egalitarian approach to DJing has only come to Kaos recently, however. He does admit to a trainspottery, label snob’s past, to whit: “I must say that three, four years ago I was so into my music, ‘ahhh, no, I have to play the latest Mo’Wax, this Shadow and the new Carl Craig’, I was like that, you know? But I’ve changed and become more open-minded – it’s important that you have an open mind when it comes to making music and DJing…”

And finally, praise be, Kaos actually mentions the album. “I wanted to do a record that is not a DJ record; I wanted to show the other side of Ghost Cauldron. This record is more inspired by film music, like ‘Midnight Vapor’ is inspired by [Giorgio Moroder’s 1978 classic soundtrack] Midnight Express.” To these ears it sounds like DJ Shadow. “It’s good that you say that, I like Shadow a lot. The first show he played in Berlin, with DJ Krush, we played it together!” I can almost hear his chest swelling with the pride of a true fan. “I like the raw side of Shadow, the way he samples. We record in the same way – all the songs were sampled loops, vibes, ideas, we sampled lots of moments out of old records, obscure weird twisted rock – we wanted to dig in different crates, you know?”

We know. And having exhausted himself DJing, finishing the album, snowboarding and letting his hair down - “I party like a pig, you know, I go crazy” - til the beginning of 2003, Kaos was “totally fucked, out of energy” and happy to take a breather once Invent Modest Fires had been completed. The former semi-pro skater - “I just got me a new Mark Gonzales board, but I don’t have time at the moment to skate” - is now singing the praises of Timbaland’s work with Justin Timberlake (the former, apparently, is “the fucking don!”), meeting hip-hop legend Prince Paul in Miami – “He scared the shit out of me!” – and enthusing about the possibility of a skate-themed video for the album’s next single ‘See What I’ve Become’/‘Death Before Disco’.

I look at my handset to check it hasn’t ignited with all this talk of cauldrons and fires; it hasn’t.

GHOST CAULDRON’s INVENT MODEST FIRES album is released through !K7 Records on 12th May 2003. KAOS will be DJing in Australia with Patrick Pulsinger in July.

Originally published in Sydney's 3D World magazine April 2003