Issue #012 (September 2005) Unkle Ho Email this article to a friend Interview by Anna Burns So it’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon and I’m waiting a café in Newtown for Kaho Cheung, aka Unkle Ho to arrive. We’d agreed on the time and location last week when I approached him and told him Cyclic Defrost wanted an article on this busy man who when he’s not working with The Herd is making music that he releases under the moniker Unkle Ho. I get to the café early, check the minidisk is working a-ok so I can record this, order a coffee and chill to Johnny Cash. Half an hour passes but there’s no sign of Kaho. I’ve double-checked my diary; it definitely was today, called and left messages, but no reply. I try calling one more time, a chipper Kaho answers the phone. Trying not to sound anxious I say, “Hey Kaho, it’s Anna Burns from Cyclic …” he jumps in with a “Shit! Anna I totally forgot! Sorry. I’m just up the street, I’ll be there really soon.” I breathe a sight of relief and soon enough the charming Kaho has arrived, out of breathe after a lightening fast bike ride and so starts our chat. For those of you unfamiliar with Unkle Ho I don’t know if tardiness is usually something you can pin on him. Certainly, this debut has been about 3 years in the making, but considering the amount of stuff he does, this delay is easy to overlook. Here’s the story so far. Kaho got into writing electronic music about seven or eight years ago. Realising that the most important part of the process was the idea, the rest came naturally. “After I started writing music I realised it was easy it didn’t matter what kind of equipment you had. - I just had a pc and that was it.” One thing led to another and eventually this path led to hooking up with Kenny Sabir (who started Elefant traks in 1998) and getting involved in the first Elefant Traks album, Cursive Writing. The rest flowed on from there. The Herd was formed but like many other fellow Herdsmen he’s always been making his own music on the side. “It’s only now have I kinda felt comfortable and ready to release it.” It’s taken a few years for Roads to Roma to make it out of the studio and into the world. Was that just because the masterpiece was written entirely in his spare time or was it more a case of a perfectionist labouring over every second, polishing every beat? Had there always been the intention of releasing a solo project? “Yeah, for sure. I’ve always had the intention from the beginning. Every year I’d go, ok, I’m going to get something out this year! And then, that year would pass and I’d be like, ok, I’ll get something out next year!” What does one do when working on two not entirely different projects like The Herd and Unkle Ho? You could imagine that there’d be moments of tension or perhaps an internal conflict of interest when you come up with a great beat or stumble across a great sample. How do you figure out which project gets what? Some people are very systematic in their working, what you come up with on a Tuesday goes to X, but what you come up with on a Thursday goes to Y. Others are more instinctive and just have a feeling about what belongs where. Unkle Ho is quite relaxed about such a quandary. “I usually just write stuff and wont have thought about which way to send it and then I’ll play it to the other guys and go “whaddaya reckon about this.” It also depends on the timing you know. There were a few tracks on my solo album that could’ve made it onto a Herd album, but we weren’t writing tracks at that stage… But we’re furiously writing now and there’s one or two tracks that could’ve been written for the next Unkle Ho album but you know, the timing’s not there. My main thing is just to get the music out there, the quicker it does the better.” Perhaps another reason why the aforementioned scenario doesn’t bother Unkle Ho is he seems to have an excess of samples hanging around the place. Running out doesn’t seem to be a likely problem. On Roads to Roma there are roughly 421 samples. Sheesh! Is Unkle Ho an obsessive vinyl bin digger? “It’s mostly off cd actually. I’m pretty new-school about it all, and proud of it! Yeah Vinyl is good, but I don’t have a record player, I never grew up with vinyl so I don’t have that attachment to it in that sense. I scour second places for music, but I opt for cd over vinyl. The sound quality is better and it’s easier to work with.” What kind of filing system does one have to invent to keep an eye on that volume of samples? One can only imagine. Unkle Ho doesn’t seem at all phased by it. “There are a lot of samples. And that includes drum samples, all the percussion samples. So that bulks the numbers up a bit. There’s 11 tracks on the album and about 30 samples per tune.I usually spend a couple of days sampling before I start writing and generally I have a pretty big library. I split things into categories like ‘wind instruments’, ‘strings’ and ‘percussion’. Within all those categories there’s heaps of stuff like clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, guitar, violin and all that. So then when I’m writing a track I generally get one or two samples as the basis for the song and then write a beat for that and then go ‘I could do with a flute sample right now’ so I go to the wind section and flick through. I usually have the loop playing and play the sample playing at the same time and so you can kinda hear it when it fits.” To top this count off there’s also live instrumentation and Unkle Ho thinks on the next record this could expand beyond one song further into the album. “There’s a bit of live trumpet in the song Eureka. That’s played by the guy who plays with me on all my live gigs, Senator Jim. On the next album we’ll be more involved.” Is that a case of jamming when you’re coming up with parts for him or do you go to him I want something that sounds like ‘bbb brbbr bbrra doo da’ (badly imitates a trumpet.) ? “I usually give him the song as it is and say I kinda want this sort of vibe and maybe hum him some melodies. Then he will just go into the vocal booth and sorta freestyle with the trumpet, we’d do a few takes and then I’d just cut them up and use the appropriate bits.” This union has worked so well it’s now become an integral part of the live Unkle Ho experience. “It was a very conscious decision to get him in the live performance. After we did all the recorded stuff I was just like ‘wait a minute, you should play this live too!’ And he lives with me so it’s all easy. He plays trumpet, accordion and melodica and also has a theramin. He runs everything through effects so it has a really big sound.” I’d played a couple of gigs just by myself and it was pretty terrifying and it’s hard for people in the audience to tell if you’re doing something other than pressing play. I am doing something up there, but to the layperson, it looks pretty boring. So having Jim improves the performance (and sound). Roads to Roma has a beautiful smokey, breezy, chilled, gypsy thing that going on. It’s a very different vibe to The Herd, what was Unkle Ho listening to for inspiration while writing and recording this album? “Heaps of old time jazz. The Phantom Dancer on 2SER is one of my favourite shows. Greg Poppleton who does the show plays all this old swing from like the 30s & 40s and for some reason that strikes a chord. I was also listening to a lot of gypsie movement and heaps of hip-hop as well. Some of the music I was listening to I don’t actually like that much but I find quite interesting and I seek it out.” Aside from being a talented producer Unkle Ho is also pretty deftly skilled on the old graphic design front. (When he’s not making records he works as a designer.) So the artwork is also all the fruits of his creativity. There’s some sweet synchronicity with the cover art as a matter of fact. By pure coincidence there’s a picture of a happy couple dancing. The (dark haired) boy is looking all proud of holding such a beautiful (blonde) lady. “I just put it on there and afterwards realised that my girlfriend is blonde. At first neither of us noticed, but then someone else pointed it out and we were like that’s really cheesey! But it was just a good picture from a book called ‘Folk Costume from Western Europe’ and it was nice. Kinda dynamic, they’re just wandering off into the fields… I just found that book at an op-shop and it reflected the music nicely. It’s got the European influences and the birds. Hummingbird – national bird of Jamaica, you know, Jamaica, dub. See there was method behind it all! Where to from here? “We’re working furiously on The Herd right now which is going to take a huge amount of my time. Then after that we’ll be touring n stuff. I’ll definitely be squeezing in time to work on the next Unkle Ho album. There are grand plans to get another out next year… But we’ll see how we go!”