You probably haven’t heard much about the band Kaleidico and there’s a good reason for that. Only a few months removed from their debut show at Zanzabar, Kaleidico is one of the newest bands to hit the local music scene. And, from all appearances, they don’t have much of a track record.
But appearances can be deceiving. The songs that comprise their upcoming debut album represent over four years of mixing by the band’s frontman, Matthew Moore, a local music geek who studied classical guitar at Eastern Kentucky University only to come home and focus his efforts on engineering music on his computer. Now, with a full band behind him, he’s bringing his songs to life, making Kaleidico one of the more fascinating Louisville acts to watch this year. At a recent practice session, Moore and Chris Johnson, the band’s bassist, shared about translating digital tracks into live performances and about making the right first impression with Louisville’s music fans.
First off, how would you guys describe your sound?
Moore: Basically, when we play, the band has to keep up with me doing studio music. So here I am at my computer, banging on something and morphing it and making it into this thing and it’s like, “Here, let’s do this live now.”
Johnson: I think, locally, you’ve got a lot of acts that are acoustic and stripped down. And then on the other end of the spectrum, lots of heavy, hyper-instrumental type acts. We want those two worlds to collide. And the new material really does that.
What would you say makes Kaleidico unique?
Moore: The songwriting in general is different than most bands. Our setup is really demanding. There’s two of each instrument. There’s the actual drum set and there’s the electronic drum set. There’s the bass that Chris plays and there’s the electronic bass. Sometimes we alternate spots between songs. You’ll see us moving around a lot. It’s a lot to keep up with, but it also makes it interesting to listen to.
Johnson: When it comes to live music, we always ask ourselves how we can complicate things. On Matt’s original recordings, it’s just his voice and his acoustic guitar. The rest is all programmed on the computer. And it sounds amazing, but you can’t just be a “press play” band. I’m not interested in that. So, above all else, the goal is to take these great tracks and make them into a true analog experience. We button-mash when we have to, but we also try and make the stuff we sample into something interactive that we play. None of us are interested in copping out. We don’t want to leave any room for bullshit.
Matt, you spent years writing these songs on your computer before ever sharing them with anyone. Was the goal always to someday build what you had into a band?
Moore: Definitely not. When I first started Kaleidico, it was really the first time I’d seriously tried writing my own songs. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with Weezer and I’d try and duplicate their sound and make my own “Weezer songs.” Then, once I got to college to study music, I just sort of stopped writing and focused on performing. Then, when I got back and I was working, that’s when I started Kaleidico, back in 2009 or so. And it was originally just what a lot of people use music for, as a diary. I’d written seven or eight songs by the time I met Chris.
And how would you characterize these diary entries?
Moore: Usually it was about shitty things that were going on. A lot of the first songs I wrote were just sort of about the realization that now you have to start working. You have to start that part of your life. A lot of the material I’d write about was just sort of about wanting to stop and smell the roses. I just wanted to stop the busyness and the running around and be like, “I’m alive. I exist. I’m in this big world.” You know, just trying to remember that.
So what was it like taking these very personal, private songs and suddenly collaborating on them with a band?
Moore: It was awesome. The songs just translate in such a different way. There were some that I wanted to make big when I was first recording them, but they weren’t big enough. Then, when we performed them together, they were immediately big enough. “Pretty Panasonic” is a good example. The original recording sounded distant. It didn’t ever sound quite the way I wanted it to. But then when I heard it played live, it’s like, “This is the way it was supposed to sound.” There were just lots of really nice realizations.
What kind of music influences your sound?
Johnson: I think one of the key moments for us early on was we just hung out late one night and drank too much and smoked hookah and talked about minimal electronic music. We talked about Four Tet and the weird kind of house music that we all realized that we secretly liked, car commercials, you name it. So, from that, I’d say a great majority of the material is also influenced by basic, minimal electronic music.
Moore: I think the common thread between all of our influences is original melodies. Not to be cheesy, but there are melodies that just give you the chills. You hear them for the first time and it just feels awesome. That’s the definition of good music. That’s what we want to make.
What are you most excited for people to hear in this debut album?
Moore: I hope people are excited by all of the different genres that we hit in the album, though it actually worries me because I think that some people might hear the diversity and feel like there needs to be more cohesion. But I think it’s something that’s really neat about what the album does. There are some songs that are strictly acoustic. And then there are songs that are giant, with big, distorted drums. There are a lot of different styles that go into it.
Johnson: I’m hoping that people will be able to place it, that people will understand at the beginning of the album that this is a band that has the ability to mix it up with electronics and acoustic instruments. The pacing on the album is going to be great. It takes you from a huge place to a really small place and then back to a huge place. That’s something that represents our band in so many different ways.
Moore: That was one of the hardest things about putting the album together, as far as track listing. How do you put all of these songs that hit different genres, different tempos – how do you put it all together? It took quite a while to think about how it needs to flow, how it needs to start. Someone’s going to put this album on and, as the first song plays, they’re going to judge the entire thing. We had to ask ourselves, “How do we tell you that we’re going to be playing all of these different genres with just one track?”
And what answer did you come up with?
Moore: The opening track is a kind of a hybrid, with both acoustic and electric sounds going on. Eventually, you get to see that we can go all acoustic or we can go all electric. Hopefully it flows well for people.
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