TWICE UPON TWO TIMES INDEED: CID RIM & THE CLONIOUS RETURN TO SA

With their main man Lehrl and a handy hip flask full of whiskey in tow, Clemens Bacher (Cid Rim) and Paul Mohamedi (The Clonious) touched down on South African soil for the second time in two years. It’s one of the hottest evenings of the month; clearly stricken by the heat and a touch of fatigue post-soundcheck, Clemens sips his ice tea as if he hadn’t a care in the world while Paul politely holds out his flask to offer me a sip. It’s 6:30pm, just hours before they were to rock Cape Town’s Waiting Room for another installment of the weekly bass night Leggo!, hosted by DJ White Nite, who offers me a chair. Cid Rim and The Clonious are back, and ready to talk beats, Dirty Paraffin and the best burgers in town.

CID RIM & THE CLONIOUS – by Loyiso Mzamane

So how did you get started with making music? Did you teach yourself or were you classically trained?
TC: For me it started when I was very young, I had some classical guitar lessons. I left about a year or so after that, I hated it. It felt stupid to just play notes and stuff I didn’t like, so I lost interest in that totally. As I grew older and I got into this whole DJ thing, I became quite fascinated with producing music. A friend gave me the software and I said ‘ok it’s a hip hop track so I need to do a snare on the two and the four’ and I slowly started to learn by listening basically. From that point on I realized it was good to know an instrument to help the process production-wise as well.

CR: For me it’s pretty much the same story except after high school I started the drums at the Jazz Conservatory. But when it comes down to music production I’m pretty much self-taught. It was us and two other friends in our circle including Dorian Concept who all learnt to produce together. Group efforts.

TC: A think tank!

CR: Yes a think tank. We all played in a band together so we’re all instrumentalists really.

So what happened to this band that you guys formed? Do you still play?
CR: We brought out a record in 2007 and some compilations in 2011 I think, so yeah we still play. It’s called JSBL. We’ve just been busy with our solo stuff more often these days so we seldomly play. Yeah you can just get it on the internet. It’s a band, so it’s 70% recorded instruments and the rest is the production we do in our electronic stuff.

JSBL, comprised of the two as well as Oliver Johnson (Dorian Concept) and Willibald Resner, held a launch party in ’08 entitled Twice Upon Two Times to promote their latest jams:

And does being in such a band with the boys help your electronic style?
CR: Everybody knows that if you play an instrument, each person knows their own instrument best, so we learn from each other. We all get to play guitar and bass and keys and stuff at least a little bit, which you can tell when trying to put new sounds together.
TC: Yeah he’s given me tons of drum lessons and it helps a lot. If you’re a producer wanting to make a decent track you have to be aware of song structure. Having the guys show me what’s similar to a guitar riff or a piano riff, and this is how the drums work etc. Even using synthesizers, you still have to know. Knowledge of all the instruments and the sounds they’re capable of is essential to creating a good song.

So playing together, do you guys have quite different creative styles or is it an easy fit since you’ve grown together in the band?

CR: Yeah, well on Full Nelson it was three of his tracks and three of mine in a versus kind of setup so it was easy to do that, and then we both played over it with midi controllers and midi guitars, and effects and things.

TC: It was like two worlds coming together in a live concept.

CR: Yeah, that was Cid Rim versus The Clonious: the Full Nelson EP that came out on Affine Records, which is a Vienna-based label that we and a few other guys founded.

Tutoring as a day-job has to be pretty enlightening, Clemens. Does it ever surprise you how much they can teach you instead of vice versa?
CR: Yeah, I mean I always ask them what kind of music they like to listen to which is fun because you get to discover things you didn’t know about before. It’s funny, they mostly say stuff about ‘evergreen’ bands like Green Day, you know that stuff that every fourteen year old has to go through. And then it’s interesting to see them play better and know that they want to develop their musicality.

CID RIM – by Loyiso Mzamane

So what do you like to play at home then? Do you have a top five?
CR: We don’t listen to that much music at home. I mean we’re so busy making our own stuff, you know. Jazz is always a big one though…it’s mostly been Dirty Parraffin recently. And I listen to a lot of big band stuff mostly.
TC: I recently discovered a lot of orchestral funk stuff. Have you heard of Electric Wire Hustle? Also, Hiatus Kaiyote and Funkommunity. There’s lots of good stuff coming out of New Zealand and Australia. (oddly enough, both of these bands are featured in one of our past #bottomrightcorner music streams. Check it out here!)
CR: …and we like to listen to a lot of rap every now and again.

Old school? New school? Lil Wayne? Yes, no?
We like ‘A Milli’… I guess? But then again everybody likes ‘A Milli’. So it’s whatever. I mean it depends really, sometimes there’ll be a really cool track on a Wiz Khalifa mixtape or… Oh there’s Kendrick Lamar, who we like. Also there’s just so much music from the past that is there to be discovered, way more than you can imagine really. We like to dig into the past.

Then in that case, what do you think about the music scene in general now, with its levels of commercialism, or above ground and under-ground types of leanings. I like to describe music in terms of relationships where you get things like Nicki Minaj, which can be considered the ‘one night stand’ of music, whereas groups like The Roots and Hiatus Kaiyote that tend to stay with you and in a sense, ‘like to cuddle’. Do you think about that when making your music?

TC: Sure, it’s always in the background, sort of in the back of your mind when making the music. But you always wanna be distinguishable, and

…nowadays you have to pick your influences very carefully and have the right cocktail of elements that influence your sound.

Everything out there is rooted in something else that’s already been done before, like Clemens said, digging into the past. So what people do is, take a drum sound from this era or a couple of chord styles from another era, and then fuse it together to come up with their own thing. Sure, there are things that have a high potential for success and if you wanna go there, you have to be distinguishable and you have to kind of work around it to make it good, instead of just a copy of a copy of a copy.

CR: The general feeling I’m getting from the music industry right now is that people are leaning more toward their pop roots. I mean, everyone went through the stages where their parents just flipped on the radio when they were young and they were forced to listen to that without any direction of what the cool shit was. Parents busted the radio and everyone liked what they heard, they just fell in love with it… So I’m gonna play Hot Chocolate tonight! Ok no I won’t. Maybe!

Cold Turkey 10 / 02 / 2013 – by Mads Nørgaard

What brought you back here? Let’s start with Joburg, then go to Durban and then Cape Town.
TC: Durban was for checking out the surfing mostly, and Joburg was all about meeting Smiso (Okmalumkoolkat). We hooked up a while ago, a couple of months ago in fact over the internet and exchanged a couple of ideas, and then suddenly the idea came up to go to Joburg and meet him in person to work on some stuff.

And you Clemens, your self-titled album came out end of last year? Why was it called a ‘micro-album’ and not an EP?
White Nite: You did that to yourself actually… They said it’s an EP and then you were like, no it’s an LP and you were like no…
CR: I don’t know. It should’ve been an EP. Six full-length tracks, then we picked three and made remixes. Then I worked on an intro and outerlude, and it went on to become so much music that we couldn’t put it all on. Well from my side and Lucky Me‘s side, we couldn’t decide which tracks to put on it. Then we also had the Dorian Concept remix too and yeah, eventually we decided to just call it 30 minutes of music. So let’s call it that. I don’t even know what EP means anymore! Just call it whatever you want.
WN: EP is the new LP!

What are your favourite tracks released so far and what took the most effort to produce?
CR: Good question… The interlude from the micro-EP. It doesn’t really have a beat, but it’s great. I can’t remember the name of it though. For me one track that’s going to be released in the next EP that we’re doing took the biggest effort. It had a really strong part in the middle we didn’t want to cancel but wasn’t strong enough to stand on its own. The search for the parts that would fit was tough. It was a big struggle but we succeeded.

Cold Turkey 10 / 02 / 2013 – by Mads Nørgaard

CID RIM – DRAW (Official Video) from LuckyMe on Vimeo.

The video for ‘Draw’ came out last year, and it’s gorgeous. Where did the concept for that come from?

CR: Last year March I played two shows in Scotland, and LuckyMe is founded by Scottish people, and they brought me over with the purpose of having me over two days longer to shoot the video. Dominic Flanagan is the creative director of LuckyMe and Peter Madsen is the main DOP. Martin is also one of the main guys from LuckyMe, and so the video was just showing me in an everyday producing situation, playing and stuff, and the end got edited with some nice stars and things, which turned out nicely.

Fantastic, so we should expect some new tracks soon then, from you and Okmalumkoolkat and on the next EP?
CR: It’s still in process though, but there are a couple of tracks we did all together and a couple that we did separately. We sat down with him after sending them over and we picked a couple of the strongest ones; we’re just trying to take it from there. Then we met up at Kitcheners to perform with both of the guys from Dirty Paraffin. It was a great night, one of the most energetic live shows I’ve ever been to… so packed full of lovely people. Yeah we were staying downtown in Maboneng and we met a lot of Dirty Paraffin’s friends… And people our friends knew already, so it was a great time. Lehrl has pretty much been the connector for us because he’s been here more often than we have and he knows the music scene and the people to get involved with.

Great! So of any of those people you met, are there any that stood out for you? Maybe someone else you’d collaborate with?
CR: I already played as a tour drummer for Spoek Mathambo in the fall; four shows in France and one in Italy and that’s as far as it’s gone — for now we’re focusing on just collaborating with Smiso.

I can’t wait to hear the end result! And Durban?
CR: Yeah, we spent three days in Durban. Just to check out the surfing.

So where else do you plan to go once you’re done here?

TC: We wanna go get a burger downstairs.

CR: After this it’s back to Joburg to see Smiso again, just for two days and then back up to Europe via UK!

TC: Yeah. But let’s get a burger first. Those things are the best.

Interview by Shiba Mazaza
Images: facebook.com, Loyiso Mzamane, Mads Nørgaard