Dude Where's My Kaar?

“Half my time is spent making music, and the other half is spent not making music but wanting to.”

I’ve only been on the phone to 23-year-old tunesmith Toby Kaar for a couple of minutes. But already he’s nailed the plight of the beat-hungry musician, and to a lesser extent, anyone who’s ever lived with one.
“It’s bad for us!” he admits. “It’s always been this thing of ‘I don’t feel very satisfied with myself if I haven’t actually made something’. Sometimes I’m up ‘til six o’clock until I get something done, and then I realise I have to go to sleep because I’ve got class in three hours! I go through these weird periods where I speed up and do loads of things in a week and there’s other times when I can barely get through one song in a month. I’ve been trying to learn how to live with that reality for the past I-don’t-know-how-many years.”
For Kaar, today is a day like any other day. He’s in Bath in Somerset, where he studies music at university. A late-night song-sculpting marathon the night before means he’s feeling mightily groggy.
“I’ve been drinking shitty, cheap energy drinks to try and stay awake,” he tells me. Still, he’s pretty cheery for a man operating on a couple of hours’ sleep.
“I guess I’m used to it at this stage!”
Kaar has called several cities home over the past two decades (Dublin, Oxford, Aberdeen). Don’t worry – he’s not on the lam or anything. He’s spent the bulk of his music-making lifespan in the Rebel County, where his sharpshooting electronica is a certified floor-filler. After testing the academic waters with a film course, Kaar traded the south of Ireland for the south-west of England two years ago.
“I realised I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life making films,” he shrugs. “I was spending all my time recording sound for films and I realised I didn’t even like doing sound for films. I just wanted to do music.”
Aside from a brief flirtation with the bass guitar (in school he played in a band that “barely counts as a band”), Kaar says he’s never looked too far beyond computerised tools to create his sound.
Those of us lucky enough to have caught his positively banging live show will already be acquainted with the monome, a spacey-looking wonderblock that allows the audience to see Kaar’s grooves pulsate across 64 flashing lights.
“It’s become a weird bit of gear,” he laughs. “It kind of became the centre of what I was doing live. It adds something, especially to electronic music because a lot of people just stand behind the computer. Then you see someone like Daedelus do this thing where you can actually see that he’s playing something. He’s not just on Skype!”
Good to hear he’ll be avoiding the David Guetta technique of mindlessly tapping the side of the decks and bopping around like a gormless moron, then.
“I’m kind of in two minds about it,” he says of his live show (as opposed to Guetta’s move-busting). “There’s people I’ve gone to see who’ve just had a laptop and they’ve blown me away. It was always something I had an issue with: going to a gig to see people just staring at computers.”
Recently, Kaar’s live skills have been cracked out in support slots for fellow electronica nuts Ben Frost and Nathan Fake, as well as the stellar line-up on the FMC tour back in November.
“That was quality! I met And So I Watch You From Afar afterwards and they were stoked about it, which is a bit crazy. I was used to playing to 30, 40 people so it was a bit surreal.
“Ireland’s good like that,” he adds. “It’s so small that even if the acts aren’t totally compatible... it makes sense to put them together. It leads to more interesting gigs.”
As you may have gathered from his shapeshifting electronica, Kaar’s taste in music is pretty varied. He’s just been listening to Waka Flocka Flame (“this awful ghetto guy… every song is just full of gun shots!”) and there’s plenty more oddball rappers where he came from.
“I’m a big fan of hip-hop. I go through phases of listening to that and then listening to house and techno as well. Sometimes I’m making all this techno 4/4 stuff and sometimes I’m making hip-hoppy, beat-y stuff. Right now I’m in the middle of house-y disco.”
Huh. I bet gunshot crunk sounds make far more sense at 6am.
“I spend a lot of time putting sets together,” he admits. “I always end up staying up the night before and freaking out!”
It sounds like insomnia-induced paranoia is setting in, but Kaar assures me that it doesn’t hamper his love for performing.
“I’ve kind of got to grips with my set-up enough that I can get into the rhythm of the whole thing and work it out.”
And jitters or no jitters, that’s precisely what he does.

Toby Kaar plays Ulster Hall, Belfast as part of the Winter BASE festival on Feburary 19, and Upstairs @ Whelan’s on March 5. Download EP A Reason To Stay from tobykaar.bandcamp.com. and listen to his track 'Wensleydale' on hotpress.com now.