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Mocky gets reborn in Los Angeles

MOCKY at the Drake Underground (1150 Queen West), Thursday (July 9), 8 pm. $10. thedrakehotel.ca.


If it weren’t for Los Angeles, there might never have been another Mocky album. 

The 40-year-old songwriter/producer – real name Dominic Salole – moved to La-La Land from Berlin in 2012 to get closer to the juggernauts of the music industry. He’d already picked up co-producing credits on Feist’s albums Metals and The Reminder and co-written Jamie Liddell’s breakthrough album, Multiply. 

“Coming to L.A., on some level, I wasn’t sure if I would ever make another solo album,” Salole says over the phone. “I thought I was moving here to continue my career as a producer and writer, taking off from the few international successes I’ve had.”

Instead, he found a burgeoning indie music scene where his experimental sound – a cross between electronic music and acoustic jazz – fit right in. “At this point, Williamsburg is too expensive, so where are you going to go? People are flocking here.”

And so Los Angeles became the birthplace of his fifth album, Key Change (Heavy Sheet), a record infused with “as much human feel as possible.” 

For Salole, that means eschewing samples and electronic instruments – quite the feat for a musician who made a name for himself in the underground clubs of Berlin and Amsterdam. 

The songs have eclectic origins. Take Time Inflation, which he wrote on the way to the studio. 

“I had this melody in my head, and every time I stopped at a red light I recorded it in a voice memo. By the time I got to the studio I had about five voice memos comprising the main melodic sections of the song.”

And then there’s Late Night Jam, which, as its name suggests, was born of a late-night improv session. 

Key Change is also a reaction to the way the mainstream music industry works in L.A., where a pop song passes through dozens of people and computers until it’s been perfected for mass consumption and sapped of all humanity, an approach Salole calls “manufactured emotions.”

“I made a choice to slowly turn my back on some of the reasons I came here and go back to being a real artist,” Salole says. “It’s given me vigour. It sort of feels like being reborn.”

music@nowtoronto.com | @SamEdwardsTO

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