Kid Koala Interview

There was a drink in Canada, when I started DJing, it was in the late 80s,

there was this really sugary beverage called Koala Spring,

which had this big stamp that said, Made in Australia,

which is really funny because every Australian I've spoken to since never even heard of this drink.

It was actually quite a popular beverage,

especially among people who like really sugary drinks.

So, anyways, my mom would buy cases of this stuff at Costco,

and you would always be offered this drink.

If you were a kid, like, you know, 25 and under or whatever,

you'd always be offered that if you came over.

But you'd be milk, water, or Koala Spring.

My friends would just start calling me Koala Kid,

and it's a joke because there was always empty bottles of stuff around my record.

But that's the real story.

I was 13.

Kind of awkward, pimply period, you know, before you discover girls.

I don't really know what happened.

At one point, you stop spending all your money on firecrackers,

and candy, and you start spending a lot of your money on something you decide to get into.

I think teenagers, whatever they choose that thing to be,

it ends up becoming quite an obsession.

And for me, it was, for some, it's like comic books or something.

But for me, it was records.

Cutting them up, really.

The classical music stuff that I was doing,

it was such a strict musical experience for me as a kid.

Just being in this, like, okay, well, you have to play this 500-year-old piece

exactly the same way it's been played the last 500 years.

Any deviation from that is going to lose you points with the adjudicator.

So it wasn't a very kind of joyful musical experience for me.

And I think that when I actually heard Stratum the first time I was around when I was 12 or 13,

it was immediate.

Like, to me, I understood, like, the first thing I got from it

was the fact that it was so free of these rules and stuff, you know.

And that it was really, at the time for me,

you know, the people that were doing it were maybe just 10, 15 years younger

as opposed to, like, 500 years old.

So it was a bit more kind of within the grasp.

Like, oh, isn't it, here's these DJs, and they're doing their thing,

and they're really sort of expressing themselves,

and they're actually not, like, you know.

They're, you know, buried somewhere in some kind of universe.

So at the time, I was like, oh, you know,

this is actually kind of a much more youthful expression, you know.

And I think that's sort of what drew me to it the first time.