Mocky (real name D. Salole) is an intriguing fellow. Residing in the ultra hip metropolis that is Berlin alongside shock jockeys Gonzales and Peaches, he is a big band tightly packaged in a singer-songwriter's frame. His debut 'In Mesopotamia' contains sixteen tracks of fractured hiphop and spacey lounge room soul.

Mocky's aim is to crack the shell of pop music and reveal its fleshy innards. But before he gets started on modern composition and the evolution of humans and music, he takes a bit of time to find himself. He sounds lethargic, dragging his vowels in an accent that is immediately beguiling: part European, part North American and British. "Yes, you did wake me up. But it's okay because I was expecting it," he slurs, getting home as the sun was coming up.

His concerts take on different forms for he often adapts to settings that are more accommodating to solo performers.

"It's me with special guests doing tracks, doing tunes, basically with just a microphone. I've got the beats I want so I can do it playback style or I can do it with the band but mostly I just do it with the mic. It's definitely a performance."

Originally from Canada, Mocky and the aforementioned Kitty-Yo disco lovin' machines Gonzales and Peaches were in a band affectionately named The Shit. While the band never really emerged from the underground, Mocky used his time in that group as a springboard.

"We had a crazy time. It was a time that was formative for all of us in terms of exercising a certain persona," he explains, before clarifying that the Mocky we see now is not a different character per se, in the way that the super villain Gonzales is to Jason Beck.

"It's an extension, but it's definitely just me. What I'm trying to do is just bring out my inner self." And if bringing out his persona involves playing a series of concerts in the major zoological gardens of Europe, then Mocky has already done it. Mocky lived and recorded in both Amsterdam and London before moving to Berlin because "mainly it's just still really cheap."

He goes on to add, "Each track is in a way a representation of an episode or a period of my life. It's my first record. I just felt free to take those out from any place. It's telling the story of a period of at least four years."

Mocky comes from quite an erratic musical background but he manages to combine the sum of his influences into a heady brew of beats, rhymes and swirls of piano. He was awarded a scholarship at the famous Berkeley School of Music and found he was adept at producing as well as playing the jazz he learned as a young boy.

"I grew up in the 'eighties and listened to pop music. I kinda backtracked from there. I was the perfect age to get into 'Thriller', y'know, seven or eight. From there I got into jazz and 20th century music like Sun Ra and Stockhausen. My mission in music has always been to combine and contrast those two sides - pop, which is my roots, and so called music with more depth or academic music. I want to bring all that together so you can enjoy it on one album, a pop album."

It must take a special kind of musical mind to condense those sorts of ideas into a three minute pop song. Mocky laughs. "That's just me and what I'm into anyways."

After revealing that his two jazz heroes are Miles Davis "for his constant progression, constant searching for sound and for a style that all revolved around his horn playing" and Sun Ra, "someone who was really striving for something and in a way went beyond being a musician and became a thinker", Mocky explains his stance on the relativity of music to evolution.

"I'm trying to bring it all together from the luxurious point of looking back over history and the way we can listen to recordings and see how it is all the same, more than how it is all different. That's what I'm really into: seeing how similarities connect the dots and over the top of that put a shell on it with three minute pop songs."

'In Mesopotamia' is a carefully chosen title for Mocky's debut record.

"For me it ties in on all sorts of levels. The main reason why it's called that is to symbolise my naiveté during the period of making my first album. Mesopotamia is this ancient civilisation on the fertile crest of the land of milk and honey where music and art first came out of humanity, the first time people had the freedom to do art. The whole album is a reflection of my life and what I went through. That's the abstract reason.

"The specific reason is my great grandfather wrote a novel. He was a philosopher. He had a book called 'In Mesopotamia' about his time there and one side of my family is from that part of the world. It resonated with me on so many levels so it just had to be called that somehow. It's an aesthetic thing. I'm trying to make a reference to where I come into this musical scene."

That's some pretty intellectual stuff from a guy that wrote a song called Shake Yer Ass.

Lenin Simos

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