Kevin Drew
Bio
K.D.A.P. - Influences
KDAP is Kevin Drew. You may know him as the leader of Toronto indie-rock ensemble Broken Social Scene—but let’s imagine that he wasn’t. Instead, let’s imagine that the young man who spent his early 20s obsessing over Brian Eno’s ambient works, Morricone soundtracks, Chicago post-rock, and the early Warp Records catalogue never left the basement, never met his future BSS partner Brendan Canning in 1999, never discovered a wider community of musicians, never entertained his latent urge to write brass-blasted festival anthems, and never worked up the nerve to sing about love and spit and fucking ghosts on stage in front of thousands of people. Now take that kid, time-warp him to 2021, hand him a smartphone with a DIY beat-making app, and drop him in a forest somewhere in the south of England. The result would sound something like Influences.
Yes, like many records you’ll hear this year, Influences was a product of the pandemic. But it doesn’t so much capture the sound of lockdown as liberation, music unbound from the laws of traditional song structure and the crowd-pleasing pressures of fronting a popular rock band. The truth is, Kevin had been itching to make a record like this well before the world stopped turning in March 2020. After his two decades of playing with Broken Social Scene left him with a chronic back injury and a dearth of fresh songwriting inspiration, he longed for both a physical and aesthetic retreat from the indie-rock rat race, and to reconnect with the therapeutic powers of instrumental music that he first experienced as a teenager, when he was stuck at home with mononucleosis and happened upon a clip of The Mission soundtrack on TV. The pandemic simply provided him with the time and space to finally make it happen, as he spent the summer of 2020 riding out COVID’s first wave in the London area.
But while the aptly-named Influences marks a return to the early ambient and electronic inspirations that first prompted Kevin to make music some 25 years ago, it expresses those old impulses through an entirely new language, and exercises them in a completely different environment. This isn’t a basement record; it’s an outdoor record, written in real time during long walks through the woods of Slinford and along the canals of Islington on the smartphone loop generator Endlesss. For Kevin, this app wasn’t some mere time-killing toy, but a tool that completely transformed his approach to making music, its simple interface presenting him with infinite new possibilities and reigniting a childlike, what-does-this-button-do sense of experimentation. Instead of jamming with musicians, he was now interacting with his natural environment, intuitively switching up his beats and arrangements in response to changes in environmental stimuli, be it the discovery of a new vista or a cyclist whipping by and nearly killing him. The easy-flowing, artistically freeing nature of the music’s creation is reflected in the alias Kevin eventually adopted for the project—KDAP, a.k.a., Kevin Drew a Picture—and by the time he returned to Toronto following his UK retreat, he had accumulated nearly 45 song sketches.
Those raw materials eventually became a proper album at The Tragically Hip’s Bathhouse Recording Studio, where Kevin whittled his ideas down to eight compositions in collaboration with engineer Nyles Spencer. Certain elements of the tracks were then re-recorded with supplemental organic instrumentation, some of which was provided by La Force drummer Evan Tighe and Do Make Say Think/Broken Social Scene bassist Charles Spearin, who—in a nice instance of full-circle synchronicity—was also part of Kevin’s pre-BSS recording project K.C. Accidental. But these are not the patient, mediative, slowly-unfurling instrumentals that Kevin explored during that formative phase. Influences is positively pulsating with life, a kaleidoscopic constellation of strobe-lit electronics, rippling rhythms, and gleaming digital melodies that tap into a very 2021 feeling of existence. Influences is a slide show of intimate joyful moments playing out against a backdrop of a world on fire. It’s a dance record for the mind while the clubs are all closed, a rush-hour commute soundtrack for people stuck working from home. It’s a celebration of survival and an elegy for lost friends. It’s a reminder that excitement and anxiety often elicit the same heart-pounding sensation. And it’s the sound of someone who once forgot it in people remembering it in himself. “I didn't have anything to say on this record,” Kevin admits. “But I had so much to feel.”