Toby dances to his own beat with Gumbrielle

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie

Toby Kaar has just released what could prove to be the most exciting EP of 2016 and the Cork-based musician and producer will play a free show in Róisín Dubh next Thursday, April 14, to celebrate the launch of the four-track mini album, Gumbrielle.

The music, “an eclectic mix of samples ranging from jazz blogs to Asian supermarkets”, was made on a nine-year old computer and Toby explains how this came about.

“It was written over the course of five years, so when I started it was only a five-year-old computer!” he says. “I never really had a huge passion for new gear, new equipment. I just found something that works that I’ve been using it for ages. After I finished this EP, I actually got a new computer. So the nine-year-old computer is rotting away under my bed at the moment! It got to the stage where it was just crashing constantly, it was an absolute nightmare.

“I wanted to keep in simple, and not create any barriers between what I wanted to do and realising it,” he adds about his music. “I think you can complicate it and you can start to colour it with equipment, if you introduce loads of stuff. I was quite fluent with this computer, I just felt comfortable.”

Where did he find the name Gumbrielle?

“Gumbrielle is my mother’s maiden name,” he says. “Due to males and things like that in the family, it threatened to die out as a name. It was a French name, I’m not sure where it originated, but my mum is huge into family trees. There’s a couple of Gumbrielles in Chile, and I think maybe some in Australia.

“I’m not great at naming things, so I wanted something simple that meant something. My mum and her sisters are chuffed about it, they got very emotional when I told them. I told them to calm down, it’s only an EP!”

Toby Kaar makes dance music that surprises you, and it seems he answers questions in the same way. His press release describes his music as ‘tensely arranged’ – what does that mean?

“Well, I see the ‘tense arrangements’ relating more towards the song structures,” he says. “I mean, the pieces came together over a number of years. It is one piece. I would never say it’s just a collection of songs.

“Maybe one song says something and the other answers a question. When I compose music, there’s a lot of stuff going on and a lot of stuff changing. I didn’t write that [press release] – you’d have to find the guy that wrote the blurb and ask him!”

So, Toby didn’t write the press release, but, as a solo performer, the live show is very much his baby. Ahead of his nationwide tour, how is it coming along?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.