Bio

Obsessed from an early age with the production and manipulation of musical sounds, Edmund Cake's experience of recording a solo album struck him as a happy return to the solitary experimentation of childhood. "When you are putting together a recording on your own there's no feedback or dialogue to influence creative decisions. I could get completely lost in the details of one aspect of a recording and experiment for days with a particular idea". Cake recalls a boyhood incident when he was caught modifying his father's prized Pye radiogram in the back of their cluttered suburban garage. By disabling the turntable he managed to convert the fifties audio classic into an amplifier for his newly acquired casio VL tone keyboard. This inspired audio synthesis could be seen as the beginning of a music career defined as much by technical experimentation as song writing.

Over fifteen years later, the same deconstructed tone made an appearance on Downtown Puff along with numerous other exploratory interventions into the world of recorded sound.

Much of the material on the album was devised while Cake was living in a third-floor studio space on Gore Street in Auckland's red-light district. This particular audio environment - with its incessant street brawls, strip club pop and Doobie Brothers hits played by the covers band in the 24-hour bar downstairs - provided a peculiar backdrop for the evolution of delicate instrumentals on tracks such as Airshow and Watching Me.

It was here too that Cake recorded the one-take improvised vocal for My Son the Harpist, an intentionally free-form lyric which reveals itself to be the story of a complex father/son relationship in a fictitious Pacific village. Since demolished by a property delveloper called Carpark 80, as part of the dock area clean-up initiated by the Britomart transport project, this setting also provided lyrical inspiration for 'Oh Baby Bear' - an ode to Auckland's outmoded transport system.

Although the album is being released as a solo project, it represents a multitude of musical collaborations. Each track was developed as a separate entity and most musicians were only involved in one or two tracks. As the album was produced and recorded by Cake many of the people who worked on the album over the past five years will be hearing the finished product for the first time when Downtown Puff is released in June.

Two of these collaborators are Geoff Maddock and Joel Wilton, the other sides of the creative triangle which made up the short-lived Flying Nun phenomenon Bressa Creeting Cake. Since the dissolution of the band soon after the release of their acclaimed (self-titled) album in 1997 Geoff and Joel have found popular and critical success with Goldenhorse. What exactly Edmund Cake has been up to in the intervening years is anyone's guess, but Downtown Puff may just provide a few clues …

Band Members:
Edmund McWilliams (vocals)
Ed McWilliams (guitar, vocals, accordian)
Egg (bass, piano, synth, vocals)
Eddie (drums, percussion, vocals)

Links

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• Bandcamp Page