St. Lucia Quotes

I believe that people have to be sensitized more about the many jobs an individual can branch out to after studying an art form.

I find that I have done a pretty good job of fusing all three of them so far and I intend to get better at my craft. This is the reason why I am always eager to learn new stuff, especially from those who are more experienced than me. I am like a sponge. My ultimate goal is to open an animation studio in St. Lucia.

You may be surprised to know that growing up, I wanted to be a writer of children's books.

What I love about African-African music is how unselfconscious it is in so many ways.

I have noticed that these days, people don't want to take their time to succeed.

My family still lives over there [ in South Africa] .I miss them terribly. I would say that most of my life over there was probably very similar to the sort of life someone would experience growing up somewhere like Australia or in the US.

As a visual arts teacher, I have to keep my mind open. I have explores styles from pointillism to cubism.

I was constantly drawing and colouring. I had an immense love for art and anything which involved art fascinated me.

[My mother] was the one who encouraged me constantly and always reminded me that God gave me a talent and I have to use it. I should not keep it locked inside.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

As I got older, my ambitions changed and I wanted to be a graphic designer. In form five, I did Art for CXC and got a grade 2 at the general proficiency level. I was devastated because I was aspiring for a grade 1. I took a break from art when I went to A level because I could not cope with the disappointment of my Grade 2. But I guess when you love doing something you just can't turn you back on it completely.

A true artist is practically married to his or her art form so I just couldn't turn my back on it.

I feel like kids that grew up in New York City or in L.A. were exposed to all these subcultures and subgenres, whereas I was only exposed to the poppiest of pop music so I never had this negative connotation towards pop music. That's not South African music having an effect on me, but just how international music was filtered through South Africa affected me. It gave me a not-negative connotation towards pop music growing up.

When I was growing up, it was still during Apartheid, so the country was very shielded from the outside artistic world. Anything that was too subversive was basically banned. All the music that we got from outside of South Africa was the poppiest, least subversive music that you could get.

We should not let negative influences get to us.

From as long as I can remember, I was always fond of drawing.

I must say that the first person to realise that I was talented in art was my mother.

Normally the meaning of the songs, if there is any, occurs to me after I've written the song.

The music that I listen to the most is probably world music, whether it's from African or South America or all over.

I think that layers in music, whether it's layers juxtaposing emotions and feelings or layers of texture, make for a more interesting product.

I decided to create a really good laptop recording situation and to learn how to write that way, rather than have the perfect stuff around.

Normally when I'm writing, in the beginning I don't think of lyrics at all. I'm just improvising.

A lot of the people I was writing with think a lot more about lyrics and a lot more about the details from the beginning. That kind of thinking made me a little self-conscious because I was suddenly having to judge what I was doing early on in the process.

I had this perfect situation where my studio was a three-minute walk away, and every day I would go to the studio. If I had an idea, I could work on it at the highest level possible.

When I start working on an idea, I immediately record without judging it.

I've been making music for as long as I can remember. I would, as a kid, just sing little ideas or be making something.

I went to this boy's choir school when I was growing up, and I think that the first time that I consciously started making music was when this one kid joined our class. He was an amazing pianist and would come up with all these ideas. I've always had a really competitive side, so I saw him doing that, and was like, "I have to try writing songs as well."

I was very conceptual about what I was doing; I had the first five albums planned out, and all the songs on every album, and the artwork. I always had these ambitious musical projects in mind.

I developed this guiding statement to stress on the fact that every good thing takes time to develop.

For now ACID Kreationz has only one body and that's me. I have intentions of hiring persons when I am through with university. For now it is only me but off and on I contract sound producers and other persons when the need arises.

I am trying my best to stay above the water. Right now ACID does not only offer animation. I offer real life productions as well and also compositing (animation composited into real life video)

Like all businesses ACID has its ups and downs. There are actually seasons when business will pick up such as Christmas time and carnival time. There are other times when business will run very slow.

ACID Kreationz was founded in 2008. I formed this business with the purpose of paying my university tuition because my teaching salary would not be able to cover school payments.

I got a job as the Visuals Art's Teacher at my Alma Mata, St. Mary's College. Then my interests shifted to animation. Ironically, it was one of my students who sparked this energy in me by introducing me to an animation program called FLASH. So I dabbled and played around with it.

Music has always moved me really deeply, and it's always been more about that than about the desire to rebel or annoy people (although, I've had my moments of that as well). I think it was just years of maybe moving slightly away from it but always coming back to it as the thing that I'm best at.

A pretty pivotal moment for me was having a songwriting class with Paul McCartney when I was at LIPA, and then being called in a few days later by the headmaster of the school to tell me that Paul McCartney likes what I'm doing.

Of course I had the parallel of having the early years of my life being spent during apartheid, and then having a lot of awful poverty going on around me while I lived in this bubble of middle-classness, but I was a child, and I only really started to (I hope) understand all of that fairly recently.

When I was 10 I went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, which is this idyllic Harry Potter-esque music boarding school in the mountains in South Africa, and that's when everything started to change for me and I realised that music is my thing.

We lived in a suburb in Johannesburg, which is a massive city of about 8 million people, and my parents would drive me to school every day and over the weekend I would go to the mall and then occasionally on Safari. Pretty normal stuff, apart from the Safari.

I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.

The racial conversation in the States is so multifaceted and multilayered. Obviously it's not always a positive conversation, but it's just so much more detailed than it was when I was growing up in South Africa.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.

Trying to be really dark and alienating just felt exhausting to me, so I started going back to the music that I grew up with, whether it was African music or pop music. It took me away from being overly self-conscious about what I was doing.

When I was developing St. Lucia - around 2008, 2009, at the peak of Pitchfork culture - what was considered cool was being as alienating to your audience as possible.

World music evokes a feeling. You don't have to think about the scene that it comes from.

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love.

There were times when I would suddenly realize making music is a crazy pipe dream. I would see bands that did super well in South Africa still struggling to survive, or even people on the international level who are doing well but financially can't really support themselves.

I met the guys at HeavyRoc through the drummer in St. Lucia, Nick Brown. He is Ben from The Knocks' cousin, and at the time we'd been doing some work together, but everything was still very much in the unsure developmental phase (even though I'd been in it for a year and a half). I told him that if he was going to play the music for anyone that he shouldn't say anything about it and should just play it and see if anyone says anything, and he did it one day at their studio and they loved it and got it touch.

The moment you're too apologetic about something and people know that something isn't finished, they listen/look for the mistakes or cracks, but if you act like it's done people experience things in a totally different way.