Perera Elsewhere: Sasha Here

By Alif Omar Mahfix  •  in Interview
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We dig ‘Ebora’. It sounds like a vaguely sinister remod of a traditional Nigerian song (we could be wrong though), can you tell us what it’s about?
I made that song in Lagos, Nigeria last January.  I was actually there co-curating a project for the Goethe Institut called 10 Cities. I had invited Rob Smith and Pinch from Bristol to Lagos to make music as part of an exchange. So we were in the studio there for a couple of weeks. I made a small studio set up for myself in the office. I played and recorded an Agidigbo – a plucked Yoruban instrument – and cut it, pitched it, etcetera, and made a wonky beat.  Nobody wanted to sing on it other than Opadoja Oladayo Joseph ‘ Aremu’ who is not only a singer but also a contemporary dancer. I think he was sucked in by the atmosphere of the track. He sung an incredible variation on a folk song about the spirits in a bucket of water. It is sung in Yoruba. I think it sounds like he is singing backwards sometimes.

We really like your overall look. One of your good friends, Hugo Holger Schneider, contributed to it and it seems like there was real thought put into it. Do you feel like the image of an artiste is a lost art to some? And how important is it to have a distinctive look?
I think a lot of artistes think about how they want to be portrayed visually actually. Unfortunately there is so much music nowadays that people are often only motivated to listen to music because of the image of artistes. I personally tend to judge music before image, but I am technically a full on music geek. Most of the music I listen to is almost faceless, i.e. instrumental electronic music with graphics. The normal consumer is probably motivated by image, and unfortunately even more so in the case of female artistes.  But that is a whole other discussion that we could go into….

Your image as Perera Elsewhere is sort of a mixture of the cultural and the modern – something like the future meets history. Is there a message you’re trying to convey through this?
I’m not sure if a message that you can put in neon lights can be deciphered.  It is like the music, it is subtle and coherent through its incoherence. It’s stuff we all experience – the future and the past. A retro futuristic sound. Landscapes and nature vs. architecture and technology vs. what the f*ck is gonna happen next to us earthlings?!  Big questions for humanity! Irony, truth, pain, love, hate, plastic, organics… it’s all emotion and real shizzle.

This mashing of the cultural with the future is represented sonically on the album as well. We read that you’re quite the gallivant, has that led to your exploring your history as well as the rest of the world’s culture?
I’m not sure that this is an album that has much to do with travelling. Per chance a couple of the tracks were recorded in odd places as I was invited to take part in exchange programmes and I’m the first person who said yes to this stuff. I love travelling even since before Jahcoozi times. I worked sh!tty jobs in London during my student times and spent the cash on travelling. I think to be honest, it comes from being open to music from different places. ‘Bongoloid’ sounds like it was made in Burundi in 1914, but it was in fact made in my kitchen in Berlin. I think the amount on music on the internet allows you to get an insight into stuff that you would have only read in books or heard on records back in the day. And I think friends are a very important aspect, if you surround yourself with people who have ideas and are open to fresh stuff, then you will rub off on them and they will rub off on you. It’s all about the environment. I wanna learn from other people no matter whether they are in Berlin, where I live, or if I meet them somewhere else along the way.

You will be playing a DJ set in Kuala Lumpur. We’re curious, has your DJ mixes changed since doing Perera Elsewhere? What can we expect?
My DJ mixes are dependent on where they are gonna be heard. I did one recently for Fader Magazine and one for Red Bull Music Academy. Because they are gonna be heard at home, I like to start somewhere slower or odder and then go somewhere more dance-y or at least different and then land somewhere else at the end. It’s a real journey for listeners. I do something similar if I play an opening set at a club or the closing set in a club. If I play main time, then there is more pressure to start dance-y and stay dance-y… but even within those constraints I’d like to have dynamic and be relatively eclectic.  But for me bass, drums, percussion, and an elegant choice of sounds are the most important key elements of the dance music I like. What the BPM or genre is can vary according to what I feel like playing or what fresh tracks I come across while ‘crate digging ‘, although in my case I DJ with Ableton rather than vinyl.

Jointly organised by Detour Asia and  Goethe Institut Malaysia, Perera Elsewhere aka Mother Perera will be spinning a DJ set at Palate Palette on Saturday 21 December ’13.

soundcloud.com/perera-elsewhere‎