Ep18 Curative Hiphop - Micha Walter

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Luke 00:00:05  So welcome to another episode of the Improv Pod podcast. Today I'm talking to Misha. What's your second name?

Micha 00:00:11  So you can call me for the sake of artistry and and aliases, I can be Mickie more fingers.

Luke 00:00:21  How did you get that name?

Micha 00:00:23  Mickey was my name since maybe three years old. I was born in Israel and my name was Misha, with a very guttural. And in Australia, people can't say that. So my parents just made it easy for me and named me Mickey. The more fingers that came later. But from scratching records and tinkering with more than just records and keys and studio equipment and being fast and other weird innuendos, you can relate to fingers. More fingers was the name and the other options weren't any better, so I thought that was cool and I was into drum and bass and this kind of music, and it just felt like the name. So that's what stuck.

Luke 00:01:04  So could you introduce yourself a bit? So you're a music producer?

Micha 00:01:08  Yeah. Many fingers in many pies.

Micha 00:01:10  So as a kid, I was a rapper in high school. I rapped and released a CD and moved from rapping to deejaying. And eventually I moved to London and I learnt how to produce and how to create beats and sample and do these kinds of things. And while I was still deejaying on radio in England, I met a lot of rappers and wanted to record everybody that I ever met, and organised some sessions and went back to Australia and produced with another friend of mine, an engineer. So I'd learn just by doing. And now I write songs, I produce music, I make art, I create animations, I manage a rapper from Australia, so I just do things that always centered around music and and can. Creativity. I currently live in Stockholm, but not for much longer. We're planning to return to Oz in December.

Luke 00:02:06  So I'm going to play a piece of music. and I want you to tell me what that makes you think of any kind of thoughts, emotions, ideas. They can be as abstract as you like or incredibly specific.

Luke 00:02:18  Anything, really. Okay, here we go. So what did you think of that?

Micha 00:03:21  Well, just for context, my wife's grandmother passed away last night at two in the morning, and she was 94 or about to turn 94, and her sister is here staying with us. And we saw her recently because it was very close to the end. Yeah. So it's quite emotional around the household at the moment. So when I heard this piece of music, it was impossible not to think about her and this sort of vision of her very frail but beautiful old woman being carried away and being lifted up by little fairies with their wings and lifting her away safely. It was a vision of crossing over, really. It's all I could think about. And the music just brought that out, and I haven't had the chance yet to process this event.

Luke 00:04:13  Was there any particular aspect of the music that brought you into that space.

Micha 00:04:18  As you started to play? And I get comfortable and just listening and being able to allow myself to hear the music.

Micha 00:04:25  And then it was a movement walking upwards that allowed me to see this fluttering of the wings and the lifting. And then at the end, that last boom, the last low note was the door closing. A little bit of closure on that story.

Luke 00:04:40  It's interesting how especially this first piece that I played to people. There's often this theme of ascension, as in ascending to something I don't know if we used to have.

Micha 00:04:51  I no use if I'm looking forward to listening to that one. Yeah.

Luke 00:04:53  Yeah. So his he came up with this glass staircase idea and the fact he was going up this glass staircases. Delicate, but the sense of going into another space or going upwards. And a couple of other people have also said this is.

Micha 00:05:11  It the same piece of music or it's not? It's always improvised.

Luke 00:05:14  Yeah, it's always different every time.

Micha 00:05:15  Do you feel that you ascend in these pieces or does it just. It doesn't.

Luke 00:05:20  Sometimes what I'm thinking about is, is often quite minimal when I'm playing it.

Micha 00:05:26  Yeah. And for me, I also feel I'm able to listen to music objectively without detail and just again capture that essence, that it's a feeling and it can be. It's my own mood or moment in time that will define whether it's really uplifting or quite sad. And that piece could actually be both the sadness of of death and the beauty of a safe journey away. It's yeah, it's. Yeah. It's both.

Luke 00:06:01  So you are for telling me a story, something that happened to you. Or it can be anything, really.

Micha 00:06:09  This week, all I've been doing is been writing a proposal for some funding, and I work closely with with homeless youth and create music and workshops and one character in particular. Oh, and he lived with us when my wife was pregnant with my first born, Samuel, and this guy was out of jail. Hard life on the streets at the age of 11, and he fell in love with rap music. And I met him doing a workshop. Part of being a human, I think, is you want to help people.

Micha 00:06:43  I really learned the idea of helping one person can help many, and over the 15 years I've known Owen, I've been working together closely with him and he's just grown and grown as a as an artist, as a rapper. He's very dedicated to his craft. And yeah, this week I've been building this proposal because I'm going to create workshops. And the beauty of the story is that the reason I'm returning to Australia is through him and an opportunity with an organisation. We've been funded to build an enormous art and culture centre in Australia, where we'll be able to help people living with any kind of trauma. There'll be spaces dedicated to creative workshops, art therapy. It's all for people who have been homeless, who have been abused, who have gone through addiction, and this is now a step towards my future and his future as well. I was doing workshops for a long time, teaching scratching records and the art of wrapping things like this. I set up a small company that would go into youth centres, and Owen in particular lived in a crisis centre or a youth refuge, so they'd have few beds available.

Micha 00:07:59  And I went in there to take my records and show these people a bit of hip hop and whatever, and he struck me as someone who seemed very dedicated, and he was learning how to edit videos using the facilities they had there, and he just seemed very keen and asked me to be his DJ for a show. And I said, sure. And from that point he asked me again and I did it again. And I was very rusty with his raps, but I was very encouraging and yeah, we just continued to be in touch and I just wanted to help a guy who I could see so much passion, so much fire in him to share not just his story, but his artistry. He's just kept going. He has not stopped, and he's then in turn kept me accountable and inspired because I see him working so hard and so dedicated to getting to where he wants to go. I'm I got to keep up. We're very much a partnership now and it's not like a mentor thing. We share our vision together now.

Micha 00:08:57  It's great.

Luke 00:08:57  Yeah. So what I tend to do is break the story down into points, into Q points, if you like. Can you tell me a bit about what it was like in this youth center as an atmosphere?

Micha 00:09:07  Yeah. So the youth center itself is in Cool Neighborhood. It used to be a rough part of town, but not really. It's full of trendy cafes and all that kind of thing. And the refuge itself is on a corner. It feels a little bit like a miniature prison. It's like your old sort of estate housing style corner, balcony, two levels. the front entrance is a large, car park, graded fence and security entrance only. And when you walk past, the kids are always out the front. They're asking for a dollar. They're being cheeky, they're smoking, they're doing what they do. There's always kids around that area, but meanwhile there's business, women and men walking by, it's very nice cars. Everything's very fancy. And when you walk in, you're expected to see a fight.

Micha 00:09:58  You're expected to hear screaming. There's people coming off their drugs, there's police cars are always pulling up nearby because, you know, something's just gone down. Yeah, there's a tense atmosphere from time to time. In other times, it's this oasis, which is what it was called, and it was this very caring environment run by quite old people and a few young volunteers back then. And yeah, it's it's a place that heals people. But the people from the outside looking in, it looks like a very rough environment you might not want to walk through.

Luke 00:10:32  And then you talk a bit about his process of transformation. Then what did he go through this guy to get out of this sort of mindset?

Micha 00:10:41  It's not just a few weeks rehabilitation in there. They should be fine. It's continued. He lived with me and my wife and we're a very kind, loving couple. And I don't think he had ever seen that before. Back then, they have to see love to know that it exists. And it's possible he didn't have a dad.

Micha 00:11:01  His mom was doing what she was doing. So these people at the Oasis place, they just would keep giving him love. And the transformation came with giving him some independence, offering him a job to clean the garden. Little things one by one. And the transformation would just slowly take shape, because he had this passion to do his music and his art and his videos. And I think he saw that if he didn't do those things, he would be dead or in jail. So he made that choice. He had to make that choice while others were going back to jail. He chose not to, and that's what he takes.

Luke 00:11:39  All right. I'm going to probably condense quite a lot of that in musical terms. It'd be probably setting the scene at this place, which is on the edge, and let's try and give it a kind of hip hop vibe. And then this process of transformation. It's quite difficult, actually, that.

Micha 00:13:52  It feels like it's at the ending point. It's almost coming to the end.

Micha 00:13:58  Yeah.

Luke 00:14:00  Did you feel like that reflected his journey in any way?

Micha 00:14:03  Yeah, it felt like there was this cool little off time piece, and that's when the craziness was happening at the refuge and all the fights and the muddle and the huddle and the bubble was all moving along. And that was where you came out in the Ascension or the the move away from that was. Yeah, that was happening. And when you finished, I felt like there was still a journey to go, which is great.

Luke 00:14:27  It was anything that you missed.

Micha 00:14:29  The only thing with, especially with hip hop, is space and is to pull back and to do like bom bom bom, that real ability of changing the movement and the pacing to put it into a new space.

Luke 00:14:46  Are you up for? Telling me another story of some kind. Something that's contrast.

Micha 00:14:51  I grew up in a in a Jewish kind of home. And, you know, I was sent to a social group on a weekend which was also based on sort of Jewish identity and things like this.

Micha 00:15:02  There's a group or a section called the Chabad mix, the ultra religious Jewish ones, they go to New York or to Israel, and they study all the pages of the Torah, and they know it all, and I certainly don't. There's 613 commandments that are supposed to be followed, and the rules are silly. You can't turn the light on and off on Friday, so you have to get someone else to do it. So there are people who get the neighbor, hey, it's Friday, can you turn the light on for me? It doesn't make sense. So in one of these youth groups that I was at, there was a boy, Andre. Funny guy. We used to play like I was already going into hip hop and he was more into hallucinogenic kind of techno, and he was always talking about fractals, but anyway, I went away. I lived in London for years, eight, eight years, and then I came back to Australia. And one of the things with people who go to the Chabad house and this thing, it feels like they're always trying to recruit you.

Micha 00:15:57  My instinct is to run when I see one of these black and white suits coming towards me, I'm like, okay, here we go. I'm going the opposite direction. And I hadn't seen Andre for years. And then I'm in Bondi in Sydney, and there he is walking towards me, and my instinct is to start walking faster because I see he's wearing the hat and he's like, Mickey, hey, what's up? What are you doing Friday? I knew it, I knew it. He was straight in there with the question and he asked me to join a band. He's friends with these guys. A piano player, incredible jazz pianist, plays Latin and a violinist. Also child prodigy, incredible musicians. He invited me to a jam. He needed someone with beats and to scratch some records. And he had all these records he bought in New York when he was studying. And all the records were readings from the Torah, children's education, all very Jewish and, you know, enlightening the young minds, but also cantorial music and, the rabbis chanting and these beautifully deep, spiritual songs and melodies called Negan nim or the Negan is the melody.

Micha 00:17:06  And I would just get a record, play a beat from a vinyl. I'd played two turntables, and then the other two guys, the violinist and the keys player, would be able to jam along. And I played a new gun. No no no. No no no no. And then they would continue. No no no no no. And we could improvise and we would record these improvised sessions. And I'd go back a week later, we do it again. And we became a band and we started to do shows, and we started to build those jams into songs. And I would bring my laptop and record and start to learn how to use Ableton. And It was a learning process, and for ten, 12 years we made songs together. And the lesson there is don't run away from someone who's calling your name. And I'm very in love with this music. And the band is called The Asthmatic.

Speaker UU 00:18:00  Oh, my. Oh my God. For.

Micha 00:18:13  The music the violinist was really passionate about was klezmer, which is Eastern European and Jewish influenced music and gypsy swing.

Micha 00:18:23  He plays with Lulu Reinhardt in Germany, from the Reinhardt family, Django and that gang. So he's part of that crew and his crowd. When he performs his solo shows or his his band shows, his crowd is often 80 plus year old women who just feel that he could pull the heartstrings so well. He's just got that talent. Incredible violinist Daniel Wellington. His name is. It was the idea of bringing these old Yiddish melodies back from 100, 200 years ago and not letting this language die, not letting these melodies and music die. And that was the concept behind the animatics, was to keep that alive. So give it the hip hop bent was my way of bringing it to now, but that's just natural for me to do that.

Luke 00:19:10  Do you have a particularly Jewish scale then? You this?

Micha 00:19:13  Yeah, there's a Semitic scale. There is one. D-flat, A-flat, B flat and for white keys C, e, F, g.

Luke 00:19:28  Cool. Yes, this is quite an interesting sound, so I might try and use that a bit.

Speaker UU 00:19:32  Okay. All right.

Luke 00:22:03  So what I was going for. There is this initial sense of unease, you know, see this guy coming towards you across the street and then experimenting with this idea of creating this new genre of music, which is using this weird scale with the kind of hip hop idea and going in a more positive direction, which is quite hard thing to do.

Micha 00:22:26  And when we perform, there'd be samples thrown in from vinyls that just didn't make sense. But somehow that was the idea. It was a mesh. It was always a mystery what might happen, and very improvised as well with asparagus. He would just put the needle down anywhere on a record and there'd be just something would happen. And often it would work by magic.

Luke 00:22:47  Did that music do anything for you that I just played.

Micha 00:22:49  Towards the end? Yeah, it really did. It really hit a spot that was familiar. and of course, when you discovered the scale. Yep. There it is. It's more one handed.

Micha 00:22:59  The bass can be quite minimal, and it's just those melodies. It can be quite eerie as well. It's just something magical about that little scale that gives you a feeling. It places you in Eastern Europe or it places you in that.

Micha 00:23:15  Yeah.

Luke 00:23:16  So you can you could have like fifths used a lot of fifths in the bass.

Micha 00:23:19  Yes, exactly.

Luke 00:23:21  Great. I think we'll wrap up there. What did you get out of this podcast?

Micha 00:23:26  I got a free concert. That was cool. It was a bit of therapy for me just to get today's events out. We've worked together on some music in the past, so it's lovely to connect. And musically. I've been in family summer mode for five months, so I'm desperate to jump back in and reconnect to music like this.

Luke 00:23:48  What are you working on at the moment?

Micha 00:23:50  right now I'm finishing a video animation for this rap song for Owen. I've got another song that's very close to the end with K.J.. Do you remember her? She's from Atlanta, and I've added a girl from Western Australia, Chaka, onto the song with some beautiful harmonies.

Luke 00:24:09  So you collaborate a lot remotely? Yeah.

Micha 00:24:12  Completely remotely. I am a remote human. I don't connect with many. I don't have many people here in Sweden. I'm do my dad life and go and do some yoga and play music in my own make art, like that's what I'm about.

Luke 00:24:28  Thanks very much for being on the podcast.

Micha 00:24:30  Thanks for inviting me. It's an honour.

Luke 00:24:33  Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.