Ep23 Key-lime K-Hole - Craig Reeson

Listen to the episode here

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Luke 00:00:05  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is Craig Robinson. So you're a chef? Yes I am, yeah. Currently working in Ruma in Totnes. I've worked in other places before. The very famous vegetarian restaurant Willow, which is now closed down. Unfortunately it was a staple for 35 years in Totnes. So what's your favourite dish to cook or a favourite dish to cook? I've got so many. I'm really starting to get into desserts at the moment and I love a key lime pie. I mean anything with a bit of zest in it and like ponzu sauce, the Japanese sort of like citrusy soy based sauce that is to die for. That with tofu just makes your mouth pop delicious.

Craig  00:00:49  I wanted to try an experiment. I haven't done this before, but this is to combine music with cooking. So if you were to describe this dish for you to describe the key lime pie and the elements that go into it, I'm going to try and make a musical interpretation of the key lime pie.

Luke 00:01:05  Oh, I like this. Okay, so I guess the first thing that you would do with a key lime pie is to make a nice crumbly biscuit base. So that's the kind of backbone of your dish that holds everything together. That's the sort of like crumbly, delicious, sweet biscuit base. And then inside that casing you would have a really smooth, creamy, sort of Cuna sort of style filling. Or you could go with a typical soft cheese filling. But the most important thing is the center has to be this creamy, smooth flowing, but also there has to be that element of sharpness that a sharp, citrus like cutting through the key lime pie to just make everything pop. And then on top of that, then you've got again, this is to preference, but a light, airy meringue coating on the top. You don't have to do the meringue coating, but I always find with the key lime pie it's just another layer of texture that just gives it a beautiful flavor.

Craig  00:02:07  All right. So I'm going to play a piece of music.

Craig  00:02:09  And I want you to tell me what it makes you think of. Any kind of thoughts. Ideas come into mind.

Luke 00:03:07  At. The start of it. The ding ding dong. That stabbing of the keys. What came into my mind visually then, was someone trapped in a cave and looking for the way out, looking for the light. And then he found his way out onto this more or fog island. I felt this almost like London, like in the 1900s, fog filled sort of cityscape. And then I felt the light coming in with the tinkling of the lighter notes and and as the tinkling of these lighter notes started to, to permeate the fog, I felt the sun appear out of nowhere. And then this imaginary figure was actually on a beach and then walked out into the sea. And then the last little bit of that movement, he was just floating in the sea of calm at the end. This feeling of almost entrapment and then being freed out onto this kind of plane, I don't know.

Luke 00:04:22  That's what came into my mind as I was thinking about it.

Craig  00:04:25  And then they said, the fog.

Luke 00:04:30  I think that bit there, that sort of like tingling. That was when the light was just starting to break out of the fog. And then you were actually on this beach because before I was trying to search in the fog of of where I was, and then suddenly the sunlight breaks out. Oh, it's actually a beach. It's not a city after all. Yeah, it was a very interesting experiment. I had to close my eyes as well. I thought that's sort of helped when I was listening to you.

Craig  00:05:00  I'd like you to tell me a story. Some kind.

Luke 00:05:04  In my early 20s, I was living with quite a lot of hardcore drug users. We were all living in this house together. It was like a regular occurrence that we'd have these kind of wild and crazy parties. This one particular party, some had brought this drug called ketamine. Actually, it's used in the medical, it's anesthetic.

Luke 00:05:23  And basically I took some of this drug. Very stupid. I don't condone taking drugs at all, but I was absolutely a silly youngster at the time. So I put it down to that. When you take this drug, they call it going into a keyhole, that the effect it has on you. And I can see why, because it looks like you're looking through a keyhole. And that's where maybe I think keyhole, keyhole, maybe that's where it comes from. But when I took this drug, everything started to go dark around my peripheral vision, and it started to focus in on one point, and the point in the middle started getting smaller and smaller, until everything around was black and dark and basically everything had disappeared. The room had just turned into a pinpoint prick, like a pinhole camera. Everything had zoomed into this one point, and then I was aware that I was floating above my own body. And then after that, everything became surreal. It felt like I was in the deepest part of the ocean.

Luke 00:06:23  The absolute peripherals of the universe complete dark void of the universe. But it wasn't in a bad way. I was almost freed from my body, like my soul had been lifted out of my body, and I was floating around in this pool of everything, basically. And then when I started to come back into my into my own body, and I think it must have lasted about eight hours, something like that. It was morning by the time I woke out of it. And when I woke out of it, I was aware that I was back in a human body again. And I looked at my hands and I thought, oh my God, those are hands, those fingers on hands. And I looked at a guitar in the corner of the room. I was like, fingers, play guitar. And then I looked out of the window and I was like, oh my God, there's houses out there. People live in houses. This is reality. Almost where I'd been before was so far removed from reality.

Luke 00:07:15  It was like a different plane of existence altogether. And then coming back into the body, it was like such a weird, surreal experience. Like I'd been lifted out of that body and I was part of everything. And then I came back into that body. I was like, oh my God, I'm a person again. It was like, weird.

Craig  00:07:31  Do you remember anything that you experienced sound wise?

Luke 00:07:34  Yeah, like a giant sort of swell going into the pinhole with everything around the sides dissipating into a single point? The only way I can describe it, really. There's a film called Get Out. It's a horror film. And, lead character in that movie, gets drugged. And it captured that moment almost perfectly, where everything kind of zooms in but almost in slow motion, and there's this swelling sound as everything sucks into this one visual point.

Craig  00:08:03  Yeah. And then when you're in the visual point, did the sound disappear for a bit. Yeah.

Luke 00:08:08  It turned into nothing, but also then expanded into everything.

Craig  00:10:39  So what are your thoughts on that?

Luke 00:10:41  That was absolutely beautiful. It almost took me back to that space. I felt the chaos at the beginning and then the vacuum of everything being sucked in, and then this explosion outwards. I felt that universal connection, those beautiful keys that you were playing there, that was something really special. It almost sounded like a something from kid A.

Craig  00:11:03  Took me a few seconds to get into it, but I was using the pedal quite a lot. But by holding it down all of those notes are now somehow still playing. So you get this kind of cacophony of noise. Yeah.

Luke 00:11:16  It's quite interesting, really, because those beautiful chords that you were playing in the middle of that, that was almost reminiscent of a pyramid song, I thought from like amnesiac, funnily enough. Yeah, but yeah.

Craig  00:11:29  It's funny because I just played that one guy, and I'm sure Pyramid Song is like such a ridiculously mathematically structured song, isn't it? Yeah, I'll tell Radiohead that.

Luke 00:11:38  Yeah, let Thom Yorke.

Luke 00:11:40  No.

Craig  00:11:47  Time for another story.

Luke 00:11:48  Then a few weeks ago, I found out that I am going to be a father. Me and my partner Liz have found out we're going to have a baby in eight months time. She took one of these pregnancy tests and we left it, and we closed the door of the bathroom. Basically, you have to set a timer for three minutes, and after three minutes it will tell you the result and they usually pretty accurate. So we we waited for this the three minutes to pass, which seemed like an eternity really, and then opened the door up and looked at the pregnancy test. It's positive. It was an immensely joyous and terrifying moment, knowing that it would be bringing an actual human into existence, the scariness of being a father and all the stuff that entails. And for Liz, a mother, obviously. But I think she'll be fantastic. There's no worries there. It's more the worries about me wanting to be the best dad I can, and wanting to bring that child up with love and compassion and honour.

Luke 00:12:55  But me, myself, doubting my own capabilities of being a father. But when I found out I'd just laughed with joy. That was the the happiest moment, probably of my life.

Craig  00:13:07  Okay, music wise, I'm going to go for this theatrical scene with the door. This is the closed door. And then there's the time. So I'm gonna go for that idea. And then when you find out, it's obviously a sense of massive joy and excitement and then the wave of society. And am I going to be good enough on a thing? Yeah, I'll bring that in somehow.

Luke 00:13:27  An explosion of excitement, nervousness, being a little bit terrified, but most importantly of all, pure joy as well. And happiness.

Craig  00:15:43  So what do you think that.

Luke 00:15:43  I think that's absolutely amazing how you can make the keyboard talk like that. I felt every moment of that even more so than the last one, the waiting. I felt, the anxiousness of the waiting, the opening of the door. I felt that part.

Luke 00:15:58  I felt the looking at the test and the explosion of joy. But there were some almost discordant bits in there, the anxious bits, and then just the wave of happiness and joy and excitement. That's my favorite piece so far. It's absolutely stunning and beautiful. Thank you.

Craig  00:16:16  When you were waiting for this door to open, I was thinking about a ticking clock.

Luke 00:16:21  Yeah, I really got the looking and sort of looked at my wrist when you were playing that part.

Craig  00:16:25  And then I tried to distort the harmony a bit. So you got this sense of joy. And then in comes the insecurity.

Luke 00:16:31  I felt that as well. Those discordant bits, like the anxious kind of like, oh my God, am I gonna be good enough?

Craig  00:16:42  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Luke 00:16:44  It's been a really interesting experiment for how sound represents itself in the brain visually. It's like when you're playing the keys, I close my eyes and I go into this place. And with the parts that you were basing on the stories, and it almost took me back to those places.

Luke 00:17:06  I could tell where I was, what I was doing, how I felt at the time when you were playing, and then for the piece, the sort of abstract a bit where you were telling me to visualize something while you played. I had a clear vision in my head as well, and I think it's so wonderful how music can do that to the brain. It's transcendental. A lot of ways it takes you off to that mystical part of dreamland in your brain, which is where creativity lives. I'm always going to think of the moment when my partner and I knew we were going to become parents. I'm always going to look at that with immense love, and now I have a soundtrack to it. It's really made me think about where music comes from, because you're just ad libbing that in your mind. You're just playing what comes in. Do you have a basic idea of where to go?

Craig  00:17:57  My brain is like, we've got to come up with something. The tick tock thing. How do you represent time in music? I think maybe we'll use a clock metaphor.

Craig  00:18:05  If you were scoring a film and there was a scene where time was really important, like a lot of films. Hans Zimmer does this quite well. You have this sense of tock, tick, tock. And then I just visualize like specific things about the moment, that sense of joy. And then I visualize, like anticipating something that could go wrong or the awkwardness of the mixed emotions of parenthood. Don't think about it too much. Don't think about the notes. It's almost like I'm outsourcing the music side to something else. I'm just thinking about one thing, and with my musical knowledge, I somehow managed to make it work. And sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. But that's what's good about this podcast. It's an experiment for me.

Luke 00:18:48  You've nailed it. The beauty in that last piece that you've played, I'm going to treasure that. And it's good that it's recorded. Once my child is of age, I can play that back to them. Maybe not the ketamine part, but certainly the lovely music.

Craig  00:19:04  This goes back to a time when daddy did drugs.

Luke 00:19:06  Oh dear.

Craig  00:19:08  Thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Luke 00:19:10  It's a pleasure, Luke.

Craig  00:19:11  Join us again for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.