Kazilae is finding his musical voice with a little help from Seaboard

From Humble Beginnings to Genre Fusion

“You should get that kid a piano or something,“ was the unsolicited advice offered to Kaspar Kazil’s parents as they vacationed in Italy, their young son humming away happily in his stroller. So they did — and music has been a continuous presence in Kaspar’s life ever since.

Today, Kaspar is Kazilae — a musician, producer, and occasional DJ who folds hip hop, classical, and abstract electronica into a future-facing blend that defies easy categorisation. Following a recent performance at Dream Wide Awake, a “sleep concert” in Rotterdam for which Kaspar employed his trusty Seaboard 2 to great effect, we caught up with him to learn more about his approach to the gig and his musical evolution.

Kaspar’s journey with piano playing began with the trusty Casio SA-21 his parents bought him, with which he’d jam out to their tape collection, a formative mixture of 20th-century classical and early electronic music. Later, after a period of taking lessons and performing in competitions with his local church, he caught the attention of Marlies van Gent, a piano teacher at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.

“What she taught me went way beyond the notes and the techniques,” he explains. She really taught me how to interpret music, and that's really still shaping everything I do today.

“It was just incredible to discover how deep you can really go. We would play songs for months. Some were very technical, but getting the notes right was just the first step — that was expected. Really understanding the music was what it was all about, to bring out the deeper meanings, stories, and images behind the notes.”

Taking place in the cavernous nave of the Holy Family Church in Rotterdam Noord, Dream Wide Awake is the brainchild of visual artist Bambí Benkö (who invited Kaspar to perform), music producer Nikos ten Hoedt, and artist and church administrator Ferry Chrispijn. Taking inspiration for its name from Tricia Hersey’s book “Rest is Resistance”, the immersive event invited its audience to repose on camping beds, hammocks, or mattresses under a constellation of Benkö’s jellyfish-like “light sculptures”.

“I loved how the invitation pushed me to explore something new,” says Kaspar. “I needed to fill two hours, but I barely had an hour of material finished, including lots of faster beat-driven stuff that wouldn’t fit. I was to start early in the morning, so people would still be dozing for the first hour at least, and it needed to be super slow. I needed to improvise and do stretched-out, even slower versions of my slowest material.

“So I brought my Seaboard and a piano — just live-looping those would already be enough in theory — and on top of that, I turned some early song drafts into ‘tape loops’ of sorts to improvise around.”

Sculpting Sound with Seaboard

The Seaboard, Kaspar explains, is a relatively new addition to his setup. In a little over a year, however, it’s had quite an impact on his process.

“Kazilae is all about sounds that are fluid, organic, alive, and sculpting those types of sounds can take a lot of work. To create what I’d hear in my head, I would draw lots of automation that would just take forever, and it wasn’t intuitive at all. Thinking back, I don’t know why I didn’t realize sooner that there are tools to help you do that immediately — I could have been using one five years earlier if I’d known!”

Part of Seaboard’s appeal, Kaspar says, is that playing on the tactile surface feels like “live sound design”. By tweaking and playing with a single patch in the included Equator2 soft synthesizer or one of his favourite u-he plugins, he’s able to make the instrument sing in a way that hasn’t been possible with traditional controllers.

“You can do completely crazy abstract effects, but also these beautifully emotional lines where you're almost playing like a violin, or a polyphonic theremin of sorts,” he says. “I actually just came from a jazz lesson, and something we’re exploring now is voice leading: trying to make the notes blend fluidly between chords with the least amount of movement between each voice, similar to what an a cappella choir or string quartet will do.

“You can't really do that on piano, so I would often end up manually drawing each line for each synth voice separately, just to get that effect. It would take hours. To be able to just do that live now still is mind-blowing to me. That really opens it up, for me, but also for the audience, because they can see exactly how each subtle movement directly translates into sound.”