On Tour With Tkay Maidza

If 1tbsp had 2 parents, who would they be?

Rosalía and Four Tet.

What are you looking forward to on this tour?

With 1tbsp, I have been keeping it quite eclectic but on this tour I've been wanting to step it up even more. There's so much music that I listen to that normally wouldn't find its way into my DJ set and recently I've been inspired to try to make it fit in if I can. I didn't get that much of a chance to give it a try-out before I came here. So it's a bit of trial by fire, but it's been really fun and it's going well.

I'm playing at almost every tempo and shifting it around a lot so it's been really fun for me to try that out. Also, seeing the audience react really positively to hearing a lot of different things in a short amount of time without being overwhelmed.

Do you tailor every set to each city?

Yeah what I’ve found is before a tour, the work is just curating a huge playlist of stuff. I deviate from that but throughout a tour I find that I hit similar moments but how I get between them is quite different. Each set is different but jumping around a lot is constant throughout each show.

Do you mean also jumping between genres?

Yeah when I played in New York, I remember I started off at 140 BPM and then I took it down to 88 BPM, which was double time, so it was actually 176. Then I took it back to 90 and then up to 120. So I like shifting that a lot as well!

Do you do that to keep the crowd energized? How do you keep the crowd going throughout the set?

I think it's just good songs. I know if I'm losing people when I play some songs and I know that I have a bunch of songs that have worked in the past. So I might pull up one of those to bring it back together. But I'm not afraid of moments where you lose the crowd for five minutes or disorientate them a bit to then re-orientate them with whatever comes next.

I feel like that leaves room for the unexpected. Feeling those moments out. Is there any city or venue on the tour that you're especially excited about playing in?

Well, I was really excited for New York, because it felt like a nice bit of a step up. And I'm a big fan of DJ ADHD so it was an honor to play with him.

I’m also excited about playing in Mexico City. It's going to be a pop-up show on the rooftop of a heritage-listed building and it looks like it could be quite a special venue. The last time I played in Mexico City, the energy was just the best it's ever been so I'm excited to go back. At night, it's really nice sometimes to not be trapped in a sweaty club for five hours.

Makes sense. I also wanted to ask you about your work as Golden Vessel. What do you feel like is the main difference between this project and your stuff as Golden Vessel?

Golden Vessel is more of (well it didn't start this way), but it's become a songwriting outlet. It's just different palettes.

When I started to make the 1tbsp music, I asked a few friends about it and some of them said I should do it on Golden Vessel and some told me I should do it separately. But then I just had a gut instinct. I felt like I needed to separate them because there would just be too many different things going on in one area. It just made so much sense to split them up.

But there's still songwriting with 1tbsp and there's still electronic production in Golden Vessel. So there's crossovers, but I feel like every time I make a song, I know in the first five seconds which project it will belong in.

It's kind of like two parts of your musical brain.

Yeah, I feel like I could have four projects even. Well, actually I do have a band as well, which has kind of stopped existing, but it's called Lucky Idiot.

Wait, great name.

We did two EPs in 2021. If I had more time and more brain capacity, there could be even more projects with different identities, but two is already quite a lot to figure out.

True, true. I love that you have such different tastes in all different areas. Since 1tbsp started in 2021, do you feel like the sound has changed at all or has it stayed consistent?

It's definitely changed. I was quite inspired by Ross from Friends who has a lofi house thing going on and I wanted to make an EP in that style. The project's been really influenced by DJing. So as I started to DJ, I realized those songs didn't really fit into the type of stuff that I was playing.

In 2022, I became really obsessed and discovered this whole reggaeton, dembow, kuduro sound - just like Afro-Caribbean and Latin American music. And I kind of let that infiltrate into the sound. So that's kind of the shift.

Yeah, at your New York show you were playing a lot of songs that had that Latin influence. I’m so curious where did the name 1tbsp come from?

I actually can't remember picking it. I like to cook, so it's recipe jargon. But one thing I didn't think about which has become the best thing ever is that a lot of posters are alphabetical so I tend to be quite high up on the poster. So it’s actually the most perfect name ever.

That's so perfect. What type of stuff do you like to cook?

I’m a pretty free-form cook and I don't follow recipes. I watch a lot of youtube cooking videos and then I pick up techniques and make my own concoctions. It's kind of a relaxing thing for me to do. So I get a bit antsy on the tour.

Yeah, you know, you're getting out of your pattern. What's the most memorable thing you've witnessed at one of your shows in the past couple of years?

I sang a song at my friend's show. It was for my friend, BAYNK. He was playing in Berlin and I just happened to be there that night. So I was like, yeah, I'll jump up and sing! There was this couple and they both loved a song of his so they both individually had messaged him, saying, “Hey, we want to propose during the song” But they didn't know that they'd both messaged and they didn't realize that they were both going to propose.

Oh my God.

Yeah and all of their friends were there and they knew so they were really enjoying this confusing moment. My friend made an arrangement of the song that had this section that slowed down so they could propose in the middle. And then when it hit that spot in the song it was just crazy. It was the exact same moment in the same song. Then they both got on a knee for each other and were both like, “what are you doing?” And everyone in the crowd, obviously, was just having an awesome time because it was just like, how did this happen?

That's beautiful, I have goosebumps, wow.

Yeah, it was really sweet.

Sounds crazy. Are there any genres or sounds you haven't experimented with yet that you're trying to get into right now?

For 1tbsp specifically there's this type of music that's almost post-punk meets dance music. There's a really cool Swiss band called Grauzone from the 80s. I think there's room for something to exist there with dance post-punk music but I haven't found it quite yet. But in general I've never really played with hardcore music or metal and I don't know if I ever will but it's interesting. Maybe one day I'll come around to it.

There's a lot of things that, five or ten years ago, I said I’d never do and now I'm doing it. Like for some reason, I used to really not like strings. I just didn’t like strings at all. And now I'm obsessed with strings. So maybe I'll have an arc where I want to make hardcore music.

Hey, I'm ready for it. That would be really fun. Tastes just change over time as well.

Yeah, the most exciting thing about creating stuff is that your taste changes. Otherwise, it would be boring.

Do you remember the first musician that you idolized?

The first album that I became obsessed with was called Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by French band, Phoenix. I found it through their song 1901 when I was 12. It was on a car commercial. I just became obsessed with that record and watched every YouTube video I could find of Phoenix playing live and interviews. I think it still holds up.

Some of the music I listened to at 13 I listen to now and it's not good, but for some reason that album is still kind of perfect. I became pretty obsessed with those four French guys.

What's your antidote to creative block?

I actually don't really get creative block. Maybe having a bit too much on my plate is the problem rather than not being able to make something. I think adding more to my plate was the solution. I’ve just been in a good flow for the last few years where I’m pretty self motivated. So I just wake up and start making stuff. It feels like a habit now rather than feeling like “AHH I should make something.”

Sometimes it's good to just make something and have no expectations of it, too.

That's the only way to do it. To have no expectations. Unless I'm in the room with someone I'm excited to work with and bouncing off their creative energy and we only have one day so we need to make a good song. That's also a cool energy to have.

But for the most part, it's just like cooking, you just gotta do it. Sometimes the meal might not taste that good, sometimes it tastes very good.