Finding the tools: Summer Lee Carlson

Something different is percolating in Kampot. Not a live show – not yet anyway – but a collaboration between singer/songwriter Summer Lee Carlson and Phnom Penh-based producer and beatmaker Khid Genius. Throw in an additional Minneapolis musician, and graphic designer Markus Dixon, and you’ve got a creative team producing what is being pitched as a project combining talents and skills to make endless platters of ear candy. They’re making tracks ranging from EDM to R&B and stopping most places in between, with new songs being released every six-eight weeks, followed by remixes every two weeks after. The latest single, Disaster – “Shirley Bassey taking Cinderella out to the club and telling her to forget about being home by midnight” – drops on Friday 17 March.

Summer recently sat down with LengPleng to talk about the delights of creation and collaboration. “This is how we do it,” she explains. “Khid sends me beats, and I choose which ones I want to work with. I write the songs, do the lead and backing vocal arrangements at home – DJ Mute Speaker has a little studio here where I record the final vocals. Then I send the basic tracks to Khid, who gets the stems ready, fills out the sound, mixes it a bit, and then sends it to Jason Peterson DeLaire, a Minneapolis-based musician who tours with Michael Bolton as a saxophone player; he sometimes adds sax and other instrumentation, and does the final mix and master. After that the two of them then do their own remixes.

Photo: supplied

So what’s it like working in this format? “This is a whole new challenge for me. I’m trying to choose beats that maybe I wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards. I’m trying to do things that I would never do on my own, and I actually surprised myself by writing some stuff I really, really like, and I know that would never have come from my brain alone. Collaboration is one of my favourite things about music – when you play with different people they can bring out something in you that you didn’t know about before. Their style brings out something in you – and that can be a pro and a con, but usually it’s positive. It certainly ends up taking me places I didn’t expect.”

It’s been an unorthodox musical journey for Summer, who grew up in Upper Peninsula Michigan, close to Canada. “I’ve been singing since I was three years old. In my family background there’s a lot of music – my mum sings, my dad sings, my uncles, my grandma. And I grew up in the church – eventually I actually majored in Contemporary Christian Music in college, but I hope none of those early songs ever see the light of day. So I had a very different trajectory than most. When I stepped away from the church in my mid-twenties I never thought I’d get back into music, because my music was from that world – I thought I was leaving music too. I spent ten years in Korea, where I sang back-up for a few people, did a few things, but I didn’t think that I’d ever do music much again.”

Photo: supplied

From there it’s not an unfamiliar story – Cambodia wakens the muse. “I moved to Kampot about five years ago, and eventually I wound up doing a spontaneous performance with Andy Trowers and Barang Barang at Rhymes on the River, and things snowballed from there – Trowsers Down and Low Season Riders, a project called Juke Jux with DJ Mutespeaker and Patrick Singeot, all of which reminded me how much I missed doing music. I was really proud of some of the stuff Mute Speaker and I did, and was keen to find another way to do that. The main thing for me was songs, and I wound up getting back to songwriting but in a whole different way.”

“Khid Genius and I first talked in January of last year, then he sent me one beat, like a trial, to see what I can get done. He came to Kampot and we recorded at No Strings Attached, and then I didn’t hear from him for a really long time, so I thought, well, that’s dead in the water. But then eventually he sent the finished piece it to me. That was Don’t Wanna Run, which we released in January this year, and since then every day has been non-stop – I’m spending all day emailing, pitching, sending out press kits.”

“The writing is what I really want to do, and at times I’ve thought that I didn’t have all the tools I needed, or that I was lacking something. I decided that if I don’t have particular tools I should find someone who has them. I firmly believe in combining strengths, especially when it comes to artistic stuff. Do it all yourself is a big pride point for people – if you can, props to you – but if you can’t then don’t just have part of what you do be weak. The biggest pet peeve that I have with music is when there’s something so good that is let down by parts that are not so good. To me that doesn’t make sense.”

And will this turn into something we can attend? “I definitely want to turn it into a live show if we can figure out how. Obviously I don’t want to do it karaoke style, singing to backing tracks. I would love to find a way to perform them, but right now we’re focusing on trying to release the album – all ten songs.”

Disaster will appear on Spotify via Distrokid tomorrow – today you can sample the first release, Don’t Wanna Run and its two remixes, and keep your eyes peeled for the rest of the album.

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