It was a small but powerful set. Using a midi keyboard and pad controller, she built glorious synthscapes from the weird musical gear she'd sampled. But what stuck with me the most was the fact that she introduced each song by naming the equipment used to make it.
I thought that was awesome - I know from experience that when working with old electronic equipment, often its character has a huge impact on the product; it's almost collaborative. Plus, as a gearhead, it gave me stuff to look up when I got home.
And then, just as soon as she entered my radar, she disappeared.
Until now. Her first album, Top Gear, dropped on Fishrider Records a couple of weeks ago and it's just as lovely as I had hoped.
Filled to the brim with squarewaves and primitive sub 12-bit samples, it takes you on an adventure through digital kingdoms of pulse-code modulated wonder. There's melancholy here between the layers of synthesizer and processed vocals, but also cartoonish whimsy and charm.
This charm is further enhanced (or maybe caused) by the nature of the instruments used. Each song focuses on sounds from one piece of equipment, which is named next to the track title. Most of it is fairly obscure or unloved, the sort of thing a synthesizer aficionado today would scoff at. On one song she even uses samples from an electronic duck caller to create a dark and brooding medieval anthem.
And somehow each song was conceived and recorded in a single session.
"I can never finish anything, so I had to set these rules,'' Stef explained. "I was like, `I'll make a song in one session and I'm not allowed to change it, or whatever, and then if I do that 12 times I'll have an album.'
"And I had all this junk that I'd collected from TradeMe, cheap kind of unfashionable music gear, some of it I'd never even turned on. So the idea was to kind of use them, give them a go and see what kind of sounds come out of them.
"I have quite a lot of `nice' stuff, but I tried not to use them because I wanted it to be a lot of cheap stuff, kind of unfashionable '80s digital.
In keeping with being "unfashionable'' is the fact that the only physical release is on CD. In an era where digital perfection is being shunned in favour of the crackly "organic'' sound of vinyl or cassette, having a CD release seems absurd. But during that phase in the late '80s and early '90s that most of her instruments are from, the CD was heralded as a new era of music. The future was coming, and it was digital.
If you're like me, part of the fun is jumping on the computer and searching these strange musical beasts and learning about them. For Stef Animal, it's kind of like archaeology.
"I just got addicted to these unloved `sound modules', like little boxes of sound.
"I wasn't sure if it was going to work out, but in the end I'm quite happy with it. Like, it's quite musical and because of the limitations, the speed and the equipment, it's got all this character that wouldn't have been there. I would have tried hard to make the perfect sound or something and that would have ruined it.''
To read the full interview and get more from Fraser Thompson at dunedinsound.com.
See it, hear it
• Stef Animal performs with indi at The Captain Cook on March 1.
• Stream the album at stef-animal.bandcamp.com or buy the CD at fishriderrecords.bandcamp.com
