I was first introduced to the sonic magician Chaki the Funk Wizard via an excellent podcast called Leighton Night with Brian Wecht, a variety/chit-chat show hosted by game developer Leighton Gray and Ninja Sex Party founder Brian Wecht. That’s a lot of strange words together in a single sentence, but real heads already know what I’m talking about here. It’s hard to resist a guest with such a magnificent title, so after enjoying the episode, I sought out Chaki‘s social media presence and was delighted to see the following Instagram bio:
”One man groove tornado‘ – CBS News
Mexican Jew from Outer Space
Fuck ICE Free Palestine’
Well. Consider me sold before hearing even a single song.
Of course, the music is the real core of it all, and I’m happy to say that Chaki the Funk Wizard delivers exactly how you think he would; an addictively groovy combination of slap bass, retro-sounding synths, and Zapp-esque talkbox vocals to get your body movin’. The Wizard himself was kind enough to answer a handful of questions about his roots, his road to nailing down his signature wild live performances, and his upcoming vinyl mega-release.
Tell me a bit about some of the early influences on your work, and how you started tinkering with music.
Growing up in L.A. I was always surrounded by sick-ass old skool funk, punk and a lot of new wave on the radio. Devo was my first favorite band at 4 years old. When I was in high school, rave culture was huge and I hated it. I hated the music, the clothes, the scene, the parties. I had to hang around these people, though, because I liked weed and LSD and the ravers had the best stuff. All the different subcultures co-mingled because of drugs (this is a good thing). The ravers, gangsters, punks, heshers, and Deadheads were all listening to each other’s music. I remember a lot of bad house music and annoying drum and bass, West Coast Hip Hop, Ween, 90s punk. Wu-Tang was huge. Around this time, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Squarepusher were starting to penetrate MTV here in the states and I ate that shit up.
We started bootlegging software and getting cheap PCs, making songs and getting in front of our computers and being silly as fuck on stage. I made a Destiny’s Child remix that was getting played by Plastikman during his sets!
How did you begin performing under the Chaki the Funk Wizard moniker?
My first ever show as Chaki was in 2001 at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco and I brought a whole-ass 486 computer on stage! I played a lot of shows with my friends from Books on Tape and Captain Ahab, whose main composer is now a member of the great band clipping.. But then I moved up to The Bay and stopped doing Chaki and just played in metal and punk bands for about a decade.
I had a revelation and wanted to play the music of my youth. My roots. The stuff that’s in my heart. I wanted to use no computers. All hardware. I wanted to wear a shiny cape and sing through a vocoder. So I restarted Chaki back up and added ‘the Funk Wizard’ to this new iteration. I also added a lot of slap bass.
The whole-ass computer in question.
Your live shows are really something to behold—I’ve only seen videos, but you have an amazing setup. Can you tell me a bit about your current equipment and how you learned to operate as a one-man act?
Sure! First off I’d like to give a shout out to the Roland company of America for creating the SP-404 sampler. When I was coming up, it was sacrilegious to use a sampler in your band. Now it’s weird if you don’t have a 404. So yeah, that machine does a lot of the heavy lifting live, along with the Electro Harmonix V256 vocoder for my vocals, a Studiologic Sledge for live synth, and my neon green Dean bass with a Q-Tron. I like the Deans because they are cheap as fuck and I can beat the shit out of them on the road.
What is your writing/composing process like? Structured, free-form, collaborative, etc.?
There are two types of dogs in me. One: the magical muse puts a song in my head and I attempt my best to recreate that song with the limited instruments and shitty software I have. Second: I fuck around in the studio (my bedroom) until I find something to groove on. I do get collaborative towards the end of the song creation process just to bring in other sets of ears. My brilliant friend Skot Brown, currently in the bands Jeweled Snakes and Alter De Fey, helps me a lot with the mixing process and to breathe life into the digital corpses I call songs.
Chaki‘s next big release is his full-career spanning retrospective, titled From L.A. to the Bay, which drops on March 13th via High Occulture Records. There’s a link to pre-order here. You can also already hear two excellent brand-spanking new tracks on Bandcamp now, one featuring Steve Bartek of Oingo Boingo, and one that is the fucking anthem of our time:
You can also catch Chaki opening for Dan Deacon in San Francisco on January 22nd at the Great American Music Hall.
I’ve also been both told and mildly warned about a future upcoming collaboration with The Satanic Puppet Orchestra, and I’ll be honest, I’m beyond curious. Get this wizard to the puppet show!
