The Capitol K story
Born in Malta to a mixed Maltese and British family, raised in various disparate locales, Brunei Darussalam, Dubai before settling in the UK. Received a rather unconventional education due to dyslexia; found themselves early in the arts before eventually settling into music as the only available outlet in teenage wastelands. Played guitar in a hardcore band and made prolific 4-track demos. Stealing his brother’s Atari computer and locking himself in a room for a week with a free software disk from a magazine cover resulted in the first Capitol K demo, which spurred him to sell his car to buy a sampler and move to London, where via the connections of a bandmate who worked on the debut Capitol K album he got lock-in after-hours sessions in Dave Stewart’s (Eurythmics) old writing room, the Crypt Studio. Resampling his 4-track demos of guitar feedback with the latent influences of UK rave, and the special ingredient: K’s natural wandering into the collection of field recordings he made on his travels. For the decade following, his location recorder and dictaphones always to hand would capture the sounds around him and cut-ups that would inform his compositions.
His debut album came out on a still very new Planet Mu (ziq008). A friendly challenge to “write a pop song” resulted in the track Pillow on his follow-up EP. The track was an immediate underground hit and led to a deal with XL Recordings. The expectations of the major-label and A&R environments were never the right terrain for K. His second album, Island Row, full of off-kilter experimental tunes and soundscapes with a cross of electronics and vocals, was delayed for a very long time whilst his label got distracted with the resurgence of garage rock, and was eventually released to great acclaim and cemented a cult audience. Following which K was unceremoniously dropped by his label, agent, publishers and manager all in one sitting and thrown on the scrap heap.
Capitol K, though, had been schooled in the ethos of DIY, punk self-reliance. Wisely using all the advance he had from that brief moment of notoriety to invest in recording equipment, Capitol K built a studio in his house and started his label Faith and Industry. Though the label initially functioned as a way to carry his continued experiments in music, a decade later it expanded to releasing the music of lots of the artists Kristian was working with.
Capitol K albums from that point on also carried on as very personal narrations, almost sonic journals of Kristian’s story. Happy Happy, the only K album you will struggle to still find, was a slightly schizophrenic affair: moments of cohesive experimental pop clash with vulgar live band experiments and lyrics driven by the challenges life was throwing at him. Capitol K had become a four piece live band at this time, and the live shows rather than the recordings are where the music was really working. At this time Kristian was hosting regular nights in East London under the Faith and Industry banner and growing a community of artists and musicians. This growing community and collectivisation found its flowering in a later album, Notes From Life On The Wire With a Wrecking Ball, which documents the stories of various East London squats that Kristian and friends set up, including establishing recording studios. Notes From: was a poetic album driven by the highs and lows of survival in the cracks and hidden libertarian zones on the edge of the financial district of the City of London. The William S. Burroughs short novel Ghost of Chance led Kristian into his own realisation of “Lemurian theory,” which coincidentally was also zeitgeist absorbed by others of the time like the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). This was early internet time, and collective consciousness was yet to be viewed as such an obvious construct as it is now.
Before all this, though, came Nomad Junk. A gig offer in Taiwan led Kristian to find a way to extend the visit to Hong Kong and Tokyo, where he collected instruments, field recordings and junk-shop vinyl. Hong Kong had just come out from the SARS pandemic and Kristian was collecting public information films from the time. The Nomad Junk album was made from the scrapbook of this time and was a narration in Asian positivism, full of optimism and wander. Kristian knew Asia already, growing up there as a child, so this album pointed back to his earlier work and sound memory.
Four years after the London paranoia of Notes From: came a curveball album: Andean Dub (2012) drove head first into electro cumbia and the influence of South American sound-system music. A love affair with Argentina, simultaneously spurred by friendships formed in the global bass scene that was very active on SoundCloud. Kristian travelled over 5,000 kilometres of Latin America collecting CDRs, instruments and field recordings. Also setting up meetings with a few producers he had met online, getting tours of neighbourhoods and attending club nights and music events, from caverns in Bolivia with a Mapuche wedding party to a Buenos Aires back-room ZZK club night. Outside of these travels K double dosed on the legendary file-sharing site Taringa, collecting a huge canon of Cumbia Sonidera from Mexico.
For a good four to six years I was playing nothing but experimental cumbia. I was DJing it everywhere I could, and after I made and released the Andean Dub album I was constantly performing it live. This was the most heady and psychedelic moment for Capitol K. I was playing a lot of very late night shows to really tranced out crowds. I’d play for hours until I’d used every last demo and unfinished track I had available. Constantly accompanying the set on the Korg M1 mono synth or strumming the charango I’d picked up in Buenos Aires. Someone once told me my live set was like shooting mescal; I’d be performing in this trance and people would be coming out of the audience and stroking my face. It was a glorious ceremony and it lasted a good many years. Then one day I accidentally erased a hard drive that contained my entire collection of music that I’d sourced around the world, and I took it as a fair sign it was time to move on.
Years later cumbia music did indeed permeate into the mainstream West as well, but I like to think I was defiantly the advance party on that one.
I would like at this point to extend my gratitude to Chancha Via Circuito and DJ Sonido Martines, who though I only met a couple of times each provided a lasting inspiration.
A six-year hiatus followed this era, whilst I was going deep into my studio practice and working all hours on building the productions taking place at Total Refreshment Centre. I’d also at this point become something of a mentor to many musicians and aspiring producers, as well as having a knowledge in making unorthodox spaces and impromptu collectivisations of creatives function enough to survive.
I had in my possession a beautiful cane flute I had bought from a hawker in the Chacarita market of Buenos Aires around 2009. It was old and in a hand fashioned papier-mâché carry case, the flute originally a quena that had been fitted with a reed so it was something like a primitive clarinet in tonality. In addition to this I had amassed a large collection of natural vessel instruments and flutes from around the world, including the Asia trip. I could never approach these instruments in London. I concluded I had to liberate these instruments from their environment, so I transported myself with them to Malta. I’d become very interested in the idea of genetic memory and wanted to find a way to open up ancestral memory. Over two years I would visit every season for a period; I studied flute-making and started a series of exploratory walks. On my walks I was cutting and collecting reeds to take home and fashion into instruments, also collecting reeds washed up in driftwood as percussion. Each instrument I made following a walk would be used in a ceremonial recorded improvisation. My Mapuche reeded quena that had never played a note till I made the conditions for it to breathe became my lead instrument, and from these improvisations came the Goatherder then Birdtrapper albums. To this day I still have people reaching out to me wanting to talk about the natural resonance of temples, burial grounds and ancient ritualistic musics. I was also informed in part by the Japanese approach to acousmatic and musique concrète, which formed simultaneous to the French GRM school only was more earth, and lacked the Western spiritual constructs of its counterparts. All this was interfaced with some great drum machines and live bass. I managed to print vinyl editions of my music for the first time in over a decade, and a Maltese artist, Chris Bianchi, devised an amazing cover pulling from his own explorations that we had hand-printed in a small run. At this time I was using one of the last remaining Jamaican lathe-cutting rooms in London and getting short-run vinyls delivered at odd times of the night in cash deals from an unnamed pressing facility. All my practices in the studio, label and music had evolved to the most localised economy.
Initially intended as a trilogy of releases, part 3 never came about due to events of 2020 and restrictions on travel. The concept for that was to follow Goatherder and Birdtrapper, the arable and then underclass of hunters and their strange disguises into the mercantile. However the experiments in creating my own Mediterranean mythos returned on Local Popular Song Vol. 1, which also marked a series of spontaneous releases with very fast production-to-release frames. “LPSV.1 samples 70s-era Maltese smash hits through a haze of 8-bit filters, analog echo and junk keyboards. Slowed to pace a steady 30 degree Celsius medium. To accompany your island life siesta dream.” A later single, Ħabbata, a collab in Maltese language with the artist CHILD, also played on a folklore theme.
This brings us up to date and the 2025 release of Artichoke, which took its ignition from way back in 2004’s Happy Happy, my buried pop album of all places. It started with a live request for an archive set of tracks like classic Pillow (2000) and the gem “Love in Slow Motion” from Happy Happy. After a decade-plus in mostly instrumental territory, Capitol K set out to reclaim and reinvent writing a new set of vocal tracks. The 10th album Artichoke was a return to the off-kilter vocal electronica ruled in the pre- to post-millennial era. Allegorically the album is artichoke: gestated in winter, bloomed in spring, a multi-layered blossom, prickly yet vital, best taken with a generous pinch of salt. Themes covered are requisite eulogies to love, the urbane, our digital age, and visiting the kiosk with your friends.
For the misfits who stuck around, and the new ears ready to listen.