Kiva - Kiva LP

Kiva, the first and only album from Royce Doherty and Paul Mac’s duo project of the same name, is a sparkling gem hiding in plain sight within the Australian musical canon. Originally released in 1997 by id/Mercury, Kiva offers up a collection of timeless queer pop songs draped in dreamy ambient, downbeat and dub sensibilities. The music is the product of a serendipitous meeting of minds between two young music obsessives who crossed paths in Melbourne in mid ‘90s. It’s also a perfect evocation of the futuristic techno-utopian impulses that supercharged the global electronica counterculture during the race towards the 21st century. “I never had these big diva plans or anything like that,” Royce reflects. “It just sort of evolved that way.”

After being introduced by the high-end audio specialist and former synth-pop songwriter and producer Dave Corazza (of Boxcar), Royce started showing Paul the cassette demos he’d been recording with an Ensoniq ASR-10 sampling keyboard, a couple of synthesisers and a 4-track. Despite having shifted his musical focus from The Lab to Itch-E and Scratch-E’s futuristic machine beats, Paul was still very interested in traditional songcraft and how the two worlds might meet. “When I heard Royce, I thought, what a beautiful voice and melodies, what can we do with this?” he remembered. In an act of forward-looking prescience, the combination of Royce’s angelic songs and Paul’s celestial production collapsed the boundaries between popular music writ large and the electronic avant-garde of the era.

While making that project, the duo formalised their creative formula. Over the next two years, Royce began commuting monthly from Melbourne to work with Paul at his home studio before inevitably moving to Sydney. These sessions laid the foundations for a fortnight spent recording in an isolated oceanfront bungalow on Gerroa Beach near Kiama.

Nearly three decades after the fact, Royce and Paul remember Kiva as a golden moment of creative synergy. “When I listen back to this album now, it’s got such a vibe and feel that’s really its own,” Paul enthused. “There's so much of our version of dub on this record. It’s beautiful hearing Royce's core song ideas stretched out to eight minutes of trippy, acid kind of moments set over slow breakbeats and stuff. It felt so fresh being able to have this elastic sound, pull songs apart and stretch them into space.” 
–Gazebo