Chokai is Simon Curry, a 28 year old musician originally from Welwyn Garden City in the UK. Now living in Luton in the UK and currently signed to Artificial Bliss Recordings ltd, the road to Chokai as we know him today has been a rocky one..
Simon grew up listening to a wealth of music from Elvis Presley to LL Cool J, and took a keen interest in indie, techno, rave and rock music in his early teens listening to bands like Oasis, Blur, Manic Street Preachers, the Chemical Brothers, Leftfield, the Orb and Radiohead. His broad musical horizons made his appreciation for music blossom into production, and began to experiment with the limited music making gizmos available at the time.
Simon's first album titled "a higher node of subliminal unconsciousness" by "Cabal" was a collection of looped samples created on a Casio SK-1, overdubbed on tape and interspersed with vinyl records. Simon had acquired the taste and feel for production, and began saving his pocket money to purchase ever more sophisticated pieces of kit. A second album followed.
"I went down to cash converters with my Brother with the budget of £80 to buy anything I could make music with. We ended up buying this utter piece of crap Casio home keyboard that weighed a ton and was obviously not for professional production, none the less we carted it through the town center, eager to get it home a fuck about with it. I spend hours in my room trying to get sounds out of it that i knew would never come out, but in the end produced an album called 'are you a spaceman?' by my next guise 'callisto'. We then moved house and things started to get more interesting..."
In 1997, Simon managed to get hold of a Commodore Amiga 1200, loaded with the tracker program Octamed. After some time experimenting Chokai was born with a string of insane and lo-fi drum n bass tracks. Simon also began to make music on a Playstation using music 2000, and produced another 2 albums worth of material all recorded on tape.
"I remember once inviting a potential girlfriend over to my house to play her some tracks I had made on Playstation (a terribly naive thing to do, but I was a spotty 17 year old), it was apparent then that I was passionate about making music, even if it was low-budget. I made her listen for like.. 3 hours worth of material, after she left she ignored all my calls! This gave me lots of motivation to start thinking about really pumping some cash into my studio and properly having a shot at being signed..."
In 2000, after three years of experimenting and understanding the real limits of the current setup, Simon joined forces with his Brother, Chris Curry to plan out and put together some more serious kit, and with one huge loan bought a yamaha RM1X, a novation Nova, a Yamaha SU-10 (later replaced with an Akai MPC2000XL), an EMU Proteus and a PC (used just for mastering and publishing). The first ever, semi-professionally produced and debut album from Chokai was created in less than one year, titled "traveller".
"I remember a real sense of freedom from using this new kit, the editability and potential to make more complex sounds and beats was almost too much, I literally locked myself away in my room for 14 days and booked a long holiday at work. Chris was inputting his ideas on what he wanted to hear, we listened to tons of other music to get ideas on what the conventions were and built tracks. I must have made about 50 songs in the space on 6 months, and got through a metric ton of weed, and personal mental difficulties (panic attacks) We narrowed them down to 11 tracks and knocked out 'traveller' with the intent of selling CD's online. I only made about 10 CD copies in the end because I was printing everything from my PC and using a CD copier...."
In 2002, Chokai produced a second album titled "Traveller South", following on from the theme of experimentation to route out a core style. By this time Simon was also running an electronic unsigned artists review web site called "Petrolmusic.net" and has made hundreds of contacts online with other producers across the globe. Simon has also got involved with the then newly-formed 3Bass records, born from the Overthrow! collective run by the artist Sain. Chokai was signed to the 3Bass label in 2003 and set about releasing a new album of material, a more fully formed project titled "Tori Umi".
"Signing to 3Bass was quite possibly the most exciting time, knowing that people actually liked my music was a superb feeling, and I wanted to prove myself even more so really knuckled down to produce something serious. I concentrated on the aspect of music I liked at the time, Uplifting/Melancholic melodies and really long, exciting builds and breaks. I was breaking out of the whole trance and dance thing and copied ideas alot less. Once Tori Umi was complete I was really satisfied with what I had made. By this time Chris had kind of lost interest so Tori Umi was the first album that was really all about my expression of music..."
Tori Umi met with reasonable success online, but 3Bass then disbanded in 2004 leaving Chokai without a label.
"Leaving 3Bass was tough, I really wanted it to work and offered all the support I could. The guy running 3Bass was passionate and serious about music, but I think in the end Chokai just wanted more and felt kind of disconnected.."
Chokai went on Hiatus in 2004 when Simon met his now wife, Simon spent some time out listening to music, travelling and experiencing. In late 2004 Simon met up with fellow producer Junction Eleven, and with the support of Chris formed Artificial Bliss Recordings in late 2005. A brand new Label designed to promote and sell innovative and new creative electronic music. Chokai was one of the first artists on the books.
"I had been making some tunes on and off while on hiatus the previous year and intended just to release an album in 2005 on my own, but meeting with Carl from Junction Eleven gave me a new goal. It was not just about my music any more about about electronic music as a whole. We had this idealist attitude that we could really make a big difference to electronic music as a whole, and today we still feel the same, and we will..."
Chokai released "Iko" in January 2005, which met with more success than Chokai could have imagined, scoring numerous number one slots of indie websites and generating lots of buzz.
"Iko is really influenced by my time spent in Japan, its a special time i my life that was expressed in a new style of Chokai. Its a unique piece that will always be close to me".
In 2007, after 2 years of running Artificial Bliss Chokai released a new freely downloadable EP titled "Glade Geita", furthering Chokai's ability for expression in music. The EP marked a turning point for Chokai, defining a new more unique and experimental flavor.
"Glade geita is fucking weird, but I like its uniqueness and obscurity. Its more of an expression of the world rather than my own perception of it... "
Free download - "Glade Geita" EP
Click here to download
Click here to visit the artificial bliss website.