Edmund Cake

Obsessed from an early age with the production and manipulation of musical sounds, Cake's experience of recording a solo album struck him as a happy return to the solitary experimentation of childhood. Cake recalls a boyhood incident when he was caught modifying his father's prized Pye radiogram in the back of their cluttered suburban garage. By disabling the turntable he managed to convert the fifties audio classic into an amplifier for his newly acquired casio VL tone keyboard. This inspired audio synthesis could be seen as the beginning of a music career defined as much by technical experimentation as song writing. Over fifteen years later, the same deconstructed vl tone makes an appearance on Downtown Puff (Gunga).
Much of the material on the album was devised while Cake was living in a third-floor studio space on Gore Street in Auckland's red-light district. This particular audio environment - with its incessant street brawls, strip club pop and Doobie Brothers hits played by the covers band in the 24-hour bar downstairs - provided a peculiar backdrop for the evolution of delicate instrumentals on tracks such as 'Airshow' and 'Watching Me'. It was here too that Cake recorded the one-take improvised vocal for My Son the Harpist, an intentionally free-form lyric which reveals itself to be the story of a complex father/son relationship in a fictitious Pacific village. Since demolished by a property developer called Carpark 80, as part of the dock area clean-up initiated by the Britomart transport project, this setting also provided lyrical inspiration for 'Oh Baby Bear' - an ode to Auckland's outmoded transport system.
Although the album is being released as a solo project, it represents a multitude of musical collaborations. Each track was developed as a separate entity and most musicians were only involved in one or two tracks. As the album was produced and recorded by Cake many of the people who worked on the album over the five years heard the finished product for the first time when Downtown Puff was released.
Two of these collaborators are Geoff Maddock and Joel Wilton, the other sides of the creative triangle which made up the short-lived Flying Nun phenomenon Bressa Creeting Cake.