Sandymount strand, 6 a.m. A young man is strolling along the shore in the early dawn, smoking a cigarette and contemplating another good night's work just completed. He is tall, gangly, and in his early twenties; his hair is tousled and slightly curly.
This is David Kitt, and he has just pulled another all-nighter in front of the tape machine, painstakingly laying down intricate loops, unravelling unwieldy chord sequences, and whispering his vocals so as not to disturb his sleeping flatmates. In the corner, Kittser's bed lies neglected for yet another night, while its sometime occupant stoops over his acoustic guitar and weaves a dream-like musical landscape. Now, as the dawn invades, it's time to turn off the tape machine, the sampler and the f/x boxes, and get ready for another day's study at Trinity College.
Sandymount village, 3 p.m., a couple of years later. David Kitt is sitting in Ryan's pub, sipping a cup of tea and telling me how he recorded his debut album, Small Moments. Produced entirely in his bedroom on Londonbridge Road, Small Moments charts the quiet emergence of a new Irish songwriting talent, and is a tantalising taster of greater possibilities to come. You may not have heard much about Kitt. In Dublin, however, Kittser has been a treasured secret among the city's coffee shop and juice bar set, who have adopted the 24-year-old as a Celtic beatnik icon. Kittser is a cut above your usual guitar-strumming folkies or guitar-grinding rockers. He treads a strange, alien territory between pop and avant-garde, mixing ambient sounds and free jazz improvisations into his gentle tunes and impressionistic lyrics. Such is the hypnotic, understated power of his songs, that the city's young intellectuals are happy to follow Kitt's meandering musical path wherever he goes.
Eventually, the media and A&R people picked up the scent, and the result has been glowing reviews for his album and live gigs, and a deal with Blanco Y Negro Records to release his first studio album proper in the year 2001. When we meet, Kitt is in the middle of recording this second album, and trying to come to terms with working outside the safe environs of his bedroom. "Most of the recording has been done," he announces. "It's just a case of changing some of the arrangements and stripping it back. In the early phases, we were throwing a lot of stuff at the tunes and seeing what stuck - and a lot of it didn't. It means that the album will rely on the songs as opposed to the sounds. I didn't really feel I had the skills to go off and make this kind of record, so I just wanted to go into the studio and see how it works in there and learn as much as I could. "When you go into a new environment and you're surrounded by new machines, it's like new toys, you know, you're just anxious to play with everything that's there. You can get a bit carried away with trying out things, so a lot of the early stuff is very cluttered and very confused."
Kitt also came up against a few musical language barriers in this unfamiliar new hi-fi setting; at the start of the sessions, he couldn't get across to his co-producer what he wanted, and his co-producer couldn't see where Kittser was coming from. Being used to working on his own in a bedroom late at night, Kitt found he suddenly had to communicate esoteric ideas to other people, and sometimes he just couldn't make himself understood.
"When you're doing it yourself, there's never any question. You chip away at it, and you build it up. Basically it's like painting a picture; you add a bit here and add a bit there, and its all very balance-based and very colour-based. Whereas when you go into a studio with someone else, it's like painting a picture but handing someone else the brush."
With a Masters degree in Music Technology hanging on his bedroom wall, you'd think that Kitt would have no problem communicating his ideas. Under the tutelage of Dermot Furlong and composer, Donnacha Dennehy, Kitt studied "psycho-acoustics" - nothing to do with an unplugged set by Ozzy Osbourne, but more to do with the psychology, physiology and physics of sound.
"The bulk of the course is aimed at tuning your ears and making you aware of things you weren't aware of before, soundwise," explains Kitt. "It starts with how the ear is structured and how it picks up different sounds and interacts with the outside world, and then it comes into the way we perceive sound. And then it goes into how sound actually travels and how sound interacts with a room. "What the Music Technology degree did for me was to help me articulate things that previously were pretty abstract. So it's handy for me in a way, especially when you're talking to other people about their music, and you're trying to say what you appreciate about it. Just thinking about music and thinking about sound and trying to put it into a broader context. Not to over-analyse it, but the great thing about the course was that it was taught in a really inspirational way. It wasn't dry or academic. Dermot Furlong had a real passion for it. He was a very inspirational figure."
Your usual would-be songwriters would simply pick up a guitar, grow their hair long, start busking on Grafton Street, and wait to be discovered. They probably wouldn't even bother with guitar lessons, let alone a Masters in Music Technology. Kittser, though, is a different kettle of fish altogether, a man who is serious about the sounds he makes, and isn't satisfied with simply strumming a guitar and singing a melody. "I usually get more ideas for rhythms than for melodies. I'm more interested in rhythm - that's always what triggers things for me now. I find that sitting down with a guitar is not something that inspires me as much as it used to.
"I'm not into that whole `repeat chorus to fade' when I'm finishing a song. When the vocals finish, I'll start putting new ideas into the coda. I also don't like music that tells you how to feel or is over-contextualised. You have to leave as much room as possible for the listener to take it on several different levels. And I've never really been drawn to overblown vocals."
Kitt's creativity is fuelled by the rhythms of hip-hop, soul and r&b, but he channels these beats through his passion for the post-rock sounds of Mouse On Mars, Stereolab and To Rococo Rot. Underlying his whole musical ethos is the pioneering electronica of Kraftwerk and the minimalist approach of artists like John Cage and Steve Reich. Listening to the electro-acoustic textures of Sleep Comes Tomorrow, Sound Fades With Distance and Headphones, however, one clear comparison filters through the ambient fog: Brian Eno.
Kitt can play music instinctively, but - like the legendary Professor of Pop - he can also intellectualise about it. He likes nothing better than to talk about technique, and much of our time in Ryan's is spent discussing the finer points of song structure and rhythm. The overwhelming impression Kitt gives is that pop stardom would not be his number one career choice. You can easily picture him as a backroom boffin, using his well-tuned ear to create unusual sounds for other pop stars, or taking an otherwise pedestrian band and adding unique effects to make them sound more interesting. It's an unexpected career path for the son of Fianna Fail TD and Minister for State for Labour, Trade and Consumer Affairs, Tom Kitt. Coming from a political family, did Kittser have to negotiate hard to be permitted to follow his muse?
"I think there were expectations of me academically," he says. "You know, until about 15 or 16 I was doing very well at school, so there were high expectations of me to go to college and get into one of the more conventional professions. There wasn't any one thing that really appealed to me, but at the same time I felt, everyone I know is going to college so I might as well give it a go. The conventional wisdom was, get college under your belt and then go ahead and do whatever it is you want to do. "I did the Music Technology degree to balance my parents' desire for me to do a Master's and my desire to get stuck into music. Over the last year or two, when it has become very important to me, my parents have been very supportive. They never stop talking about the music - they're big into it and they'd always be ringing me up to get the latest demos or stuff off the album. I think if you're going to go out on a limb, you have to have something that convinces people that it's worth a shot. Before I became more public, I didn't really let people in on what I was doing. But once you start letting people in, then they rally around you and give you more support."
Small Moments is out now on Rough Trade Records. David Kitt and his band play an all-seated concert at the Temple Bar Music Centre on Thursday August 31st, featuring special guests.
