St. Lucia Quotes

[My mother] was the one who encouraged me constantly and always reminded me that God gave me a talent and I have to use it. I should not keep it locked inside.

I was constantly drawing and colouring. I had an immense love for art and anything which involved art fascinated me.

I have noticed that these days, people don't want to take their time to succeed.

You may be surprised to know that growing up, I wanted to be a writer of children's books.

I believe that people have to be sensitized more about the many jobs an individual can branch out to after studying an art form.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

From as long as I can remember, I was always fond of drawing.

I must say that the first person to realise that I was talented in art was my mother.

My family still lives over there [ in South Africa] .I miss them terribly. I would say that most of my life over there was probably very similar to the sort of life someone would experience growing up somewhere like Australia or in the US.

Normally the meaning of the songs, if there is any, occurs to me after I've written the song.

A true artist is practically married to his or her art form so I just couldn't turn my back on it.

As I got older, my ambitions changed and I wanted to be a graphic designer. In form five, I did Art for CXC and got a grade 2 at the general proficiency level. I was devastated because I was aspiring for a grade 1. I took a break from art when I went to A level because I could not cope with the disappointment of my Grade 2. But I guess when you love doing something you just can't turn you back on it completely.

The racial conversation in the States is so multifaceted and multilayered. Obviously it's not always a positive conversation, but it's just so much more detailed than it was when I was growing up in South Africa.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.

We lived in a suburb in Johannesburg, which is a massive city of about 8 million people, and my parents would drive me to school every day and over the weekend I would go to the mall and then occasionally on Safari. Pretty normal stuff, apart from the Safari.

When I was 10 I went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, which is this idyllic Harry Potter-esque music boarding school in the mountains in South Africa, and that's when everything started to change for me and I realised that music is my thing.

ACID Kreationz was founded in 2008. I formed this business with the purpose of paying my university tuition because my teaching salary would not be able to cover school payments.

When I start working on an idea, I immediately record without judging it.

For now ACID Kreationz has only one body and that's me. I have intentions of hiring persons when I am through with university. For now it is only me but off and on I contract sound producers and other persons when the need arises.

Trying to be really dark and alienating just felt exhausting to me, so I started going back to the music that I grew up with, whether it was African music or pop music. It took me away from being overly self-conscious about what I was doing.

When I was developing St. Lucia - around 2008, 2009, at the peak of Pitchfork culture - what was considered cool was being as alienating to your audience as possible.

I was also always interested in the aesthetic realm - architecture and that kind of stuff - but music was my first love.

There were times when I would suddenly realize making music is a crazy pipe dream. I would see bands that did super well in South Africa still struggling to survive, or even people on the international level who are doing well but financially can't really support themselves.