About

Hi, I am Nicholas Kempson, a self-taught musician from Melbourne, Australia.

I am known as 'Nick' to friends and 'Nicky' to family. As for my music, I go by the pseudonym Big Blue Bazooka.

Originally I had no thoughts or intentions for making music, I even had almost no interest in music at all until I was around 19 or 20. Somehow out of chance I accidentally started to discover and enjoy listening to more and more music. Pet sounds by The Beach Boys is what really created my enthusiasm for music, before that I had only known music as “what played on the radio” and thought I just didn't have an interest in it. The reality is that I just didn't know the magnificent world of music that existed behind the horrible playlists of mainstream radio stations. Once I discovered the real world of music on the internet from the big artists, to the complete Bandcamp unknowns, I became a member of the secret society of hardcore music enthusiasts (Disclaimer: this is not a real society, it does not exist).

Near the end of 2018 (I think) my uncle, who has been a music enthusiast and music maker since he was a teenager, compelled me to play Bass guitar on a new years day jam. I had no idea how to play it or what the frets were but he showed me where the G and D notes were and told me to “just keep playing those notes”, and so I did. This must have placed some kind of desire in me subconsciously because a couple months later I ended buying a cheap unbranded bass guitar and it all went from there.

After a few months I found just playing was not enough, I started to feel a compulsion to make music. It was very difficult at first learning all the theory and studying my favourite songs. I even decided to quit multiple times in the process but each time I still came back.

I have a love hate relationship with making music. I like making music to a point but not when it overwhelms me. The first year or so I was very obsessed, I was making music and researching things related to making music, for hours upon hours a day, multiple days a week. I was Studying chord theory, analysing chord progressions and developing a idea of what goes on behind the scenes of the whole idea of music to begin with.

It got to a point where I had quit making music altogether for lack of confidence in the quality of my work and for the massive amount of time it was consuming, which restricted me from doing the other things I love. I have noticed many musicians I love dearly have cited a compulsion to create and I to get that same feeling.

I have OCD as well, very severe, and when I started to make music I would get this compulsive feeling. I very much believe the OCD did and still does cause me to struggle with separating my thoughts from 'work' (music making) time and my time doing other stuff. This caused me great anguish for a long time during the earlier parts of my music production journey, however, thankfully I am now much better able to manage this compulsive feeling and restrict my music production time to a set time frame each week (although this doesn't always go as planned).

I find it hard to describe what my musical style is exactly. I make what I feel and what I feel is very different from one day to the next, as a result I have made music with many different moods, feeling and genres. Overall I would say I generally make happy and upbeat sounding pop rock style music but my instrument use over time on different tracks is very eclectic, from guitars to synths, to folk instruments and kiddy percussion and toy like instruments. I also make stuff from normal pop rock to more weird and experimental music and have even become engrossed in the hardware limitations of vintage video game consoles and sound chip, for making music.

I used to use a lot of virtual/software instruments when I started which can be seen heavily on my first few releases (Lucky Dip, Cartoon Girl), however, I have since moved away from that. I now use a lot hardware instruments instead as I much prefer physically adjusting and making my own synth patches with the knobs, switches and buttons on my hardware synthesizers.

One of my other projects is a duo band with my uncle. We are called 'Big Carrot' and make mostly pop rock and folk pop music (so far) but I also slipped in my experimental music preferences into a few tracks to frighten away the average unseasoned music listener.

I hope in the future I can keep improving and making more killer albums.