Kid Mac is in Venice Beach, California and late for the phone interview. That's cool, it's Venice Beach and there are a lot of distractions.
When he finally calls he has a good reason.
"Sorry, we decided to shoot a last-minute music video this morning. We had this amazing location on the roof with beautiful scenery, and we had a friend with a helicopter and put two and two together," he says.
A helicopter. How do you get permission to do a last-minute shoot with one of those?
"I had a buddy who has one of those little remote control helicopters. We got some great stuff up on the rooftop performing and they swooped around us," he says.
Oooh. That kind of helicopter.
The song the Australian musician and filmmaker is capturing these lovely beach scenes for is "Higher," the first track off his second album Head Noise.
"A lot of people are discovering the music from YouTube and online and my manager and I decided to shoot a video for every song on the album and put one out a month. This one is coming out next month," says Kid Mac, known at home as Macario De Souza.
A month is a very quick turnover.
"Yeah, but it was pretty simple to shoot. Twenty minutes of footage and just whack something together. Everything is so DIY, these days. It has to be! There is too much competition and not everyone's got the budget for something bigger," he adds.
A little bit electro, a little bit Indy, Kid Mac has just made his first trip to the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, to perform four shows, with a side visit to Los Angeles.
"SXSW was a new experience for me. There are just so many people and so many bands, it's overwhelming, you feel like a needle in a haystack but you have to try and utilize that. It was awesome and exhausting," he says.
"Two of the shows had a kind of weird vibe. It was more like industry people standing around; I'm more used to people jumping around at my shows. They were more checking me out. You try to jump up and down and go crazy and feed off the energy of the crowd, but these people were standing there with clipboards.
"The other two gigs went off like a rave, which is what I like."
Whistler can definitely expect a little of the latter with Kid Mac's performance at Tommy Africa's on April 1.
"We're bringing up a drummer and a bass player, and just a party vibe, really. I promise to get the party started. There are also some more mellow tracks, it's not just in your face, we can mellow it down into something that is more interactive," Kid Mac says.
That he's in music at all is thanks to his earlier career as a documentary filmmaker, started when he was 14, and reality TV show staple in Australia.
His feature Bra Boys: Blood is Thicker Than Water was narrated by Russell Crowe and is one of the most successful docs in that country. His current reality TV show is called The Crew.
Documentary making and reality TV. How does being grounded in reality impact your music?
"I find it goes hand-in-hand for me. The stories I try to tell in film are as real, as raw as possible and gritty stuff. The music really is an extension of that. It is based on actual stories from my life, or friends' lives, not made up fictional things," Kid Mac says.
"Saying that, I do want to move into features and drama and that's what I am doing now, but the music has built momentum for the last two years and I want to keep with it for a few years, then eventually move into features. That's the plan."
