" My life’s not 100-pages interesting just yet, " jokes Eric San, who also goes by the DJ name of Kid Koala, over the phone from his home in Montreal. He’s referring to Nufonia Must Fall, the internationally renowned turntablist’s debut graphic novel, and the latest product to be issued under the Kid Koala name. San, who remains best known for the Kid Koala discs he’s released on the Ninja Tune label, was approached about branching out into novels by Toronto’s ECW Press after it heard him discussing the illustrations he’d done for his Ninja Tune debut, 2000’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. And though he signed on to complete a 100-page book, two years later he came through with the 350-page Nufonia Must Fall, an illustrated work that he likes to refer to as " a silent paperback film, " a noir that he completed using a digital grayscale process developed by his artistic partner in the process, Louisa Schabas. Nufonia Must Fall contains barely 800 scattered words of text, but it’s accompanied by a 10-track, 16-minute soundtrack CD of plaintive, piano-based compositions.

This isn’t the first time that San has taken the road less traveled. When he first signed with Ninja Tune, the label was interested in issuing a collection of his 12-inch beat-oriented material. Instead, it ended up with the genre-defying Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, a disc full of stylus-stuttered sound effects and dialogue samples that amounted to surreal sketch comedies and densely textured exercises in digital technical mastery. San likes to think of the disc as " short-attention-span theater, " and he describes the illustrated booklet that attracted ECW’s attention as " a short story of in-jokes. " The illustrations themselves are askew narratives full of anime-influenced graffiti-like caricatures drawn with wide-eyed exaggeration and at odd angles to their surroundings.

On Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Nufonia is the nightclub where a character named Negatron goes to " not " have fun. San says Nufonia Must Fall is about an insecure robot who falls for a workaholic woman; he describes the idea behind Nufonia as " the fall of the demons in a person’s head, which is where a lot of negative things in life actually begin. " Influenced by ’50s romantic films, particularly the work of Roman Holiday–director William Wyler, as well as the more modern absurdism of the Coen Brothers, Nufonia Must Fall is not, he points out, meant as a man-versus-machine political statement. And despite Negatron’s dedication to his record collection, it’s also not the least bit autobiographical. But it was San’s way of keeping himself occupied during the six months he spent on the road in 2001 as part of the funk-fusion band Bullfrog.

Now the publication of Nufonia Must Fall has put him back out on the road. His idea was to go to coffeehouse/supper-club type settings that would allow him to introduce the graphic novel to his fans in a relaxed atmosphere. Candlelit two-person tables would be provided, along with board games and other interactive activities. At the Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge, MA, where he’ll perform/read next Thursday, that approach isn’t feasible. But the show will still be more of a sit-down affair than a dancing-in-the-aisles celebration. Antonio mash-up king DJ Jester the Filipino Fist will open the proceedings with an hour of mixing sensual soul, funk, and rare groove. San and musical partner DJ P-Love will follow by synchronizing electric piano and turntable-derived musical snippets with slide projections of illustrations from Nufonia Must Fall, demonstrating that they’re as comfortable mixing media as they are mixing music.

" My approach to the book and tour is probably the same as to how I make tracks, " San admits. " I make little radio plays with background music you can add the dialogue in. And I write the kind of stories you don’t just read but that are open for anybody to read whatever they like into. "