Karum Cooper

In conversation with Karum Cooper, we discussed the nature of the southwest music
scene.

“In order to have an amazing functional music scene you need to create a mini industry”

I bumped into Karum on the main high street of Falmouth where we both live. We were on
our way to the meeting, it was dark and stormy, as expected during winter in Cornwall. We
retreated to a café, I bought the coffees, he bought the cakes.
Karum is twenty-five, a twenty-five-year-old with many talents. He is a musician, promoter,
and producer, making his music through Webmoms, self-described as “Jazzy Lo-fi
Instrumental hip-hop.” BYP is his promoting company, and he runs Burn it Down festival,
a popular alternative music festival based in Torquay. He moved to Cornwall when he was
eleven from Manchester and has been based down here in the southwest ever since. His
formative years were here in Falmouth. He got his music interest through his secondary
school and college bands and the friends he made through this. He was surrounded by a lot
of punk and indie music.
Karum told me about his early days in music, in-between sips of his black coffee and bites
of his Vegan banana bread, how college fed his musical growth. “We kind of had this pretty
amazing run of singer song writers or producers. We all kind of came up together. I think it
was one of the things that makes Cornwall different from cities is that it’s quite likely that
you’ll get a melting pot of different musicians playing together at a younger age and coming
up together and cutting their teeth together. By the time you get to your early twenties you’ve
got ten to fifteen people you know you can comfortably count on. It’s really comforting.”

How did you get into music? What’s your origin story?
The band I was in for a long time was Hypophora. Basically, a high school band. We started
that when we were about fourteen. Started gigging properly in our last year of school. That was my 
gateway into music. After playing the guitar, finding a band was important in realising I wanted to 
do that full time.

I guess it gave a place for it. What made you pick up the guitar?

My dad played and he taught me when I was about ten or eleven. There was an after-school club. 
Anyone who played an instrument that likes rock music would come together. I went on a whim and met a guy called Sam who went on to be a founding member of Hypophora and a good friend. He introduced me to heavier music. I think he was my catalyst into discovering this world. It was really inspiring. It was run by a TA; she was so invested and really liked seeing us learn a new song and was really excited to see us build this band together. Her enthusiasm was infectious. It was an amazing breeding ground for people that thought their music was being taken seriously.

How would you define the music you make with Webmoms?

It’s usually in constant flux. I would say it’s kind of like a jazzy instrumental, lo-fi hip hop. 
It becomes more hip-hop with vocals and more RnB if there is a singer featuring on it. It straddles 
a few different things at the moment.

How did you progress through music?

Both my parents are really into jazz and RnB and soul. So, it wasn’t like a drastic change in 
taste. It was constantly going on in the background, but I tried going against the grain listening 
to heaver stuff. But I realised I can be more diverse with my music taste. Let’s put on a John 
Coltrane album. In my late teens I was being more open minded with music taste. We had a sequencing class at college where we were taught Logic Pro, it was a game changer for me, I was able to make music on my own and got into making my own music and sequencing and sampling. With an affinity for electronic jazz, the older I got I realised that between genres there are endless sub genres. What’s released is more on the commercial side, but I don’t think I would be able to comfortably sustain a fan base or make a fan base from super experimental stuff. But in five years I know I’ll have more stuff in the bank.

You’ve built up an archive of music, have you still got more to release?

It’s stressful. It’s like I am a bit of a perfectionist. I don’t want to release something if it 
isn’t at its peak form or if it’s going to fall on deaf ears. I self-released a lot in the early 
days. But I am used to releasing through labels, so I am scared to produce without the support and
the PR and stuff. It’s about now lining up labels. I’m slowly sifting through the back log of 
music, by the time I’ve done this I’ve made more songs.

That’s a good problem to have.

Yeah, maybe a label will find me with ten albums worth of stuff, later!

A lot of artists regret not keeping an archive of their work.

It’s amazing to chronicle your own progression. When you’re in doubt of your own artistic 
capabilities, being able to go back through your archive it’s like ‘oh I made that.’ It’s powerful.

What do you get from promoting and producing?

I’m still in the process of figuring it out. They started as hobbies but theoretically they could 
go in their own directions and be full time careers. But I have a real passion for it and having 
the platform to put new bands on and showcase the bands you like to rooms full of people is 
something I don’t want to lose touch with, it’s about finding a balance. In order to get gigs, we 
would put on our own. You become more competent in how you can organise yourself, and you reach people you don’t know and offer them help and that’s how I started BYP.
I don’t think it’s going to be the focus of my life. If an investor wants to come along and funnel 
some money to Burn It Down and take it to an arena, I wouldn’t turn that down.

You never know something could come out of the woodwork; you’ve just announced Burn It Down is happening again in 2024.

We’ll do Burn It Down forever, I think. It’s a fun thing to pour ourselves into once a year. I 
don’t think we’ll ever stop doing it. It’s important for the southwest scene to have that. Because 
there isn’t really an alternative festival below Bristol.

It’s about putting your energy in the right places.

I spread myself too thin. I’ll ear mark one or two days a week to work on bookings. I feel at
this age, I should be focusing on things that are more in line with what I want to be.

What are these things?

I want to get better at my instruments. I started getting flute lessons, started honing my own 
music theory knowledge. I kind of blindly figured out I like producing music when I was younger. I took the skills I had when I was seventeen and kind of carried them on but haven’t refined them.

You want to master something.

Yeah definitely

Do you think the south-west allows you to grow as an artist or is it restrictive?

Bit of both. Probably an equal split. The south-west is not a particularly profitable place to make 
music, there is no real industry here outside of the local one. There are no record label or PR 
companies and event promoters really. There’s no industry to get stuck into. It makes it really 
difficult to have a belief or collective toward music, people still see it as a novelty. In any 
other city you would have a huge, huge community of full-time music industry professionals. That 
doesn’t happen down here as there is no eco-system outside of festivals. Also, they are all older 
men for the most part, so it’s not a very inclusive scene.

In order to make a name for yourself in Cornwall as a musician you kind of have to go free- lance 
and bust a gut to carve a name for yourself. There’s no ladder here, you either move away devoid of talent or you cut out your own niche.

Do you think you’ll stay down here?

Possibly. I am lucky to be in the position where I am making money from music, and pretty much work remotely. That affects my decision. I defiantly don’t want to live here the rest of my life. It’s 
chaos in bigger cities. The benefit of living down here is an easy way of life.

There is more space.

Which is easier for making music.

What does your growing reach mean to you?

It’s always an amazing thing, even you are reaching out to me, it’s really cool. It shows there are 
some legs to what I’m doing. Especially with the gigs and festival stuff. It’s a really amazing 
thing to give something to a community, when we were young we had nothing.
Basically, there was nothing for young alternative kids to get stuck into. The ability to 
facilitate that and give that to younger kids now is really important. That is probably one of the 
sources of my pride at the moment.

It’s about community.

Yeah, and its defiantly growing. There are steps in the right direction.

Do you think there is a future for alternative music in the southwest?

I think so I hope so, I think we need more infrastructure. There are more artists and bands and 
publications which is good to see. In order to have an amazing functional music scene you need to 
create a mini industry. I think we have a bit of a way to go about being self-
sufficient. I guess it’s impossible to tell. We’ll see but I have faith.

We left the coffee shop, leaving behind crumbs and coffee dregs. Heading out to the pier so I could grab some portrait shots of Karum, in the misty rain, we continued to chat as I took the pictures, and he posed like a trained model. The only soul in sight was a man in a small fishing boat, diesel engine spluttering he provided nothing more than a polite nod as me and Karum parted ways, until the next time.