In a home studio in Wynnum, musician Ken Kunin explains the virtue of the perfect mistake.
“I need to sit down with [my] daughter Lily after our tour, have a drink with her, and listen to Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night,” he said. “Where the coolest stuff is sometimes imperfect.”
It’s a fitting manifesto for The Kunins, the father-daughter folk duo who are resisting the trap of hyper-polished digital music.
A nod to the past comes in their latest double A-side single, The Levee / The Sorrow You Are Drawn To.
While the format harks back to a previous era, it is also a quiet act of rebellion against a singles-driven industry. Ken said the move was as practical as it was artistic – it’s expensive to promote songs, so they plumped on offering two for one in a single package.
“Something that frustrates us no end is social media; a lot of songs these days seem to be specifically written to go viral on TikTok,” Lily said. “We want our music to be about the music first and foremost.”
At the centre of their sound is the duo’s harmonies. Lily’s classically informed soprano combines with Ken’s gravel-dusted baritone, which are captured on their newly released third album, Time Is a Cruel Master.
Time – and how little of it there is – forms the emotional spine of the record, with track One Way Flight serving as its thematic anchor.
“Time really is a cruel master,” Ken said. “You can’t get it back.”
The record is an act of defiance in a creative landscape increasingly shaped by algorithms. Recording the album forced the pair to confront a familiar modern dilemma: how much is too much editing?
“We had moments where we were just like, ‘Okay, enough is enough,’” Lily said. “We’d removed every click and pop, and suddenly it wasn’t real anymore. It had lost its soul.”
This philosophy led them to choose honesty over gear. For the album’s title track, they scrapped painstaking studio takes in favour of a “scratch” vocal Ken had recorded on a basic stage microphone which provided a raw performance that was “mind-blowing”.
For Lily, who arranges the album’s intricate string sections, the approach required a shift in mindset.
“The perfectionist in me struggles sometimes with living with human flaws in music,” she said.
The trade-off is a sound that feels alive rather than preserved on this album which is backed up by some muscular electric guitar.
Their current Community Halls Tour favours acoustically sympathetic spaces from the Sunshine Coast to the border.
“We’re not a bar band,” Ken said. “We want people to leave thinking about the stories in the songs, like they’ve just watched a really good movie.”
Whether performing through Influenza A (as they did for the video for The Levee) or hauling PA systems into heritage halls, they insist on doing things their way.
“We aim to be fearless and unedited,” Ken said. “When you’re sitting with an acoustic guitar in a room, if you’re no good, everyone will know.”
The Kunins conclude their tour on March 7 with a headline performance at the Manly-Lota RSL, where the show will be recorded for a future live release.
Time is a Cruel Master is available on all digital streaming sites.
