Das Kope Scales California Terrain, Creating Trippy Audiovisuals for His Sophomore Album
“I’m one of those guys who has a backpack filled with junk,” George Pimentel, most commonly known on stage as Das Kope, said. “Like a VHS camera or a Japanese camera that no one has ever seen.”
Going on road trips to the hazy California coast, rugged and mountainous Big Sur, iconic Pacific Coast Highway, and various cities across the Golden State, Pimentel uses his film cameras to draw inspiration for his next song.
“It’s dreamy,” Pimentel said of the California landscapes. “Something about the light. I don’t know what it is.”
With a little bit of mixing analog and digital graphics — plus his own animations — Pimentel transforms his 21st century pictures into a ‘60s- and ‘70s-inspired psychedelic, retro visual that serves as the foundation for his music.
The trippy, grainy graphics — featuring wavy lines, vibrant colors, and dreamlike animations, influenced by the movie Fantastic Planet and Terry Gilliam’s animations in Monty Python — has become Das Kope’s signature style.
Some of the visuals for Where I Live, Das Kope’s debut album, were created even before the music. Pimentel said he can’t complete a song without putting together one of his kaleidoscopic videos. This symbiotic relationship set the rhythm for Das Kope’s creative process.
Pimentel also draws inspiration from psychedelic artists across multiple decades, including The Beatles, Air, and Tame Impala — who he often gets compared to. Taking influence from those artists, he describes his music as chill, hazy, and apocalyptic.
“Not for all the songs, but I’m always trying to mix something that is two opposite feelings,” Pimentel said.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, and a Los Angeles resident for half his life, Pimentel embodies a mix of two contrasting environments — with both cities in nearly exact opposite parts of the Americas.
After moving to L.A., Pimentel said he avoided visiting the beach until he took a big road trip to Big Sur in Central California. Traveling north along the coast, he said he felt like he had arrived somewhere entirely new — a place that now feels more like home than anywhere else he’s lived.
“And that was around the time that I found my sound,” Pimentel said.
One Album, 12 Tracks, and Hundreds of Ideas Later…
Das Kope released three new singles — Melting Away, We Must Be Out Of Our Minds, and Laying Low — since February. Each song creates a dreamy soundscape, transporting listeners to a surreal world.
The slow tempo and lo-fi textures of these songs — accompanied by visuals of the Pacific Ocean, palm trees, geometric patterns, and outer space — mirror the feeling of slowly drifting in the ocean, soaking up the sun with your head in the clouds.
“It took me a while to start releasing new songs again,” Pimentel said. “I’m getting ready for my second album. It’s pretty much ready. I’m just mixing the final songs now.”
He said this album has taken much longer than expected and he’s not sure why — something he hopes to understand in hindsight.
“I spent so much time alone in the studio for We Must Be Out Of Our Minds and I feel like that process really got to me,” Pimentel said. “Sometimes when it comes to finishing something, there’s a huge pressure there. And it’s easy to be like ‘oh, don’t overthink’ and ‘just finish it,’ but it’s easier said than done.”
He wrote over 300 song ideas — not all of them good, he admitted, but part of “a process to get to something else.” One sound led to another, which then inspired a few full-length songs.
“I got so deep into this process that I started not even seeing the good songs anymore,” Pimentel said. “My perception got a bit distorted.”
His songwriting often starts with a drum beat from his drum machine or a guitar riff run through an amp. From there, he builds chord progressions or simple droning tones that inspire melodies.
Some might call these demos, but Pimentel calls them “bursts of inspiration.” Later, he revisits and expands on the ones that resonate with him the most.
“And I really try to give it a structure like here’s the verse, and here’s the chorus — or maybe no chorus — then a bridge and then I would write the lyrics,” Pimentel said.
In his home studio, Pimentel experiments with guitar pedals, bass, Casio keyboards, and other gear until a song takes shape. The main instrument used in his first album was a guitar. That’s his instrument of choice and is usually the driving element behind his music.
He said he likes to sprinkle in some synths in his music, but for his newer songs, that didn’t work. It needed more.
“And it’s weird because I didn’t want that, but I was like ‘oh, that’s what the song wants and you gotta respect what the song wants’,” Pimentel said. “The more familiar you get with an idea as you’re finishing it, you start to listen to what it’s kind of asking you to do. And if you try not to do that, it starts to sound like something unfinished.”
Just One Man on Stage — For Now
Without a record label or producer, Pimentel has total creative freedom — but he admits that an outside perspective might help.
“When you’re doing it all by yourself, sometimes it’s not that easy to do that,” Pimentel said.
While finishing his second album, Pimentel often wished for a collaborator to help with certain decision-making.
“If I had that, maybe this record would have come out a year earlier,” Pimentel said.
During live performances, which mainly consist of local L.A. shows, Pimentel said it was hard to find a band, which even if he did, he said it would have been too expensive to maintain. In 2023, when he toured with the indie rock band STRFKR, he experienced being solo on stage for the first time.
“They said I could go on the bus with them, but I couldn’t bring a band because there was no room,” Pimentel said.
He said this was great because it forced him to decide to perform alone. But, he really wasn’t alone.
“My computer was sending my visuals to the projector and I feel like that’s what also gave me the confidence to play by myself because I felt like I was there with my animations and these trippy visuals I make and I feel like they were almost like a band member,” Pimentel said.
On stage, Pimentel said it was nerve-wracking. He used a pedal switcher to have different sounds change automatically, while he focused on singing and playing the guitar.
In the future, Pimentel said he might add a drummer or even a full band to his live set, but he hasn’t decided yet.
What’s Next?
“Right now, I’m focused on finishing my second album, which is very close to being done,” Pimentel said. “And then I want to promote it and it would be great to go on tour.”
Pimentel said he isn’t even showing his close friends his new songs. He said he tries not to show anyone what he’s working on because they might make a critique that will make him overthink things, derailing the music-making process.
“A few times I made the mistake of showing people ideas that were not finished and then they were opinionated and that kind of slowed me down,” Pimentel said.
One of his biggest tips to new artists: don’t show your work until it’s at its best. He said well-meaning advice can come too early.
Pimentel said if he asked audio engineers for input, they’d likely suggest changes that don’t align with his vision. His focus is on the full creative picture of Das Kope — not technical perfection.
“They’d be like, ‘the guitar tone could have been more professional,’ but I don’t care about that,” Pimentel said. “Sometimes, I like ugly sounds. I like little sounds. And I like using all of that together to hopefully create something beautiful.”
Pimentel said he also tries to avoid comparing his songs with other mixes.
“That’s where all the engineers out there say, ‘you gotta compare it’,” Pimentel said. “And I kind of embrace the muffled and lo-fi sounds. That's how you come up with something genuine.”
Pimentel also advises young artists to break the “rules.” For instance, he said if a professional tells you that you can’t pan the drums left, you don’t need to listen if the music already sounds good.
While Pimentel said he does not have the “best recordings” or the “loudest masters,” he said he’s happy to just be doing his own thing.
“If you heard a Beatles song through shitty speakers and it was really bad mixed, it would still be a good song,” Pimentel said. “And not saying I achieve that, but I want the songs to be good, even if the recordings are not the best.”
He said he may not be making the “best” music in a technical sense, but when he learned how to tweak small things, his music started to “feel right.”
For Pimentel, it took years to find his own specific sound, and now, his stream of lucid creativity and hypnotic visuals flows into a distinct, personal aesthetic he calls Das Kope.
