In early 2020, Tom Cosm noticed something strange. He started getting a series of Instagram messages from people he didn’t know. Many of them mentioned someone named Kevin.
“How do you know Kevin?” one asked.
Cosm had no idea who or what they were talking about. He thought he may have been pranked. Then his partner at the time did a bit of digging and discovered that another Instagram account with millions of followers had started following Cosm. She turned to him and said, “I’m pretty sure they’re talking about Kevin Parker from Tame Impala.”
Cosm, a New Zealander, had never met Parker, who is from Fremantle in Western Australia. But, of course, he was aware of Parker’s music, which he releases under the name Tame Impala.
By early 2020, it was difficult not to know who Parker was: the fourth Tame Impala album, The Slow Rush , was about to be released (it ended up being critically acclaimed, while also reaching No. 1 in Australia and
debuting at No. 3 on the US Billboard 200).
Although Parker tours with a band, he largely writes, plays, records and produces Tame Impala’s music himself, genre-hopping from trippy psychedelic rock to spacey indie pop to R&B-infused dance-floor bangers.
So Cosm reached out to him. He made a light-hearted joke, asking if Parker wanted to listen to his latest mixtape. And the response surprised him for two reasons. The first was because Parker not only knew who Cosm was, but he was a fan, and had been for some time.
Cosm is a 43-year-old who used to call himself an audio mad scientist but now prefers the terms prototyper, educator and sonic tinkerer. His real surname is Lewis, but at the suggestion of his sister a couple of decades ago, he adopted Cosm as a stage name. It’s short for Certified Organic Sound Machine.
He learned classical piano as a kid, then moved to jazz piano in high school, going on to study it for two years at a tertiary level. “I loved jazz because my neurodiverg
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