Mr. Sound Bite

His roots are in hip-hop, but his greatest influence is the Muppets. He’s certified as an elementary school teacher, but his real job is DJ. His live shows spotlight his skills on the Technics, but they also incorporate snippets of stand-up comedy and sometimes animation.

A hip-hop iconoclast and all-around boy wonder, Kid Koala may be one of Canada’s most unusual musical exports. This Saturday, the 29-year-old Quebecois will demonstrate his far-flung talents at the Henry Fonda Theatre, performing tracks from his latest record, “Some of My Best Friends Are DJs,” as part of a Ninja Tune showcase.

Considering that his record is pieced together from hundreds of other records, that’s no easy feat. The fact that some of the samples last no longer than a second makes his live performances even more impressive.

This isn’t to say his record is underwhelming. Quite the contrary. Released last fall, “Some of My Best Friends Are DJs” is sound collage to the extreme, a comedic smorgasbord that makes excellent use of some of the more bizarre spoken-word snippets that have been committed to vinyl over the years.

Sound bites are co-opted and cut up into unlikely conversations, then embedded into pieced-together songs that range from oompa-loompa ska to New Orleans jazz to old-school funk. Slowing down, speeding up or otherwise manipulating various samples, the music winds up sounding as if it’s melting, hiccuping or drunk.

Some tracks are unclassifiable even as songs. They are stories told with found sounds -- aural skits sewn together from unlikely source material. “Flu Season,” for example, is simply a string of coughs, wheezes, throat clearings and sneezes layered over a bed of scratches and beats.

“Some people collect stamps,” said Kid Koala, a.k.a. Eric San. “I collect samples of people wheezing and coughing, so at one point I said it’s time to use some of these.”

San works from meticulously labeled crates of records. His 10,000 albums are separated by instrument (drums, brass, ambient noises, male/female spoken word etc.), then further separated by notes (a clarinet playing E flat, a trombone playing F).

In a move that’s atypical of scratch DJs, San sometimes composes on piano first, piecing together songs with notes and instruments from different records instead of simply playing them outright.

While basic musical understanding is an inadvertent byproduct of his classical training as a kid, piano isn’t an instrument that speaks to him. It’s merely a tool.

“I didn’t find it the most expressive thing,” said San. “Not that it didn’t interest me. It just reminded me of chores and exams and recitals.”

He was 12 when he was first turned on to scratching. Trailing along on his sister’s trip to the record store for a Depeche Mode album, he heard “the freakiest stuff coming through the speakers.”

It was Miami DJ Mr. Mixx. San was quick to fork over some of the money he’d made as a paperboy to buy the record, and soon afterward he was so inspired that he attempted mixing on his own, using his sister’s stereo -- an all-in-one radio, record player and tape deck.

It wasn’t the ideal setup. The platter was not built to go backward, and when San forced it, the needles inevitably skipped. But he persisted with it until he could afford a real turntable and mixer.

A few years after that, McGill University brought him to Montreal, where he studied early childhood education by day and DJ’d clubs at night. It was through a club connection that he met Coldcut -- Jonathan More and Matt Black, the English DJs who also founded the Ninja Tune record label.

In a story that has since become legend in the turntablist community, a promoter friend of San’s asked him to tag along while he picked up Coldcut, who were playing a show in Montreal. San had popped one of Coldcut’s tapes into the cassette player on the ride to the airport, which automatically flipped over and began playing San’s demo tape while the Ninja Tune DJs were in the car.

“When the tape flipped over, I was in the third row of a minivan,” San said. “If I could have, I would have climbed over everybody to hit eject. I didn’t want them to hear it because it was totally rough. It was a really early drop before I’d added all the layers, and the levels were wonky.”

That didn’t seem to matter. It wasn’t long before the DJs were drawn deep into San’s “Scratchhappyland,” a mix that sampled the Muppets and a Charlie Brown Christmas record. A couple of minutes into it, one of the DJs turned up the volume and asked what it was. San was soon signed to the label, which released his first full-length album, “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome,” in 2000.

A woozy cut-up of warped jazz and blues, the album included a 32-page comic chronicling the adventures of a young robot in the land of Nufonia. Penned by San, the stories in the comic overlapped with the songs on the record.

Three years later, San did a similar project in reverse. His graphic novel, “Nufonia Must Fall,” was published with a soundtrack, and both were promoted with a performance tour involving six turntables, a Wurlitzer organ and a slide show.

For “Some of My Best Friends Are DJs,” San has again included a comic, as well as a traveling chess kit.

“ ‘Cause you like to eat one kind of food doesn’t mean you have to eat that all the time,” San said of his affinity for mixed media. “For me, I have a short attention span. Being on tour, there’s so much time you’re just sitting around ... that it became imperative that I find something to do.”

San is working on yet another graphic novel and a new record. He’s also collaborating on a puppet musical with a turntable orchestra pit for a 2006 tour that could very well incorporate all three projects.

“The thing with Koala is he was originally kind of pegged to that kind of turntable movement, which generated a lot of good stuff but ended up being the sonic equivalent of Yngwie Malmsteen,” said Ninja Tune label manager Jeff Waye. “Eric consciously recognized he came from that and was a part of that, but he also wanted to start putting on shows that started to put together these ridiculous concepts.”

The beauty is that these ridiculous concepts work. They work, said San, because they’re based on a proven formula: “The Muppet Show.”

“There’s a musical piece, and some interjection from [the hecklers] Statler and Waldorf. And all of the sudden it would cut backstage, and then you’re in space with a bunch of pigs,” said San, who grew up watching the program. “Just the way that traveled, I’d say it’s an indirect template for what I’m doing.”

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Kid Koala

What: Ninja Tune showcase featuring Kid Koala, Amon Tobin, Bonobo, Blockhead, Diplo

Where: Henry Fonda Theatre,

6126 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: Saturday, 7 p.m.

Price: $20

Info: (323) 464-0808 or www.henryfondatheater.com