After much of your explorations in music from the ’80s, you released Easy Listening 4 Armageddon in 1997. This was an album built from a series of samples and assembled in a very lo-fi way, fueled by the two primary influences of hip-hop and poetry. Can you discuss the writing and recording of your debut?
During the late ’80s, in addition to the music above, I was really obsessed with the ’70s, the way kids ten years ago couldn’t let go of the ’80s. There was a lot of great R&B of the ’80s that I missed out on because I was digging the ’70s crates. Shit, I almost slept on Prince, but luckily my mother took a girlfriend and me to see Purple Rain. At 14 years old the band the Time got heavy rotation, and so did the Prince number “Lady Cab Driver”.
But the five records that really influenced my debut album were Sonny Sharrock’s Ask the Ages, Rotary Connection’s Songs (and everything else Charles Stepney had touched), Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi, ESG’s 1991 self-titled album, Archie Shepp’s Fire Music. I had just met Company Flow and had been hanging out with Priest and Beans of Antipop Consortium and rapper Rob Sonic (of Hail Mary Mallon) for years by then. I was getting a Masters in Poetry at Boston University when I was making my debut so I would teach and take classes from Monday through Thursday morning in Boston and then record down at Ozone Studios run by Amaechi Uzoigwe who was my manager until I left the States.
Ozone was important; Company Flow came through there, and that bond between Amaechi and EL-P continues to this day with Run the Jewels. But Antipop Consortium and Rob Sonic were there; this cat Native Sun did a compilation called Eargazims there, other friends of EL’s, this great Emcee BMS, Saul Williams came through – this was all before Definitive Jux (EL-P’s independent label), around 1996-97. The guys who worked with Amaechi, Brett, Vassos, Mark Feggins, and Engineers Jeff Cordero and Walker Bernard.
I’ll never forget when I finished mixing that record (I always seemed to be cramming to make the spring deadline and would be doing the final mix when the Grammys were on) Brett came in and said: “Congratulations, now comes the hard part.” He was talking about selling it. The best sentence I ever heard and advice I never really took.
I consider myself very lucky to still be eating off of music with the little amount of self-promotion I’ve done. I don’t take that privilege lightly. I’ve paid a price for it but I like the peace I get in return. It’s 20 years this year since Easy Listening 4 Armageddon dropped, so I’ll ramble a bit more. Two people instrumental to that record were Dennis Kelly, my first engineer, and Bruce Grant. Both were electronic music gurus from the early ’80s.
Dennis used to work for Moog and he sold me my EMS synthesizer and brought me down that rabbit hole. Bruce was a master of tape loops. He used to play five Walkmans running through a mixer. We played live together for years. Both he and Jeff Cordero have passed on now. I had gone to Hampshire and had my first hip-hop crew with Damian Roskill and Seth Boyd, who was tight with Kut Masta Kurt before he moved to LA. Damian was tight with J Mascis (from Dinosaur Jr.).
This was western Massachusettes in 1989-92, so there was this crazy mix of hip-hop fans and indie rock fans. I read a lot of tape op issues on the can. New Radiant Storm King were friends and a big influence six years later as well. All that to say when Scratchie Records (part of Mercury) picked up my album, it was a good fit. Jeremy Freeman was/is good people. However, I didn’t trust record companies where that “Independent as Fuck” vibe, as EL-P put it, was in the air.
Your second album, Welcome to the Afterfuture, is the work for which you are most recognized. It’s considered a key work in hip-hop which absorbs all the traditions of rap, poetry (beat poetry) and spoken word seamlessly into a singular volume of music. I heard somewhere that you basically used much of the discarded loops from your first album for Afterfuture; the beats and loops on Afterfuture, however, are heavily compressed and distorted to create a dense, booming wall of sound.
As well, the album seems split into two segments, with the first half being driven by heavy beats and bass and much of the second half focused on atmosphere, namely, ambient electronic noodling. The album also features political allegories to discuss issues of social unrest. Can you go into some detail about building and creating this album, both in its lyrical and musical content? How do you think Afterfuture has developed in its significance to the rest of your work since its 1999 release?
I’m sure this is said all the time, but your first record is hard to beat because you’ve been writing it all your life, so there are 20 plus years of ideas packed in there. In my case, that bled into the second record. I had taken all the heavy beats out of the first record (hence the “Easy Listening” in the title). Cat’s used to come up to me and say, “Yo, my girl really loves your record.” I took that as an insult! That’s how misguided the underground hip-hop scene could be. Nah, I won’t even blame it on that – it was my dumbass. But I was like ‘Fuck it, I want to get the heads listening.’ Terrible idea, but it is still my favorite record that I’ve made.
The outtakes that made their way on the album were made while I was in grad school in Boston. I was living with Jeff Cordero, who was one of those geniuses that can learn any instrument in a day. I had this giant Akai 4 track and I would watch him go nuts on that and learn a lot. I moved to back to New York after my year of school. I initially moved in with EL-P in Brooklyn. Back then he had a modest mixing board, an ASR, and that was about it. I’d wake up and he’d already be banging away on a sample on the keyboard, looping it manually and nodding his head like was the best shit ever, but the initial sample would often sound like garbage – atrocious garbage. I’d go out get something to eat, come back and the track would be blazing. That would get me shook enough to get to work.
The record didn’t really take shape till I moved to the Bronx though. Fred Ones had lived with my cousin Canaan and DJ Preservation was in Brooklyn. He moved up to the Bronx and built a studio in his apartment, so we all followed. Rob Sonic and I moved across the Street and Preservation moved upstairs. The friends I was hanging out with then made that whole thing work in addition to the guys mentioned above there was Dah-1, Yazeed, Omar, and his kid Joey, and Eric Okafu who played bass on my first tour. Fred was the principal engineer and basically co-producer.
I had these ideas that were out there and sometimes corny and they would rein it in. I never trusted an engineer the way I trust Fred. That’s saying a lot because I worked with Scotty Hard after and that man deserves every legend that floats around him.