Armani XXXChange Interview

 

Armani XXXchange interview by Huwston

 

Armani XXXchange is Alex Epton, the Baltimore based producer that presented the best LP of the genre whose name derives from his home town in Yo Yo Yo Yo Yo Yo, as part of Spank Rock. He’s finally making it to Australia on the lineup of the upcoming Park Life shows after two Spank Rock tours sans the integral element of Epton (one which was even minus the front man), but with remixes for Beck and Thom Yorke plus production for The Kills and Kid Sister on the way, he’s had more than enough to keep himself busy.

Speaking from his home, the softly spoken and sometimes giggly producer first lays out why he hasn’t appeared on our shores earlier.

‘Well I guess just personal reasons, I had some family shit the last couple of years and was planning on going both trips so I ended up not having to go.’

With both parties keen not to push that subject we discuss what we can expect from the show, with Alex cementing that he is really keen to be out here.

‘It depends on the time of day, if it’s during the night I have some video show but if it’s during the day it’s just Djing,’ he says, putting to rest any notion of guest MCs or singers although, after all, it is his first tour, so an entourage could be due in the visits to come.

The Spank Rock live show currently consists of MCs Spank Rock, Amanda Blank and Pase Rock plus Djs Ronnie Darko and Chris Devlin and although XXXchange enjoys being a part of the spectacle, he’s got a pretty hectic schedule.

‘I am happy to stay at home – although I have been djing with them a lot lately,’ he says, admitting ‘I am kind of the studio rat.’

‘I do enjoy going to the shows, I just don’t want to tour extensively… it can be really exhausting.’

With his bio insisting he has a heavy art upbringing from groovy parents, just how much of this guy’s life is devoted to art and music?

‘The inspiration for a concept,’ (for a song) he says, ‘I take more from modern art… it’s more like doing a collage kind of thing, you can do that with music and make it be a horrible mess, so you have to make sure stuff works.’

Referencing, of course the Baltimore and mash up mentality, he succinctly describes the thin line between genius and disaster on a dance floor. Big Dada (the label that released Spank Rock’s first album) label boss Will Ashon suggested that Yo Yo Yo Yo Yo is the only good long player to come out the genre and time has proved that he is right.

‘It seems like that  (the ‘Baltimore’ sound) sort of came together for a bit and now the scene is drifting apart, at least over here. That was a big inspiration for making the record (all of the genres and crew mixing) but things are a bit more disparate now.’

He references ‘all of this French music’ confusing people a bit as to what the next thing is which, in a way, is a beautiful irony for a genre that draws from such a wild palette. Continuing the art metaphor, XXXchange sums things up nicely.

‘Once you start making music that doesn’t have anything to do with your physical ability to play an instrument, it has to do with sound and sound design, and what your ideas are.’

He says a lot of the more interesting art theory hasn’t really been done with modern music, it’s all been done with video art, but he doesn’t dabble in the visual side of things, just his concepts that he fleshes out on a computer rather than a canvas.

 

Jamie Lidell Interview

Jamie Lidell 3D World Interview

Jamie Lidell astonished everyone with his second solo album Multiply, the most soulful record to ever come out of the Warp stable. Three years later he’s back with Jim, a record that captures the current popular rhythm n’ blues explosion and personalises it for the charming Briton-in-Berlin.

Jamie Lidell’s debut Muddlin Gear was a complex mix of growls and distortion and virtually unlistenable when compared to Multiply or Jim. In stark contrast, his newest offering opens with Another Day, a sort of Let The Sunshine In for a new feel good generation. Recorded in the US with Justin Stanley, Jim strips back almost all of the electronics and heralds a potential worldwide hit.

‘Justin is a great fella – he’s a real music enthusiast and a great payer and owns such a nice self contained potent studio set up, so I can associate with him on so many levels. It was a real pleasure. And he has a bunch of music families around him – he called all of these amazing people to come by. He’s just a fuckin’ sweet generous guy,’ he says matter of factly.

The good weather and geography of Los Angeles injected a huge amount of soul in to the sessions for Jamie, who loved being there for the recording.

‘Waking up in the morning to the perfect blue sky – and me coming form Berlin – the contrast is amazing. I knew that was going to spark off some really cool positive music.’ Referring to the album’s opener he says ‘That was the idea, we condensed the vitamins in to the mix.’

After such a good time, could that be the next spot for Jamie?

‘You think about it (moving there) when you have a good experience but the reality of living  there 24/7 might be very different,’ he explains. ‘It may be a little on the plastic side, you can find your escape there but in LA you’ve got to drive a car to get a coffee and that’s fuckin’ rubbish.’

By the very essence of calling an album your own name, or in this case, an abbreviation of Jamie’s name, the album takes on a very personal slant. I was interested to find out the differences and similarities between Jamie Lidell and Jim.

‘Jim Shady!’ He jokes, ‘Sure, I mean it’s more uh… generous and a bit focused in general on a particular part of me and that particular part of me is Jim. I didn’t want to call it Jamie Lidell, because it’s just ne part of Jamie Liddell: a dandified, gentlemanly generous, friendly part of me… and that’s a big part of me. It’s an optimistic part of me to throw more adjectives in the mix. It’s me right now. A lot of people like to call me Jim, they call me ‘Jim’ in a friendly way, they don’t often ask Jim for money,’ he says, which bizarrely puts all in to context.

Songs from Multiply like Game For Fools are starkly contrasted with beauties like Wait For Me which seem to signify a transition for Lidell, suggested by one as the former album representing a breakup and the current one representing new found love.

‘These songs have universal themes, I think people can get a little something from,’ he says after a long pause. ‘It’s kinda like a picture of Jim, he likes to share his life experiences, but I’m Jamie Lidell and I don’t,’ he says abruptly but not rudely.

Before we get all tabloid up on that ass, the conversation quickly comes back to the real world of just how he got to Jim. His immense popularity and 2 man touring party has seen him flown around the world several times over the past years and all of These experiences have brought him to this point.

‘Gonzo (Gonzales) and Mocky and I, we had the good fortune be a trio: piano drums and voice. It’s a lot of fun to work like that and Wait For Me was a new song in the repertoire around the Multiply tour (of Europe).’ He explains ‘You’d get to a point where you’d say ‘this is a good song I want to record it’ – It’s all part of the experiences of making music, it all blurs in to a big happy pie to be eaten at your leisure.’

And will Jim be presented as a Vegas revue type show stopper? Somehow we think not…

‘A big band, possibly not, I am trying to present the Jim experience, with a small number of people but still high octane. I made a brief for myself, obviously touring solo for so many years the idea of doing something massive was daunting so now we have 4 other people playing and a touring party of nine. I have got in to a comfort zone playing on my own so I am looking forward to trying something new. The guys are friends of mine, so we can have a bit of a laugh,’ he says of the band.

‘A couple of them are Berliners, Americans, one from Canada, so they are spread around the world. And one guy from Belgim to represent the EU!’

It seems soul music grows out of some of the least geographically soulful cities in the world. Motown was not called that because there was Mo’ of it, after all and Lidell having such success writing soul music in Berlin is something of a phenomenon.

‘Maybe it comes from a lack (of soul in the city). You have to make your own entertainment. Berlin is a very hedonistic place, you can go out and get wasted everyday of the week.’ For him it as different.

‘Finding myself in the studio, I come from an electronic background so having a studio to put drums in and make noise and play every day in a big space (as opposed to the small expensive spaces available in England)… the city offers space, it’s been about people and space rather than Berlin the city with the history and whatnot for me.’

With that electronic background, the question that has always interested has been when, where or who the pivotal point was with that made Lidell do away with the bugged out electronics and step to mic and sing. The answer is charming, the answer is Jim.

‘It comes from a lot of sources, ultimately it’s down to me. I make all kinds of music but don’t choose to release it all. It didn’t come from one influence or person, it was a crazy culmination of pushes and pulls and what I was comfortable being and what I set up for myself, making a commercial, radio record. I factored it all in to mix. I thought to myself ‘maybe this is my time to get on the airwaves? Am I ready for that?’ and maybe the world might be up for hearing some of me on the radio.’ In signing of he says ‘I’m going to go for that and filter some of my pop sensibilities and make songs I really love and bring it all together, (and) it felt good.’ Which goes to show, a little bit of feel-good goes a long way.

 

Ben Folds Interview

Ben Folds was in the country recently to promote his brand new album Way To Normal. 3D sent Huwston – the other skinny white bloke with glasses – in to bat.

Ben Folds is not your average piano man. A long line of people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Billy Joel have come before him and whilst he has the performance aspect and song writing traits of his predecessors, his goofy, almost cartoon-like voice and sometimes bizarre lyrics set him apart, so much so that you might expect the guy to smash a guitar on stage.

In the past, his band Ben Folds Five presented songs that could be as comparable to Joel’s She’s Always A Woman To Me or even Benny And The Jets but always with his unique spin. His newer material saw him drawing from a more luscious set of instruments than just drums, bass and piano. The song You Don’t Know Me with Regina Sepktor was even punched out on an MPC sampler.

‘I am a rapper, I got some rap cred and I play German polkas, too. I am somewhere between the two,’ Ben jokes when asked about his apparent preoccupation with the word ‘bitch’ (see his Dr Dre cover, Song For The Dumped or Way To Normal’s The Bitch Went Nuts).

The bio clears up all of the supposed misogyny, but surely a kooky character like Folds is often misinterpreted.

‘Some people do (think it’s misogynist), but I wouldn’t use that as an opportunity to attack their intellect. I would think you would understand that. I like to stir the pot and put things out there that could be misunderstood, so I can’t get upset about it,’ he says. ‘If anyone does think I am misogynist all I want to do is point out that my manager and booking agent are women.’

And when did this misunderstanding start for Ben?

‘EVER SINCE I HAD THOSE BITCHES WORKING FOR ME!’ He jokes, genuinely off-the-cuff and delivered with quite delightful timing.

‘I have been misunderstood since a song I wrote when I was nine years old which you can either take as you being a failure. So you can take that as though, songs need to be written explicitly for people to understand or that songs are almost performance art and the art isn’t complete until the cycle is complete and they have reacted to it, like Andy Kauffman did in the 70s or Borat – I kinda like something in between.’

‘Sometimes I think it is fun to fuck with perception. Like when I wrote Bitch Went Nuts, I wrote another version and put it up on Myspace and the lyrics were about a republican golfer who is trying to make partner at his law firm and his date has gotten drunk and ruined his chances by talking about all of her liberal views. People started posting ‘I am a vegetarian, I am woman and I am deeply offended.’

Ben is a vegetarian, he is not a woman but he is offended!

With a little help from an outside producer, Ben wrestled through a long divorce and completed Way To Normal. As much as they were Ben’s songs, it was still very much a collaborative effort.

‘The collaboration was that he encouraged me to exaggerate, to not only explain the joke (in the meaning behind the songs) but be economical and efficient and creative about what we wanted to do,’ he says. ‘A few notable times he created the arrangement – in Frown Song I am scared if this sounding like a lame version of a Beatles song, I wanted it to go in another direction. Other times he just said ‘you guys are playing too many notes’.’

Explaining the joint or the poignancy to his words is probably something all song writers wish they were exempt from. Whilst Folds is a great interview subject and charming and all that, he thanks me for ‘not going there with Brick and Brainwascht. Explaining himself, he feels, has already been done.

‘I feel like I do it when I write the songs. We’re all guilty of being fascinated with the personality and the autobiography, like who’s dating who and being interested in public failure. People like to know that someone has faults. I just like to get across the song and then run – throw it like a grenade. With Brick we moved so closely between the writing, recording and releasing, I probably would have taken it out if I had a chance to make it stop.’

It’s that sort of Fold’s magic that the movie studios love although most of Folds’ best work for films has landed on the cutting room floor.

‘The song Lucky Us was for a movie, a nerd kissing scene where I thought they were taking a risk on this scene with this long 360 degree camera angle, I knew it had emotional legs, but the scene was cut from the movie, so when I used it on my album people grasped for context but the movie wasn’t there so people wanted to know what it was about.’

Whilst he has always had interest from the production houses in his work he feels his lyrics get in the way of big scenes.

‘They don’t want on the nose lyrics and some of mine get very specific, like Hiroshima, that would ruin a scene, unless it’s about a guy falling off stage. They want someone saying ‘come on, back that ass,’ he joke again, dryly.

As the piano man of our generation, Folds feels comfortable and does not wishing to be swinging an axe on stage as songs like Rocking The Suburbs might have us believe. And, surprisingly enough, he doesn’t mind the comparisons.

‘I am bound to that part of the stage, I think I had a guitar it’s kinda weird standing there. You can pull a rock step but I feel like I am just there to pay piano. The performance is all manners. I like to push the songs by making them compete with the performance. If the performance is winning then that keeps me on my toes about the song writing. In Ben Folds Five we used to really fuck with the songs and do different versions of them.’

‘There is a public perception of piano man, it is well founded, as rap is becoming, hip hop is an institution, you can’t avoid that – trying to avoid that is probably not cool. I want to draw the line in personality or where I am coming from with my song writing, which should be obvious from the first five lines that it is not Jerry Lee Lewis or Elton John.’

Put simply, Folds says he’s just ‘one of those guys who use ‘izzle’ in everything I say.’

I Love Rap

Big thanks to everyone who came out last night

New Mix

Enjoy

http://www.mixcloud.com/huwston/huwston-dj-set-18th-may/

Let’S Celebrate By James Pants

Drama Around The Corner By Andres

Sun Goddess By Mr Beatnick

Party Machine (Prince Language Remix) By Bruce Haack

Computer Love By Dj Spinna

Jasmine (Demo) By Jai Paul

Can We Pretend By Trus Me

It’s Alright Dub By Daniel Kyo

Willing (Alkalino Edit) By Gil Scott-Heron

Safety Hertz By Sam Irl

Let’s Groove On By Soul Clap

Thanks By Seven Davis Junior

Naked Eye (Propellerheads Remix) By Luscious Jackson

Unsigned Hype By Widows

Sweet Talk By Spank Rock

Boom Blast (Sticky Remix) By Wiley

Shelter (C.R.S.T Remix) By The Xx

Margeaux Part 1 By Kähn

You’ve Got The Love By The Xx

Spirits Up Above (Simbad Remix) By Jose James

I Feel Love By Donna Summer

RIP MCA 4/5/12

It’s so sad to hear of MCA’s passing. It’s terrible when anyone dies and when it’s someone who’s touched you, it really reminds you the importance of things like health and family and doing what’s right. MCA seemed to be someone who reconciled his good and bad self, after all this is the guy who’s band’s debut record was reported to originally be titled Don’t Be A Faggot (read here) but then he went on to encourage hundreds of thousands of people to get down in the name of the liberation of Tibet. Thoughts are with his family and friends. Way too soon.

Style Wars: Henry Chalfont Interview

Henry Chalfont – Style Wars Interview by Huwston

For a crash course in hip hop history, those in the know will direct you towards Style Wars. First aired in 1984, the seminal documentary captures New York City at a time when graffiti is re-imagining the metropolis and bold new sounds fill the streets. Now the film, directed by Tony Silver, has been immortalised on a deluxe double DVD. 3D’s Huwston speaks to influential photographer and co-producer of style wars Henry Chalfant about where it all began.

It would be hard to argue against the case that hip hop has been the last significant art form, movement or culture in the last few decades. Approaching the thirtieth anniversary since its inception, the all-encompassing movement is most simply broken down to the four elements of DJing, MCing, Breaking and Graffiti. It’s not till I get Henry Chalfant on the phone that I realise I’m speaking someone who produced one of the first documents covering the phenomenon as it was emerging.

That eerily calming voice that travels down the phone line has been sampled in numerous turntablist tracks (The Herbaliser’s Wall Crawling Giant Insect Breaks is one) and, waking up late for the interview, I’m transported to the world’s sickest club – where electro kids, punk rockers and b-boys are getting down. Originally re-issued in 2003, Style Wars looks at the nature of graffiti art, particularly its outlaw status in the art world.

“What we did was part of that movement of the emergence of hip hop,” says Chalfant. “I’ve noticed there has been a growth of interest in old school and I’m particularly aware of it in the art form as opposed to in music. I’ve noticed, for instance, graffiti writers in France who have been very active lately on their train systems. They are painting in a style which is obviously inspired by really old school seventies style.”

It’s no surprise then that the French seem to again be leading a cultural wave of exciting, yet sometimes disposable, club music, art and fashion (Busy P and Ed Banger stand up). The country seems to fight its love of all things American, reappropriate it for Europe and the rest of the world to ultimately create something more inviting and successful.

“Hip hop originated from the media, which carried these new art forms,” Chalfant says. He references Jeff Chang’s book Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop as an important guide in retracing the steps of the genre. Whilst he was a part of the first ever project to document the visual aspect of the culture, Chalfant says that a lot of original graffiti writers have released their own original photographs. They too have gone on to get the props they deserve, some using Style Wars as their platform. However, this success would take years to reach them.

“The exciting thing about that time was you had people who had been isolated in marginal areas, plus a vital downtown art and music scene in New York. There began to be venues where people would get together on the Lower East Side, places like Fun Gallery and One Two. Those were places where all of these people were practicing these art forms and influencing one another. It was largely fun before a lot of commercial interests became really influential.”

Chalfant muses that it’s no bad thing for people to make money from their art. Indeed, it seems the plight of the visual artist to not receive recognition for their work until it’s too late.

‘We tried to gain interest from commercial interests.

Obvious places to go were Coca Cola and McDonalds, but they weren’t interested until much later, in the Nineties. It was disappointing and then it became kind of creepy the way they were really exploiting it to the hilt. People who were originally inventing this art form, their younger brothers and sisters became the target of this marketing. Something that started off as a rebellious anti-authoritarian art form was now being exploited for money.” Maintaining the spirit of politics, Chalfant goes on to draw even creepier parallels to how hip hop is used in mass market situations today.

“In the current situation of the war, because it’s so unpopular the government has resorted to using rap music to try to attract teenagers. You see it all the time at street fairs and concerts where they blast the music out of their humvees and SUVs, and the kids are drawn in like flies.” With Nas proclaiming the death of hip hop, there really is no better time for the re-release of this important historical document.

“Teenagers then who are 40 now know about Style Wars, but if you ask today’s teenagers about Grandmaster Caz or the Cold Crush Brothers they don’t know who you’re talking about. Then you ask them what they listen to and they say 50 Cent. They have no sense of history.”

Chalfant says he’s glad the doco is back in distribution because they get a sense of the history of the genre and culture. So how much has it really changed?

“There’s no getting away from traditions that hold true in marginal neighbourhoods in New York. It’s getting rougher now. From 1985 onwards, the drug scene has been very destructive to hip hop in general and that hasn’t really gone away. The streets are in the grip of gangs – who have been influenced by gangsta rap.”

Henry Chalfant continues to name check France as a country that’s pushing things forward. He says the high art world in the US has been reluctant to acknowledge graffiti as a real phenomenon. “The Museum of Modern Art had a show a few years ago called High Low, where graffiti was supposed to be a low art form that had influenced people doing high art,” he notes.

In closing, Chalfant says, “Style Wars was a life-changing project, along with my book Subway Art. These two projects had their feet planted in the original subculture of hip hop. In a way, hip hop led me to becoming a documentary filmmaker – not the other way around.

“What I have discovered is that with my involvement for so long – and I’ve never been away from it – I’ve maintained a contact with friends of the time. Now I have the art ties. It’s important it exists and that other people can access it. I don’t take pictures of graffiti now. Everyone documents their own work now, and we’re not seeing everything for the first time.”