BONAFIDE EXCLUSIVE: PART 1 OF OUR EL-P INTERVIEW DISCUSSING THE MAKING OF WEAREALLGOINGTOBURNINHELL MEGAMIXXX3

After listening to some snippets of the futuristic soundscapes featured on EL-P’s new album Weareallgoingtoburninhell Megamixxx3, I can’t help but feel like Deckard about to interview a replicant. My apparatus is set out on the table. My phone is resting on my trusty old pen and pad and alongside it, my laptop, which is poised ready to record the call I’m about to make, like it was the Bladerunner’s Voight-Kampff test. I dial his number on my mobile, then set it to speaker phone with a bleep, which triggers of the software’s sound wave.  It’s followed by a flat hiss…then the sound wave leaps to life as the phone rings…

As soon as EL-P answers and in a warm and calm voice I hear him apologise that he has to wind up another call on the other line,  I know I’m not talking to a machine or some futuristic freedom fighter but am speaking with a man merely trying to get through his press obligations and not go mad. EL-P is live and direct on the phone from his apartment in Brooklyn. The line crackles but I’m happy that the intense heat that’s fallen upon New York City has eased up enough for him to turn the AC off, relax and face Bonafide’s questioning .

Bonafide:  How’s you doing today?
EL-P:  Good man, I’m glad it’s not like 100 degrees today, which is nice.

Glad to hear it.  So you’re not getting too sick of being couped up doing press?
Nah, it’s aright.  Normally like a week in I start losing my mind.  You’re calling just under the breaking point.  So shoot.

OK man, I guess to kick it off let’s start with your new album. Was this Instrumental album planned, or is it just a collection of unreleased tracks that you had kicking around?
It was both really.  The inception of the record was a collection of random shit, that I had laying around that I had never finished.  So I then took these things and re approached all of them, and basically used them as a basis to produce a new record.  That’s what the theme of these megamixes have always been about, they were a collection of things that no one had ever heard and had never been fully realised, so I would put them together in limited numbers as a treat for the hardcore fans and the people that follow me.

But unlike the first two megamixes, this one has been really treated and I’ve tried to create a real album that’s got some continuity to it, and I actually mixed it (laughs), which I didn’t with the first
two.

Some of the tracks were scraps of things that hadn’t been assigned to anything, or were designed for me to write something to, or they were meant for someone else, and some weren’t meant to be instrumental pieces. So I had to try and recreate them as instrumentals. So I then re-approached all of the tracks and tried to fit them all together, so there’s like three levels of productions on the album.

You’re not exactly a punch line rapper, so did you find you could be more free when you were making this instrumental album?
Obviously it’s just math at the end of the day man.  If you have to worry about writing a song and making a beat it’s harder.  Doing instrumental music is defiantly easier, but at the same time you can’t rely on the outcome but you have different directions, musically. You know you can’t just say, ‘I’m upset’, you know, so it kind off has it’s own challenges.

On the flip side, did you find that you were making beats for this album that you wanted to rhyme over?
No question.

I always struggle with that, you know in the same way that I struggle when I’m producing for other people. When I’m producing for someone else or I’m inspired by someone else I’m a lot freer. I don’t have the same mental block that I have with my own music, and it producers some great results. I sometimes feel like calling someone and saying like ‘sorry man my whole drive crashed’, or ‘you wont believe this but my whole apartment caught fire and the only thing that was damaged was you beat man.’  But, you know I believe in the rule that you need to just believe that you’ll make something dope in the future. But you can’t just hold on to something, because you made something that you like.  But it’s certainly a discipline.

Do you ever feel that you get too close to a project, and hand things over to people and like what they do, or are you like ‘damn I wish I had kept that for myself’
I’m pretty much a control freak.  Anything I do I pretty much see through the whole process to the end. So I really believe in ‘handing over’, and to some degree I think that’s annoying to most people.  But I’m the kind off dude that, if I’m doing a remix for someone, I will literally give them something, then will take it and completely change it, then hand it back to them without telling them. Which is kind of a dick move, but hey?  I can’t help it, I just can’t help it.

But I’ve often fantasised about doing a rap album, where the beats are totally produced by someone else. It would be cool to focus on one thing, and I sometimes think that if I had that kind of arrangement, I’d be putting more records out. But they wouldn’t mean as much to me, to be honest. They wouldn’t feel like a full creative experience to me, and that’s what I’m in it for.

Words: David Farnsworth

Filed under: Bonafide Exclusives, Rap, Uncategorized by J.G.