Museum Records
You don't need to look across the pond to find quality underground instrumental hip hop... M-XL talks to Brighton's Contortionist and Third Party about their new eps and their decidedly laid-back approach.
It's a laid back, sunny afternoon, the sort that really ought to be spent outside a café with the paper, or sitting on the beach with a bevvy and a bun. Yet Third Party and the Contortionist (complete with a bag of several identical pairs of children's shoes!?!) amble into the record-filled room, reluctantly ready to submit themselves to the interview process to promote the most recent releases on their label, Museum. Not that this is a promotional schedule to rival that of superstar hip hop producers – these two are publicity-shy and modest about what they do, guys who started a record label and forgot to tell anyone. By no means underachievers, they're more the sort who hide their light and get on quietly with the job at hand.
Third party, aka Ant, is the more talkative of the two this afternoon, and he sketches out a history of Museum Records. founded a couple of years now, it is home to a close-knit group of leftfield instrumental hip hop producers that also includes Art & Craft, Keno 1 and The Hermit (of which the latter two also record for Tru Thoughts, under the monikers Natural Self and Nostalgia 77). Though now based in Sloth Angeles, East Sussex (Brighton), it is actually Oxford local radio, and an underground hip hop show called Boombox, that saw them all come together in the mid to late nineties. an unlikely start, perhaps, but it was the crucible that forged the talents of other luminaries like Dave Laub (founder of the now defunct Wordplay Records), Ben 'Mixologist' Geffen and Kid Fury. It was the sort of place where a bunch of kids could get away with playing hardcore beats and rhymes without being too professional about it. In fact, the crew's ramshackle styles are now the stuff of legend. "It kind of blows me away that anyone ever listened to that show, man," says Third Party, "We were just completely under the impression that no-one was listening". On hearing that this Bear had tuned in in his youth, Contortionist asks "why didn't you phone in? You could have won some fucking stuff, you could have met EPMD!" No-one entered that particular competition and, surprise surprise, they both ended up winning and claiming the prize for themselves. "Even if we had got any other entries, we were going to win anyway, that was the cruel irony, that it was rigged in the first place," explains Third Party.
And that is Museum in a microcosm: impeccable credentials, yet they seem to have difficulty getting their message out and sharing the love. Boombox was the seed from which it all sprouted, a fertile atmosphere in which a lot of people were around doing different things, involved in different aspects of the music. Gradually the whole crew moved from DJing towards producing, and away from the MC-oriented American hip hop they'd all been weaned on. That said, it still the core of the museum sound, if indeed it's possible to talk about a coherent label ethic: "Museum's pretty varied in output," says Third Party, "but what ties it together is that we all come from roughly the same school of hip hop, in terms of the kind of attitude we have towards it, always a more alternative kind of thing, but it's manifested in strange ways. Hermit's gone fully into free jazz, whereas I – coming from the same angle – have gone fully into mid 60s teen garage bands, which kind of shows how far we've drifted." This is fully in evidence in Third Party's new EP, Dressed Rehearsal, a baroquely illustrated homage to 'all the girls who have ever watched me from afar', as the sleevenotes make clear. This wistful quality fuses with the innocence of 60s pop and psychedelic elements to create collages of spoken word samples, and jazz-filtered beats, a concoction that drifts in and out of different ideas, a mushroom-fuelled take on the art of hip hop beatmaking that really should be listened to from start to finish to be fully appreciated.
It was inevitable that once individual influences showed through, the music would take a turn away from the American model: "We kept the hip hop kind of thing, as the core of the sound, but just tried to make something more personal, more of a need to document how you feel about something than just making a record that fit neatly into a genre or a scene..." The room gradually grows heavy with smoke and, after a fashion, Ant continues: "There's not much mileage in aspiring or pretending to be something you're not, but you can definitely enjoy different atmospheres... I love reading Bukowski for example, or Fante, and even if I don't completely relate to these alcoholic deadbeat characters from LA., dirt poor, living in shacks, there's still the underlying feeling of what they're doing... The style only goes so far. when you really get into the spirit of something there's not to my mind a great difference between a Bukowski poem, a hip hop record, or a Dali painting, not really, not in the emotional intention, what drives it underneath."
This idea that disparate influences can share something fundamental is integral to the idea of museum. Each artist is a curator, selecting and ordering found objects, dusting off long-forgotten fragments and ordering them in their own particular fashion, creating a whole out of unlikely parts. "Samples can come from absolutely anywhere," says Contortionist. "A lot of producers have this cratedigging ethic where it has to come from specific library records, but I don't think that's the point of it all... I take stuff from rock, 60s records, 80s records, anything. Contortionist's tunes on his new EP, Broken Notes, are more discrete entities than those on Dressed Rehearsal, with beefy, intense drum loops driving each track forward, and more upfront, rocky instrumentation, closer in attitude to the alternative hip hop produced by labels like Anticon, which both producers admire. But in the way they combine the raw and the organic, with an experimental approach to structure and sampling, both are reminiscent of sonic sum, the David Lynch sampling, esoteric rhyme collective from across the pond.
Most hip hop artists prefer to include some MC tracks on their releases. do they have any plans? "I always wanted to get MCs involved," says Contortionist, but actually now i've got really into the whole instrumental thing. It gives you a lot more freedom to switch the format around. I get more excited now with new instrumental albums than with new vocal ones, because it's directly comparable with what I'm doing. I just find them inspirational." They namecheck producers such as Blockhead and RJD2, but there's no particular affiliation to their styles, nor a copycat mentality. They also feel disconnected from any British 'scene' as such, one that seems to have become more formulaic as a whole in the past year or two, contrary to the direction they are each taking; mainstream British hip hop seems to have an aversion to instrumental productions, perhaps because the big beat/trip hop double fiasco and the wallpaper music that Grand Central produces leave a bad taste in everyone's mouths. Groups such as aspects and Def Tex are, however, given a seal of approval, but in general the pair would like to see more lyrical risk taking and flow experimentation à la Sage Francis, and MF Doom before they could become too enthusiastic about what's going on.
So what are the next moves? "We're just taking it step by step at the moment, trying to rebuild Museum into something that's much more DIY, just get a little system going," says Third Party, "We used to be based in an outside office and I think we were a little ambitious in some respects, making plans and spending money that wasn't coming to much. So I think we need to just get it out there a bit more, in steps, think of a few more marketing ideas... Hermit's got an EP coming soon, and Keno 1 has got plans to do more stuff." The tape recorder is turned off, another tree wrapped up and the interview well and truly disintegrates into an easy conversation, a relaxed chat. Both seem happier to know that their words won't be reported. But, as the Museum spirit leads them down their own furrows, their intricately crafted and beautifully packaged music deserves a wider audience.
Third party, aka Ant, is the more talkative of the two this afternoon, and he sketches out a history of Museum Records. founded a couple of years now, it is home to a close-knit group of leftfield instrumental hip hop producers that also includes Art & Craft, Keno 1 and The Hermit (of which the latter two also record for Tru Thoughts, under the monikers Natural Self and Nostalgia 77). Though now based in Sloth Angeles, East Sussex (Brighton), it is actually Oxford local radio, and an underground hip hop show called Boombox, that saw them all come together in the mid to late nineties. an unlikely start, perhaps, but it was the crucible that forged the talents of other luminaries like Dave Laub (founder of the now defunct Wordplay Records), Ben 'Mixologist' Geffen and Kid Fury. It was the sort of place where a bunch of kids could get away with playing hardcore beats and rhymes without being too professional about it. In fact, the crew's ramshackle styles are now the stuff of legend. "It kind of blows me away that anyone ever listened to that show, man," says Third Party, "We were just completely under the impression that no-one was listening". On hearing that this Bear had tuned in in his youth, Contortionist asks "why didn't you phone in? You could have won some fucking stuff, you could have met EPMD!" No-one entered that particular competition and, surprise surprise, they both ended up winning and claiming the prize for themselves. "Even if we had got any other entries, we were going to win anyway, that was the cruel irony, that it was rigged in the first place," explains Third Party.
And that is Museum in a microcosm: impeccable credentials, yet they seem to have difficulty getting their message out and sharing the love. Boombox was the seed from which it all sprouted, a fertile atmosphere in which a lot of people were around doing different things, involved in different aspects of the music. Gradually the whole crew moved from DJing towards producing, and away from the MC-oriented American hip hop they'd all been weaned on. That said, it still the core of the museum sound, if indeed it's possible to talk about a coherent label ethic: "Museum's pretty varied in output," says Third Party, "but what ties it together is that we all come from roughly the same school of hip hop, in terms of the kind of attitude we have towards it, always a more alternative kind of thing, but it's manifested in strange ways. Hermit's gone fully into free jazz, whereas I – coming from the same angle – have gone fully into mid 60s teen garage bands, which kind of shows how far we've drifted." This is fully in evidence in Third Party's new EP, Dressed Rehearsal, a baroquely illustrated homage to 'all the girls who have ever watched me from afar', as the sleevenotes make clear. This wistful quality fuses with the innocence of 60s pop and psychedelic elements to create collages of spoken word samples, and jazz-filtered beats, a concoction that drifts in and out of different ideas, a mushroom-fuelled take on the art of hip hop beatmaking that really should be listened to from start to finish to be fully appreciated.
It was inevitable that once individual influences showed through, the music would take a turn away from the American model: "We kept the hip hop kind of thing, as the core of the sound, but just tried to make something more personal, more of a need to document how you feel about something than just making a record that fit neatly into a genre or a scene..." The room gradually grows heavy with smoke and, after a fashion, Ant continues: "There's not much mileage in aspiring or pretending to be something you're not, but you can definitely enjoy different atmospheres... I love reading Bukowski for example, or Fante, and even if I don't completely relate to these alcoholic deadbeat characters from LA., dirt poor, living in shacks, there's still the underlying feeling of what they're doing... The style only goes so far. when you really get into the spirit of something there's not to my mind a great difference between a Bukowski poem, a hip hop record, or a Dali painting, not really, not in the emotional intention, what drives it underneath."
This idea that disparate influences can share something fundamental is integral to the idea of museum. Each artist is a curator, selecting and ordering found objects, dusting off long-forgotten fragments and ordering them in their own particular fashion, creating a whole out of unlikely parts. "Samples can come from absolutely anywhere," says Contortionist. "A lot of producers have this cratedigging ethic where it has to come from specific library records, but I don't think that's the point of it all... I take stuff from rock, 60s records, 80s records, anything. Contortionist's tunes on his new EP, Broken Notes, are more discrete entities than those on Dressed Rehearsal, with beefy, intense drum loops driving each track forward, and more upfront, rocky instrumentation, closer in attitude to the alternative hip hop produced by labels like Anticon, which both producers admire. But in the way they combine the raw and the organic, with an experimental approach to structure and sampling, both are reminiscent of sonic sum, the David Lynch sampling, esoteric rhyme collective from across the pond.
Most hip hop artists prefer to include some MC tracks on their releases. do they have any plans? "I always wanted to get MCs involved," says Contortionist, but actually now i've got really into the whole instrumental thing. It gives you a lot more freedom to switch the format around. I get more excited now with new instrumental albums than with new vocal ones, because it's directly comparable with what I'm doing. I just find them inspirational." They namecheck producers such as Blockhead and RJD2, but there's no particular affiliation to their styles, nor a copycat mentality. They also feel disconnected from any British 'scene' as such, one that seems to have become more formulaic as a whole in the past year or two, contrary to the direction they are each taking; mainstream British hip hop seems to have an aversion to instrumental productions, perhaps because the big beat/trip hop double fiasco and the wallpaper music that Grand Central produces leave a bad taste in everyone's mouths. Groups such as aspects and Def Tex are, however, given a seal of approval, but in general the pair would like to see more lyrical risk taking and flow experimentation à la Sage Francis, and MF Doom before they could become too enthusiastic about what's going on.
So what are the next moves? "We're just taking it step by step at the moment, trying to rebuild Museum into something that's much more DIY, just get a little system going," says Third Party, "We used to be based in an outside office and I think we were a little ambitious in some respects, making plans and spending money that wasn't coming to much. So I think we need to just get it out there a bit more, in steps, think of a few more marketing ideas... Hermit's got an EP coming soon, and Keno 1 has got plans to do more stuff." The tape recorder is turned off, another tree wrapped up and the interview well and truly disintegrates into an easy conversation, a relaxed chat. Both seem happier to know that their words won't be reported. But, as the Museum spirit leads them down their own furrows, their intricately crafted and beautifully packaged music deserves a wider audience.
