How we rocked Adelaide

Obligatory cockiness aside, we killed it! It was about two months in the planning, cold emails to countless Adelaide venues, co-starring bands juggled and locked in. Then the long weekend of Ballarat show, to James's in Coburg, final rehearsals and laughs. We're happy to be at the stage of getting a little bored with running the same songs.

Flight from Melbs to Ads Saturday morning, Christmas Pageant not withstanding. 5pm. Show up at the club. Will it be one of those ones where crucial people are completely disorganised? Thank Gosh no it won't. Sound tech Lisa is already there sussing out the situation, what gear have we got to play with? She's showing a genuine interest in our sound rather than the base line apathy we've found in many a sound tech before. Awesome! Dudes are sound checking, hand shakes and back slapping. I leave at about 7 with Matchless Gift and his V High P clique in Lisa's sound, safe hands. Off to James's Mum's for some chops.

9.20 arrive back. The place is empty. Hmmmmm. What can you do? We contemplate not making enough on the door to cover the sound tech as per venue agreement. Whatevs though right?

Matt and crew drift in. Other randoms in the shadows. Something's happening. The prodigious DJ Snair casually starts massaging records upon the altar. Phenomenal cuts. Heads are nodding, more people are drifting in like one of those medieval court performances for an illusive monarch.

Matt and co are on. New shit I haven't heard before. Rhymes are blazing, Snare in his element. Heads nodding harder, a few cheers begin to erupt. It's looking like a good crowd now, earlier concerns no longer exist.

Now it's us. That awkward moment when you have to take control of a room. Will they respond? Ah who gives a shit. YYYEEEAAAAHHHHHSSSS ADELAIDE IN THE HOOOOUUSSE!!!! I boom, and hear some distant but distinct woos of encouragement. We start slamming. I start to realise that we're killing it.

The rhymes are crisp. The beats seem to be making the sound system have a perpetual messy orgasm... As if crying in equal parts pleasure and pain.

I can hear my words clear and honest, riding within the beats like a surfer on continual waves of sound. Then despite the roaring system, and my booming voice, and the harsh acoustics of the small room, I can hear people listening. Intently. My mind is talking like a TV control room director, "okay now cut to second verrrsse aaaaannnd GO!" I try to get those tingles happening in my body, there's emotion in my voice. Innermost stories and thoughts at some points I could almost break down in cathartic tears through the subject matter. But I don't. Just a slight tremor in my voice. Heads nodding, smiles, inquisitive silhouettes at the door of the room as if to say, "hello what's happening in here?"

One of my goals in this performance was to make like a proper emcee, and in doing so, get people to loose or even just loosen their inhibitions. I see this happening as people yell out at the conclusion of certain verses, as if having followed my train of thought
from start to end.

It's over. It's happened. I feel galvanised. I want to do it again, to write tighter verses. It will happen. This is just the start. Word life.

Thoughts on upcoming Adelaide gig

How do I remember all these words? I don't know. I'm like an actor in a stage musical reciting 40 mins of densely packed, physically demanding monologue. Maybe I should have been in stage musicals? Instead I'm in hiphop. That's okay. That's good..

We have a little gig coming up James and I as the mysterious, ambiguous Deep Crossing. But this isn't your usual down the road type affair, for this gig the both of us are travelling back to the place where it all began, our home city of Adelaide.

This has taken considerably more cost (principally in air fare) and preparation than gigs closer to (our current) homes. And there's a real drive in the both of us to make this shit fucking happen for real. We have about 3 untried tunes, about 13 total for this gig (we have more in the bag). Really hot ones. The song writing has gone from more loosely connected poem verses (e.g. Streets Move Gently), to more chorus centred, concept driven tunes (Motivate - a new one, come to the gig and see).

With my rap writing I seem to continually push the limits of what I can physical do in terms of breath control. My new third verse on Deep Inside finishes on about 7 bars of triplets. It pushes my breathing to the limit. Previously tricky breath control tunes are rendered easy! I try to rap with the ipod while I walk the dog, it increases the demand on my breathing as I rap and walk up hills.. fuckin ay. There goes Mr Emery with his little dog, muttering.. that fine line between eccentric and crazy.

But going back to the difference between musical theatre and hip hop. I recently watched The Art of Rap, at James's encouragement (thanks James), which for me was at once thoroughly inspiring, yet kind of demoralising at the same time. Ice T and the grand masters of rap come back to a familiar theme throughout the movie. "What is the difference between a rapper, and an emcee?", T asks.

To summarise. A rapper is one who rhymes words together, kinda like what I do. An emcee can "move a crowd", s/he commands the attention of the room. So for me, I'm trying to get these rhymes deep in my body so they can just be secondary to my challenge of scaring the fuck out of people.. hiphop is self creation. The audience is my canvass.

Watch out Adelaide.

The gig's fb invite here check it

Gig at Babushka Sept 21 - How it went

Another gig at Babushka last night, with the new support of electro experimentalists Juxtpose and The Primary Colour bookending our set (and the debut of newly formed Electric Universe Collective). The techno made for a really awesome complement to our own hiphop styled tunes, and people were diggin it.

I felt good and in the zone on most tunes, although being the end of term for me I felt probably least prepared of any performance I've done in a while. In the end it's not so much forgetting words that can creep in (there may have been a couple of words dropped), but loosing the rhythmic focus and conviction in the rappin. I need to discover a way to keep raps sounding fresh..

Also feeling slightly under prepared makes me more nervous than usual and trying to play it safe in my performance. James did some interesting things which shows how far we've, or really he has come with the live Ableton format. One tune, Visions Aplenty http://soundcloud.com/deep-crossing/visions-aplenty-live, James dropped the track out almost completely at the start of the second verse, leaving just a bass drum and maybe half a snare, the entry is so rhythmically complex, I kinda had to hang for dear life.. it's stuff like that that makes our set interesting, walking a tightrope, head in the mouth of a lion kinda stuff.. it forces you as a rapper to have conviction cause if you don't, then you stuff it up.

My focus on the performance was just to really try and have my internal time feel and groove going strong, and to focus on that. With the focus on time feel rhymes tend to all sound right, and the magic and imagery and stuff then starts to come to the surface.. really looking forward now to jamming with James over the holidays and hopefully coming up with new stuff, and recording/consolidating our established tunes.

Stay tuned.

Gig Sept 21 in B-Rat

Should be a good one, I think the first presented by the newly formed Electric Universe Collective, featuring electronic musicians Primary Colour and Juxtpose (formelry Wu Kush). Babushka (http://evileye.com.au/babushkalounge.com/) is great for sitting back and soaking up the vibes. Hope to see you there!

Less is, less

Rapping is a funny medium. "Rapping" as we know it, as in hiphop, "emceeing", or as some people openly profess, a sort of talentless pontificating with baggy pants, is really just a certain way of writing song lyrics.

I listen to some song lyrics in everyday rock songs, some which are repetitive, but carefully chosen and carefully placed, and which can be super-effective and evocative, and think jeez you guys have it easy.. because rapping in some ways, as an art form doesn't fit my own personal artistic mantra of, "less is more".

A rapper as a bench mark for songs often has to have three verses (16 bars each) of relatively densely packed lyrics, with ingeniously executed rhyme schemes, rhythmic flow, meaningful content, a concisely adhered to concept plus catchy effective choruses and hooks. And people smile condescendingly as if it's a phase young men have to go through.. better that than drinking and causing a ruckus.. rapping is a super-hard discipline to master..

I think a lot of it has to do with the volume of lyrics that are often expected, particularly if you're a solo rapper. I recently watched a Jay-Z documentary "Fade to Black", and was astonished at his unique and incredibly hard-to-emulate process. The documentary showed how Jay-Z would go into a producer's studio, listen to beats until he could no longer resist the urge, go into the booth, and record basically a whole song (three verses with choruses) without using a single piece of paper or pen. It seams that Jay-Z has some sort of.. photographic type memory, which allows him to recall up to some 30 verses at a time, ready to unleash upon unsuspecting beats.

It's the stereo-typing of rapping in this country, as something that wanna-be Australian males do, thinking that they're actually black and of-the-hood.. my rapping doesn't talk about the hood, or homies, or being black (I'm as white as my Cornish immigrant ancestors). But I like using language, and using it in a musical way, and I take my lead from Afro-American rap artists such as Jay-Z, and countless others, because it seems that they have really mastered the art of writing and performing in this style.

I find it very hard to say to people who aren't necessarily in-the-know, that I spent pretty much my whole Saturday locked in my office writing rhymes. It sounds kinda juvenile. But this is what I do, I can't help it. I don't really want to do anything else..