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..