Pictured: Erik recording Babu’s set for RBMA Radio in the Brewery Studios.
A week or two ago I interviewed Babu, a Filipino-American producer and turntablist best known for his work with Dilated Peoples and the Beat Junkies, who was in town to promote his new album Duck Season Vol 3.
The Beat Junkies released some bangin hip hop mixtapes back in the day that me and my friend Emi-chan loved, informed by an understanding of the breakbeat that stretches into hemispheres and rhythm structures from Clyde Stubblefield and David Matthews to Iranian rare grooves. Along with other crate diggers like Cut Chemist and Egon, they’re like some kind of west coast hip hop intelligentsia.
I’ve always found that crew to be impeccably polite and engaging, but with his buddha-like good looks and stoic expression, Babu has always seemed a bit less approachable than the others. And since I hardly possess nerd-level knowledge of rare funk and soul 45s, I asked my workmate Davide (who used to be editor of Juice) to contribute a few questions for my notebook.
Davide’s questions were pretty much the same as the ones I had scribbled down already: general, open-ended queries about how Babu put together the line up of guest features on the album, and how he saw the state of turntablism nowadays.
On-mic Babu turned out to be as classy and professional an interview subject as you could hope for. He spoke about the challenges of being a producer: how if MCs are working with someone like Dre they’ll automatically bring their top game, but the rest of the time you have to challenge them to step to the plate. (You can hear the recording of the interview soon on RBMA Radio.)
Interviewing renowned crate diggers might not be as hard as I thought – OK, it’s not like we talked about the rarest platters from Sao Paulo’s Galerias, but still, Babu didn’t have to be challenged to give thoughtful, entertaining answers. When you have an album to promote, it’s all part of the game, but it was a pleasure all the same.
Is it the Brewery Studios, or is it a sauna? Or both?
“Some people say you can’t hear a difference of one dB. But I’d like to believe that you can.”
Not a statement worth arguing, especially coming from Robin Braun, one half of the Copenhagen duo Owusu and Hannibal, who released that infectious sing-along album on Ubiquity in 2006. That 6th dB-sense allows him to change the tone of his voice within seconds from an MJ-worthy falsetto, to a Shaun Escoffery-esque croon, to (in his words) “a choir of Brazilian orphans.”
Lately this self-taught Danish multi-instrumentalist has been “going through a girl phase.” Not that type of girl phase, dummy. He’s been working on tracks with a number of different female vocalists. No telling yet, if it’ll be made-up Portuguese or Hans Cristian Andersen-inspired lyrics, or something like the intro to their album on Ubiquity, which was about a budgie who went missing and left a suicide note.
One of Robin’s new projects, which he headed back to Copenhagen by train yesterday to start work on, is a soundtrack for a new dogma-style gritty film about teenagers. The Owusu and Hannibal project isn’t on ice though: they’re just branching out, and tying up some loose ends. There’s an older, still unreleased album that will drop soon on a Japanese label as well as a major in Denmark; while Phil ‘Owusu’ is also finishing up some of his own back catalogue.
Lyrics to ‘Monster’ by Owusu and Hannibal:
THE DEVIL’S HERE
I SWEAR HE’S AROUND
HE COCKED THE GUN AND LEFT IT ON THE GROUND
TIED AND GAGGED US ON HIS HIGH IDEALS
YOU BEND YOUR KNEES
I’LL HAVE TO BEND MINE
AND WE’LL WALK TOGETHER TO OUR GRAVES
THAT RACIST HUNG US FROM THE SAME LINE
Even though the Brewery Studios isn’t exactly making a profit yet (Erik mortgaged off our future grandchildren to build the place),
There’s still such a thing as taxes, and hence, it’s worth Erik buying new stuff in order to write off some of that part of the balance sheet.
It’s somehow crazy to think that less than two years ago, that same tax department was banging on our door like the gestapo, before barging in and putting a sticker on Erik’s SP1200. The red sticker meant if he didn’t pay $500 in two weeks, they would come back, take that sampler and make some bad-ass beats of their very own.
Now they are (in a round about way) enabling the purchase of next-level analog recording equipment.
I don’t really get how that works either.
Anyway, the new Studer a820 tape machine is totally awesome and E got it for a way-more-than-reasonable price from a guy in England. It records to 1/2 inch tape. And it’s really pretty to look at.
Splicing the tape is the easy part. Now E is getting into all this mega-tech arcane alignment science. And I thought he was smart for hooking up the old dishwasher that Lars gave us.
Frank is good at telling stories. The Detroit-raised MC has been in town this week, recording tracks with Adlib (Alphabet Zoo), who’s probably Germany’s best hip hop producer, by the way. On Thursday he laid down You Don’t Have to be a Bitch, and even sang the Om’Mas Keith-esque hook. You wouldn’t think he’d be in the mood for singing any lyrics other than those. He’s had a few ‘misunderstandings’ with a local promoter. I guess that’s all part of the fun of touring, even if some MCs are created equal. As Frank put it, Ghost Face Killer doesn’t have to put up this kind of situation (he shared a line up with the Wu Tang Clan in Copenhagen last week). Frank is far from a diva. He’s remarkably calm and cool about it all. At the local Vietnamese he recounted the story of his two-month tour to China. One minute he’s being put up in an apartment in Shanghai, by a club promoter who’s doing a nationwide tour on account of being African-American and fluent in Mandarin, and as a consequence has the mad hook ups. Apartment, driver, all of that. The next, he’s at a festival at the Taiwanese equivalent of Spring Break – sleeping on a mattress that’s so old it crumbles when he touches it. The shower and the toilet are on one surface so instead of stepping in germs, Frank satisfies himself with what he calls a ‘bird bath’ from the sink. He dusts off a little corner of the mattress and curls up to sleep (having spent two days in transit), but is woken by the promoter at midnight to have some Taiwanese jerk chicken (BTW: jerk chicken in Taiwan, WTF? I have to go to Taiwan). Later, when he tries to sleep, a saucer-sized spider appears on the wall, and an ex-army marine with long natty dreads tells him “It ain’t no thing, go to sleep.” It a brave dread who isn’t afraid of a lickle (big) spider crawling upwards. But this arachnid seems to be making it personal. Later, Frank wakes up to find the spider sitting on the ceiling directly above his face. He goes to war with the spider, only to wake to the presence of a lizard. Now he knows whose footprints he had earlier spied on the soap in the bathroom. Luckily the ex-army marine had been sitting there all night, smoking a cigarette, keeping an eye on that damn lizard.
It’s a jungle out there for touring hip hop MCs.
Speaking of stories, support Frank, go cop his records (especially the forthcoming EP with Adlib), and if you are a Dilla fan, check Youtube: Frank ‘n’ Dank are the the protégés of this era’s most influential hip hop producer. So you know, they can really tell it like it was..
