Last month saw the release of the first full-length album from Blockhead and Aesop Rock, Garbology, after more than two decades of sporadic collaborations. GingerSlim recently caught up with Blockhead on the phone to discuss the making of the new album, as well as the duo’s early days and his recent lockdown project of Unlikely Remixes.
[The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity]
First of all, thanks for speaking with me. How are you doing at the moment?
I’m alright. Can’t complain, you know? I’m home for three days between tour dates, so I’m just relaxing.
I know you said you’ve been busy with promo for the album, has that been pretty hectic?
I mean this week is alright because I’m just hanging out, doing interviews and watching TV. Then I go back out on Friday.
Has it been good getting back into touring?
It’s been weird. Covid has affected the turnout a lot, so the West Coast was good but the East Coast was weird. It’s just different. Well at least for now, because Covid is still very much a thing.
Now, obviously I want to talk about the album you’ve made with Aesop Rock and I was wondering if you still get excited about album releases, or are you at the stage now where you’re happy when it’s done and dusted?
This one feels different. Like with my instrumental stuff, it’s just me and I feel like I’ve got my audience, it’s not going to change. Like they’re either in or they’re out at this stage. But with this one it’s a much bigger platform for me. I haven’t made an album with Aesop in so long and his fanbase is so much bigger than mine, it’s put new eyes on me. So, it’s pretty exciting and nerve-racking at the same time. And there’s a whole section of his fans that never really listened to the older stuff, so they started at Skelethon. So it’s exciting to know that it’s going to get more eyes on it, you know? Or more ears on it…
You guys have been working together for years, since the beginning in fact. Was there ever a desire to make something like this happen sooner?
It never really came up, because the last time we worked together on an album was None Shall Pass and he was living out west by that point. Plus he was always a producer anyway, he basically produced as much as I did on the earlier albums. And he just kinda liked making beats, so he did his own beats and I didn’t really think anything of it. But we never really discussed doing this and it didn’t really happen consciously; we just started making songs over the pandemic and then eventually it was like, “hey we have enough songs to make an album, so let’s do that”. But we didn’t go into this with the intention of making an album, and then all of a sudden, we only needed like four or five more songs to make it happen.
That’s wicked. So in terms of the beats, were they beats you already had in the stash or did you send him a new batch?
A little bit of both. I always have an artillery of beats ready to go and I don’t think I’d started working on my instrumental album yet, but the beats he picked ranged from stuff that I’d just made, to stuff that was maybe two or three years old. It’s always interesting with rappers because you never know what’s going to be picked and what isn’t. And I don’t work with that many people, I’m not like Alchemist who puts out 10 albums with rappers very year. I work with billy woods, I work with Illogic; I put out little one offs here and there… but then Aesop was like, “Hey I haven’t heard any of your beats for 10 years”. Okay, so here’s all of them [laughs]. But I sent him new ones as I was making them too.
Yeah, well it sounds really cohesive considering that was the process.
Yeah, I think it worked out well. But then it’s also the beats he was drawn to, you know?
Yeah, of course. I understand you guys met at university and I think I also read that you were rapping back then too…
I was [laughs].
What prompted you to give that up and focus on production?
Me and my friends would rap, and I’d been doing it since my early teens. It was fun cos I was like this battle rapper, punchline kinda guy. Then I met Aesop in college and it was the first time being in front of someone and being like, oh wait you’re actually good. It put my whole skillset into perspective to see someone who was a naturally gifted rapper. He could freestyle, he could write… and I was quite well versed in hip hop at the time, I was listening to a lot of complex undergound stuff that I couldn’t do. But this was the first person I’d met where I was like, he actually is one of these guys and I’ll always just be this. I was already making beats at the time, so I just shied away from rapping and I never regretted that at all. It was for the best.
So where did the interest in making music originate from?
I always liked production and I started looking for samples before I even had a sampler. I used to make beats on a cassette deck by looping, just recording these sloppy loops. Then I had friends that had samplers and I’d go over and like backseat produce, so give them the samples then they’d do all the button pushing. And then eventually I was like, I should probably do this myself [laughs]. So then I got a sampler when I was 17 or 18 and that was it. As a person with no musical background, who couldn’t play any instruments, it was something I could do and had an ear for. And really that’s all it is for me. I’m 100% ear and intuition. There’s nothing else, I’m not worth anything else [laughs].
Talking about your sampling, because that’s always been a favourite part of your music for me personally, I think Aesop described it in the press blurb as stemming from old and often neglected music. So without giving too much away, where do you source stuff like that? It always sounds pretty obscure.
Well, it’s changed a lot. For years and years I was a dollar bin guy, and that’s well into my career. I’ve never been a digger at all and I’m still not. I don’t care about old records, but what I do like is trying to find original sounding things that haven’t been touched yet, which is getting harder and harder. I think there is a sample or two on this album that after I finished, I realised someone else had used and I was like “Oh. Shit.” [laughs] But nowadays I don’t even sample records anymore, I mostly do e-digging. I have a couple of websites, a couple of premium services where I get digital copies of records from. Because I’m not really trying to buy a rare $200 record that I don’t care about, you know? There’s no point to that, I’m not supporting record collectors. Those greedy record collectors [laughs]. But as far as what I look for, it’s just something that catches my ear that sounds different. Like when I was a guy who would actually go through records, I was always looking for stuff from other countries, stuff from certain eras. Especially stuff that didn’t look like it would make sense with rap, like a meditation record from the 70’s or a klezmer record, something like that.
I know nostalgia is a hell of a drug – or a scam, as you put it on your last album – but is there anything you actually miss from the rap scene during those early days?
I miss when being different was something people strived for. For better or worse, because it created a lot of dumb styles as well, but it was just people trying to be different. And then something happened where people would see something going on and try to imitate it. Not so much in the underground, but also a little bit of that going on. That’s just boring to me. I definitely never made a beat while trying to sound like someone else, even if it did. I hear people recreating other people’s styles, which is cool but it’s also just lazy. There’s an inherent laziness to a lot of artistry these days and I do miss that focus from the old days, of really trying to expand instead of follow.
Yeah, agreed. I seem to remember a little while ago on Twitter, you did a recap of rappers from back in the day who made a few bangers then disappeared. Would you say Chase Phoenix fits in that category? This is more for my own personal interest cos I was a big fan of that album he put out and I know you worked on it.
He never put out anything after that… I’m actually still friends with Chase… but he put one record out on, I think, Battle Axe Records, that I did half the beats on. I went to Highschool with Chase, I’ve known him forever.
Oh, wow okay.
Yeah, and he released that album at the tail end of the indie boom and I think it got lost in the shuffle a little bit. Its biggest pull was having Aesop on it, but I don’t think many people knew about it. But Chase is really good. There are unreleased songs of his that are some of my favourite songs ever, from like ‘96. He was doing stuff that was really ahead of its time, like he was talking about crazy conspiracy stuff way before a lot of these guys were [laughs]. But yeah, Chase is a talented dude and he definitely fits in that category. You just reminded me of him, I was like, shit I should’ve put him in there! [laughs].
I still listen to that album a lot, so I was just interested to hear what he’s up to, but I’m glad to hear he’s alright.
Yeah, he’s working. He’s living life.
I was a big fan of your unlikely remixes series and I was wondering how that first came about? Was it just a product of boredom and then it progressed from there?
Yeah… I mean I’ve done little remixes like that over the years, but this time I was kinda in between things. My album was done; the Aesop album was done but we couldn’t talk about it and so I was just making beats. Then I happened upon some acapellas, so I started playing around with them and the more I did that, the more I was like, I love doing this! It was just so much fun and then I got kind of obsessive with it, where I made 10 of them in a week [laughs]. Because I’d be like, “Oh shit Take on Me has an acapella and Fast Car has one?!”. Those were songs I didn’t consider would have acapellas and then I had a pretty large amount of beats just laying around, which worked with the songs. So I just kinda did that for fun, with no intention of ever selling them – because I can’t – but I thought other people might enjoy them. And some people did, others did not [laughs]. But it was really for my own enjoyment. I would do only that if I could.
So have you ever tried to get involved in remixes like that officially?
I don’t really know how I’d go about doing it. Like calling up Journey, “Hey can I remix Don’t Stop Believing?”.
[laughs] Okay fair, so maybe more modern stuff in other genres…
I don’t get a lot of people coming to me for remixes and the ones that do are rappers, which are like the easiest thing on Earth to do. You don’t have to deal with the key of a song, you just find a beat with drums that work and you’re in. But I like remixing vocal stuff and I don’t listen to a lot of current vocal stuff… I mean I’d love to remix a Fiona Apple song or something, but I don’t know how I’d go about tracking that down.
Ah, well I hope it happens someday.
Yeah, me too.
With that in mind, are you the sort of artist who is always messing about with beats. Like is that how you pass the time when you’re not working officially?
I go through phases. The pandemic was a very prolific time for me because I was bored, I tend to work when I’m bored, or I’m touring. Or if there’s an assignment and someone says you need to do this by then, then I’ll go full steam ahead. But there are times when I won’t touch my stuff for months, I’ll just be like, whatever. And then I’ll get right back into it and make 10 beats in a week. It’s really an arbitrary thing and I don’t really know what dictates it. But boredom definitely inspires me to work. Like my last solo album was me sitting in the house and being like, “Well I guess I should make an album… because it’s time” [laughs]. And then two months later it was done.
So when you’re making those instrumental albums, is there any sort of vision for how you want them to sound, or does it all come about as you’re making them?
It depends. It usually comes about as I’m making it, but Bubble Bath was where I said I’m going to make an album of mellow shit. That was my goal, nothing fast, nothing upbeat about it. And then the next album, Space Werewolves, was going to be the opposite of that, like a more upbeat album. But then as I started going through it, I realised I didn’t want to make an upbeat album. So then I shifted gears and made a more rounded album because it fitted the mood better. Like we’re in a pandemic, shit’s going crazy round here, so it didn’t make sense to make a cheery summer album; which isn’t really my disposition anyway.
Yeah, that makes sense. So the album with Aesop is out, the Space Werewolves album came out in September, you’ve done the tour – what’s next?
There are some unreleased Space Werewolves songs that are going to come out, I think this month, but in terms of what I’m working on next, I don’t really know what I’m going to do. I’ve been talking to billy woods about Free Sweatpants 2 and that’s perhaps the next thing I’ll do, but that takes a lot of organisation, so I think I’m probably just going to chill for a bit. Maybe stockpile some more beats for whatever project is next. I don’t really stop and then the more stuff I have, the easier it is to make that next project.
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Garbology with Aesop Rock is out now via Rhymesayers. Buy or stream it here. Follow Blockhead on Twitter, Instagram and Spotify.
Gingerslim has been a hip-hop fan since 1994 and has written for various blogs and websites since around 2006. During that time he has contributed to The Wire, style43, Think Zebra, Headsknow, Front Magazine and more. His main interests in rap are UK hip-hop and the underground movement in America, with a focus on Rhymesayers Entertainment and the once mighty Def Jux label. He lives in Bristol and has a beard. All other details are sketchy at best. Read his own hip-hop blog and follow him here.