Articles tagged with ‘Elefant Traks’

• Circus Maximus (Review)

  A review of Unkle Ho’s second LP Circus Maximus published in Music Forum.

  Tags: authenticity, multilingualism, globalisation, Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, multiculturalism, hip-hop and folk music, world music, sampling, Elefant Traks, instrumental hip-hop, production, Press & Media

• Hermitude

  Hermitude are a two-piece instrumental hip-hop crew from the Blue Mountains, with Luke Dubs on keys and Elgusto on beats. They have performed with MCs such as Ozi Batla and Urthboy from The Herd, and Joelistics from TZU. Their style of production – passing old sounds through new technology – is richly layered and complex. This interview, conducted by Tony Mitchell, Nick Keys and Astrid Lorange at the Great Escape Festival in 2006, is a general catch-up before Hermitude headed off to play in Japan, Norway, the UK and the US for the first time.

  Tags: Elefant Traks, instrumental hip-hop, Sydney, Blue Mountains, sampling, Interviews

• Monkey Marc

  Local Noise met with Combat Wombat producer and Lab Rats member Monkey Marc after he had finished running a workshop on altering engines from petrol to vegetable oil at TINA (This is Not Art) festival in Newcastle 2005. Marc spoke about the beginnings of Lab Rats at the Jabiluka protests in 1998, where he met Izzy Brown (Combat Wombat MC and other half of Lab Rats) and how initially the Lab Rats were a traveling sound system that went to the front of protests and blockades, running huge parties with solar- and wind-powered sound system and cinema. Marc talked about the evolution of Lab Rats into a mobile hip-hop, circus, video production and performance workshop that tours to the most remote Indigenous communities in the country. Marc spoke about this work, the idea of cultural preservation and continuation of Indigenous languages, recording songs all across the desert and the issues of mimicking American hip-hop. Marc also talked about the recently released album Unsound $ystem, hip-hop as a form ripe for political expression and being written off as a left-wing extremist hip-hop group by the hip-hop ‘mainstream’.

  Tags: Combat Wombat, Monkey Marc, Lab Rats, community work, eco hip-hop, Indigenous hip-hop, politics, Melbourne, Curse ov Dialect, Elefant Traks, workshops, Interviews

• Pasobionic

  Local Noise spoke to Pasobionic at the Sydney launch of his solo album Empty Beats For Lonely Rappers at the Hopetoun in Surry Hills. In a relatively short interview, the softly-spoken producer talked to us about the origins of the name Pasobionic from his graffiti tag Paso, and getting into hip-hop via graffiti in primary school in the 80s. He also mentioned the marked separation in his life between hip-hop and Islam. He spoke about the diverse sampling practices of Curse ov Dialect, the intricacies of sampling in general and the differences of producing with TZU and Curse. Other points touched upon included his CD duplication business, working with Elefant Traks and instrumental and live hip-hop in Australia.

  Tags: TZU, instrumental hip-hop, DJing, production, Ant Farm Aphids, Elefant Traks, sampling, Melbourne, graffiti, Curse ov Dialect, Pasobionic, Interviews

• The DIY Habitus of Australian Hip-hop: Embodied Histories, Community and Scene

  If habitus is regarded as ‘deep seated generative principles of thought, perception, appreciation, and action’, this ‘fit’ seems eminently applicable to the ‘embodied history’ of hip-hop subcultures and the expression of their ‘objectified history’ in practices such as recording, performing, internet interaction, music journalism, and independent radio and television broadcasting.

  This paper, originally published in Media International Australia, looks at the Australian hip-hop culture in terms of its do-it-yourself ethos, which is, in part, a result of a lack of support from the commerical record labels. Tony Mitchell here discusses the artists, groups and independent labels that have championed this DIY ethos and have built a community of practice outside the mainstream industry.

  Tags: localising hip-hop, community radio, authenticity, independent record labels, Tony Mitchell, Aboriginal language hip-hop, DIY ethos, Pegz, Elefant Traks, Obese, Hilltop Hoods, Koolism, Reason, Indigenous hip-hop, Conference Papers

• The Rappers are Revolting: Mixing Folk, Hip-hop and Politics

  This piece was written in response to an article in The Age which argued that there were no protest songs in contemporary Australian culture. The rebuttal was subsequently published in The Age on August 1, 2006, and discusses the political content in a number of Australian hip-hop groups, including The Herd, TZU and Morganics.

  Tags: hip-hop and folk music, The Herd, protest songs, Pegz, Tony Mitchell, Reason, Morganics, Upshot, Elefant Traks, TZU, eco hip-hop, Press & Media

• The Sun Never Sets (Review)

  An review of The Herd’s third LP The Sun Never Sets by Tony Mitchell, published in Music Forum.

  Tags: Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, multilingualism, protest songs, Elefant Traks, politics, Press & Media

• Unkle Ho

  This 2005 interview with Elefant Traks co-administrator and The Herd producer Unkle Ho took place just after the release of his debut solo album Roads to Roma. Unkle Ho talks about his family history, his travels and its influence on his sampling, his method of music production and running of Elefant Traks in general.

  Tags: production, Unkle Ho, The Herd, instrumental hip-hop, Elefant Traks, sampling, Sydney, Interviews

• Urthboy & Ozi Batla

  Urthboy and Ozi Batla are two of The Herd’s MCs, and members of the Elefant Traks record label. They both have other endeavours, Urthboy with two solo albums so far (Distant Sense of Random Menace, 2004 and The Signal, 2007) and Ozi Batla with his group, Astronomy Class (Exit Strategy, 2006). In this interview, conducted in 2004, Urthboy and Batla talk about the reaction to The Herd’s second album, An Elephant Never Forgets, particularly the lucid, political tracks ‘77%’ and ‘Burn Down the Parliament’. They talked about their discomfort as being pigeonholed as straight-up political rappers, commenting on the innateness of politics in everyday life and the desire to express opinion and to encourage dialogue in art rather than engaging in polemics. They also talked about the way that The Herd and Elefant Traks work as collectives, and the idiosyncrasies of the Australian hip-hop scene: its fans, artists, styles and practices.

  Tags: Ozi Batla, Astronomy Class, hip-hop and folk music, authenticity, Urthboy, The Herd, Sydney, Elefant Traks, politics, Interviews