Astronautalis "I've mastered the craft that is dead" - interview

MW: First of all, welcome to Switzerland. How was the concert in Baden? 

Astronautalis: Great, actually. It was super fun. We're still kinda hung over from it... After the concert, they asked me to DJ the afterparty - so I said: "Yeah, why not" and I just played tons of music, and people kept feeding me whisky...

MW: Let's go back - to Your first concert in Poland. My friend was there in Wrocław, he said the venue was packed. How do You remember this concert? Did You expect so many people? 

A: Not at all! I'm a super DIY kind of artist, and my fanbase is built through word of mouth. So the first time I play in a new city, I don't expect anybody to be there, maybe just a handful of people... Like tonight - this is the first time we play in Basel, so there's probably not going to be so many people. And I'm okay with that, it doesn't get me down. 5 people, 30, 50 - doesn't matter, I'll make it. We'll work our asses off, so that more people will come the next time. And our first show in Poland - I didn't know who's gonna be there. And there were a ton of people! It was amazing. I'm looking forward to coming back, when the new album drops. 

MW: Yeah, let's talk about it - You just released a new single, "Sike!" Can You tell us something about it, how did it came together, etc.? 

A: It sorta came together at the last minute. You know, I work on a records in a strange way, not like many people do. I do a lot of planning in advance, I can write a record for years even - then I go to the studio and knock it out very quickly, when a lot of people take several trips... Day here, day there - they need like 10 days to finish the record. Anyway... My producer brought his friend, a synthesizer player Adam Pickrell, who also makes beats. "Let's hear them", I said. In the intro of one of his beats were these synthesizer sirens - which would become the core of "Sike!" beat. I shouted: "Stop! THAT's it right there!" With those sirens, we started building the beat right off the bat. "We need the bass now" - so he started playing some jazzy bass, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind. I put on some Boys Noize track - he's a German techno producer, one of my favorites - a track with this mean, mean bass. Adam laid that bass down, threw some drums and we began building the beat. After that, it all happened fast - all of the verses I had, I intented for another song, but I decided to use them anyway. It all came pretty gnarly! Then we got my friend Reggie Pace - an amazing brass player, he has his own band No BS! Brass Band, he also plays in Bon Iver - add some horns to it. Reggie is a Southern dude like me, he grew up on the same Southern rap - like Trick Daddy - as me. So when I said "I want some Trick Daddy horns on it", he understood right away. "I know exactly what you mean" - he just kept stacking horns, he brought trombones, trumpets,  kept layering and layering, and he came up with this  awesome sound, like Trick Daddy's "Shut Up" - it all came together sooo nicely. Sometimes you work on songs for years, and sometimes they come together amazingly fast - like "Sike!". When we were done, we were like "Holy shit, that song's a monster!" 

MW: October 16th marked the premiere of a new compilation, called "Gazing with Tranquility" - a tribute to Donovan. You've covered his song "Season of the Witch". Was Donovan and his discography a big influence to You? 

A: Yeah, to a degree. My parents played me a lot of music, when I was growing up, so I knew Donovan through them. He was a part of the Bob Dylan, Van Morrison era... And my parents love them, they also had some Donovan music in their collection. But I didn't really know much of his hits. In my mid-twenties I started to listen to Donovan seriously, to learn songwriting - he is such an amazing songwriter. I did this cover, because I've previously worked with the organization "behind" it. It's called Rock the Cause, they do compilations of covers and tributes to artists, and the money from it - they donate to charity. Every year they also do The Beatles tribute, each year they get a new artist. I did a loud, crazy, punk version of "Back in the U.S.S.R."...

MW: Really?! 

A: Yeah, it came out great! There's this guy, a guitarist of the legendary Minneapolis punk rock band The Dillinger Four - his girlfriend is a good friend of mine. One day I was a little drunk and asked him - and her, because she plays bass, she's an amazing shredding guitarist: "I want to cover a Beatles song, but I want to do a punk version of it. Do You wanna put some bass into it?" So I got two legendary punk musicians on my track, just because I got drunk and had the guts to ask...

Going back to the Donovan track - I worked on it with my guitarist Oscar Romero. All I knew was that I wanted to approach it like a "modern rap cover". Using a wavier synthesizers, hard 808 drums - sorta looking at it like a Young Thug song. "Season of the Witch" is a very simple, basic song in structure, it has that really strong dynamic shift. The verses are so sparse and so minimal, when the chorus comes, it hits. Kinda like a modern electronic dance music is right now, with huge dynamic swings and dubstep. Pop rap music right now is similar - Drake for example has whole verses with no drums, so when it comes to chorus, it bangs. I wanted to take this approach. I had a drum sounds, and sort of a basic loop, but we ended up scrapping it altogether. We stayed up all night, drinking whisky, Oscar was playing keys, I played at the board, looping stuff... We finished the music, Oscar went to bed, I did the vocals and mixed it in the morning.

MW: You are a specialist, when it comes to unique covers. A couple of years ago, You even recorded a Wiz Khalifa cover....

A: Yeah, "Black and Yellow"! It was for a podcast called "Radio Lab", they were doing episodes about colors and they had musicians cover songs about colors.  My song didin't make it on the show, which was kind of a bummer, but I decided to put it out anyway. With this topic - songs about colors or with a color in their name - everybody did the obvious ones, like "Paint it Black" or "Yellow Submarine" - it was boring for me. I said: "Fuck it, I'm gonna do Wiz Khalifa's song". It was still hot back then, too. "But I can't just straight up cover <<Black and Yellow>>, I can't rap it" - so I decided to do "the prettiest" version of it I could think of.  I got my friends Rickolus and Erica Burton to play cello and piano and instructed them to do it "slower and as beautiful as we can make it". 

I love it, it's so fun. Doing covers is like a school assignment or something. Trying to think of a creative way to make something different of a known song. When You cover songs of Donovan or Bruce Springsteen - I did a cover of "Seven Angels" a while back - you do songs of geniuses. I'll never try to make it the same way they did - it's stupid. And it's a fool's dream - "oh yeah, I'm gonna make it sound like Donovan, even though I can't even touch his coat-tails".

MW: So, You want to make a tribute, but also add a little twist of Your own... 

A: Yeah. It doesn't make sense to do a Springsteen song just like Springsteen. I'm never gonna be Donovan, I'm never gonna be Springsteen, and certainly I'll never be Wiz Khalifa - so I might as well try to go the opposite way. With "Back in the U.S.S.R." I did the punk rock version with gnarly electronic drums - something different. It makes it much more interesting, because there's no need to it existing without it - The Beatles did it perfectly. 

MW: Speaking of unique experiences - in 2015 You had the chance to perform on some extraordinary stages, like Victoria and Albert Museum or even the Biennale festival in Venice - as the first and only rapper. How did it happen? 

A: It's one of the craziest things ever! I got asked to play the opening show for an arts festival in a little German town called Memmingen. It's a beautiful little mountaintown in southern Germany, at the base of the Alps. There's an art museum there. They did an art show about the sound installations and they asked me in advance, if I want to do one. I never did anything like that, so I said: "Sure, why not, I'll give it a try". I came up with an idea of having people tell me secrets through Snapchat... Kind of a weird sound installation, where You walk up the staircase in an old building, and you hear people's secrets whispered through the speakers... It came out really cool, I'm proud of it. And after that - we played the show. There weren't many fans there, it was more of an "art" crowd, you felt they were there more for the art festival. But in the front there was a middle-aged, black lady, just dancing her ass off. We were amazed: "Who is this lady? She's clearly not a normal fan of ours"... After the show the organiser said: "Hey, I wanna introduce You to one of the other artists of the festival" - and it was her. She was super nice British lady named Sonia Boyce. An insanely talented woman, her works are held in Tate Modern. We talked a minute, she was especially interested about my freestyling. A month after the festival, I got an e-mail from her, She asked me to participate in her project called Exquisite Cacophony - artists, improvisers, each one in a different field. Originally, it was supposed to be three people - me, an opera singer and a singer and performance artist Elaine Mitchener.... But then the opera singer dropped off.

I agreed. She sent me a full breakdown of the project - and at the end she mentions it's a piece for the Biennale. WHAT? I always wanted to go to the Biennale, I love art, my mother is an artist, I grew up around art, so I know, how important Biennale is. Going there... I never thought I might be able to do it. And especially perform there! And then it went from here. Every step we talked about over the course of months, we brainstormed ideas, eventually they flew me over to England. Every step of the way I kept thinking: "OK, this is the point where it's gonna stop". I don't get my hopes up or get super-excited about things, because things so often fall apart... I thought: "This is never gonna happen", and the next thing I know - I'm at the stage of the Biennale. One of the craziest and most unique experiences of my life. It's a different world, a world of fine art - and as a musician I understand it, I respect it, but still  - I'm a  tourist in it. Biennale is a top, a most important art event in the world. Given the nature of my music, I'm never gonna be really famous and rich - that's not my goal. I will never achieve such level of success in my field of music as I've achieved in the field of art that day. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it...

MW: I study history, so I'm particularly interested in Your "historical fiction rap". How'd You get the idea for it? For tracks like "Dmitri Mendeleev", "Thomas Jefferson", or for the EP "The Unfortunate Affair of Mary and Earl"? 

A: I always loved history. At the time, when I first started to seriously make rap music - early 2000s, the peak of the indie scene, when Def Jux, Anticon, Rhymesayers were strong... A lot of artists were basically white kids who went to art schools and were rapping about their feelings. And I don't say it in a disrespectful way, a lot of their music means lot to me - I just looked around me and decided I don't want to be another white kid after art school rapping about his feelings. I sorta went in the other direction and chose not to rap about myself at all. My album "Pomegranate" for example - every song on it was about a moment in history, some small, some large, some totally fictional, some actual and accurate. That was thrilling for me. Taking the elements of history as a framework - I think no one did that before in rap music at that time. History is a great guide, and with music and art you sometimes work with a coded language. You wanna be poetic, you wanna communicate a message, say something interesting - but you also have to make sure that people know what you're talking about. I use the elements of history, mythology, religion, because people know them, they can relate to them. When you use them as alegory, simily, it's easier to communicate complex feelings o a lot of people, because you're tying them to the things they know. There's nothing better than being able to tell the story that lasts forever and if you use that sort of touch ons, it makes it easier for people to understand a universal story that comes through a song. 

 MW: At the very beginning, You were also a battle rapper - You even performed at Scribble Jam... Do You still follow the battle rap scene?

A: It has changed so much. I realize I was kinda naive back then. I've always been a purist on what a freestyle is - it's something you use on the spot, nothing pre-written. But even at Scribble Jam back then there were a lot of guys with pre-written stuff. It was not really talked about, but it wasn't a secret either. Peple knew that, I didn't - I was naive. I've always been an outsider in rap, self-taught and everything.... At Scribble Jam I got my ass handed to me. I was SO nervous. It's the most nerve-wracking thing. If you don't come up with a good line within the first two bars, people start booing. 3000 people, all booing at you... it's a unique experience, it fucks with you. At that time Scribble Jam was the most important battle rap event in the world. Mountain Dew started to have money battles then - but still, Scribble Jam was where you earn your shit... I was invited by Kevin Beacham, who works for Rhymesayers. He heard about me from Mr. Dibbs. I was so young at the time, like 20, I don't think I was old enough to drink... So many of my musical heroes were on stage! And it was crazy, how many of them were nervous. Even the pro guys were nervous as hell, they kept pounding booze. I am very comfortable on stage - but at Scribble Jam I was the most nervous in my entire life. I literally couldn't form a sentence. Basically, I got into the second round, because the guy in front of me was even more nervous than me. After that - I said "I am done battling". I was kinda bored with it anyway. I love it, I love freestyling, I like the idea of being competitive as an art form. But you just get tired of it eventually. Volunteering for a battle, you agree to being called a faggot for like 10 hours...

With that said - I still listen to it, and when I see a battle, I'm thinking: "Man, I can't wait to get back in it". I did it once or twice. Grind Time Now, all that battle rap - it has changed. It became more like a stand-up comedy of sorts. I think there are a lot of people my age or older that look down on GTN, on pre-writtens and stuff. But that shit is difficult, and I have much respect for battle rappers. I was a very good battle rapper in my day, but I could never do what they do on Grind Time Now... There's a mind you have to have for it. Like my homie Cadalack Ron, who's one of the craziest GTN battlers - some of his stuff is so amazingly funny and incredibly creative. 

(Unfortunately - on January 24th Robert Paulson a.k.a. Cadalack Ron has passed away. He was one of the most imaginative, unique and controversial figures in the history of battle rap, and also an accomplished recording artist. Rest in Peace.)

When GTN was at his peak - I obsessed over it, I watched every battle. These dudes are not freestyling, they know who they battle, they have the time to prepare it all. But still - I have much respect for them, I couldn't do that myself. 

You know, people don't really freestyle anymore. I kinda feel like a samurai or something. I got really good at an art form that is gone. I've mastered a craft that is dead. I don't really mind it, I love what I do, but it's not there anymore, there exist very few people that do it the way I do it. 

MW: What's the status of Your projects Jason Feathers and The Four Fists? 

A: Both of these projects are very similar, in a way. Jason Feathers came about like that - Justin [Vernon, of Bon Iver fame] was at my place buying weed from my roommate. Back then, I lived in a filthy, "punk rock" house... We were hanging out, talking about music - about how stressful it is to put out a record. There are fun moments - but mostly, it is really stressful. You try to make a record perfect, so a lot of times it's about meticulously solving problems. "This isn't right, how do I fix it?" It's like solving math in a language You've never even heard of. No rules whatsoever. It's very frustrating. We were talking about it and we were like: "Man, we should just fuck around, do music just for fun". Justin asked: "I got some weird synthesizers and effect processors, wanna come to my house?" He invited over me and also the other guys - S. Carey and Ryan Olson - and that was how Jason Feathers was born. We never thought about putting it out - we just wanted to come and have some fun. First couple of days - we finished it and thought t was awesome. Couple of days later we listen to it again - no, it's not perfect... But it COULD be good. So we started working from there. As for the future - I think we will record some more, but we'e all busy with different projects.

The same with Four Fists. Stef - P.O.S. - and I were working on The Four Fists album, but then he got very sick. He had a kidney failure, he had to have a kidney transplant. He's a very good friend of mine, but we don't see each other that much - we got our own lives, we tour, Stef has two kids... So when he got sick, making music became much less important than just seeing my friend.  Now he's much better, he had a transplant, and also - my record is done, his is pretty close to being done - so I think we'll get back on it. I think fans really want us to finish these records, but we'll take our time. We'll  wait for the right time and right place to put it out... "It will be done when it's done". Le the dragon sleep a while, then we'll wake him up. 

MW: So, in 2016 we can expect Your new album? 

A: Yeah. Man, it feels good to get that record out. It's been done for a while, we just been figuring out the label stuff. We do it super DIY, punk rock-style, my team is very small, just me and my manager Harpoon Larry, my best friend and old roommate, He's the one that convinced me to start touring, he's not a musician, he worked in an office, but quit his job. We started 15 years ago and we've been together ever since. As far as the labels go, this is the best situation we've ever been in. I had some shitty labels, my last one was great, but very small, only 2 people, we outgrew them the second the record came out. They are still our homies, though. It's funny how quickly the things go well sometimes. We start out as a musicians, we play shows - and then, one day, you wake up and realize: "I am a business". My bandmates are my employees. It's not only my thing anymore. I have to make sure they can work and we can live off of this... It's confusing and scary. This year has been all nothing but business. But now, the business stuff is done, 'Sike!" has been released - now it's time to go back to the fun stuff. I'm super excited for this new record, I think it's the best thing I've ever done. It's very different than anything I've ever done. 

MW: I wish You all the success - and see You in Poland!