All right, let's get going now if the ball is rolling. Here we go.

Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd. Hope you're doing well. We're here with an exclusive conversation and interview with the one and only West Coast, experimental hip hop, noise, and everything in between trio. They have a new record out via Subpop Records, Dead Channel Sky. A lot of you guys have been enjoying it on the channel, and we're going to talk about that record and anything else that comes up in the conversation. I imagine there will be a lot since it's really been a minute since they released a new record. It's been a minute since we talked as well.

Jonathan, William, and Daveed, clipping. Thank you for coming through. Thank you for taking the time.

Anthony: All right. Let's talk a little lead up to the new album, because obviously, it's been a minute since you guys came out with a record. You gave us a lot of material and a lot of heat with your last album cycles in 2019 and 2020. Obviously, around that same time, we're talking about the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns in full swing and everything. So it was a very unique time for anybody to release music, but especially for you guys, because, again, it was such a big couple of projects. I imagine after such a point in time with all of you, respectively, having a lot going on in your own lives, which was also the case with the previous couple of records, too. There was probably a point of separation or where you guys all needed to focus on your own thing. Past the point of the last two records, at what time and through what point of inspiration did you guys decide to reconvene? What pulled the group back together again to start working on material for this new record?

Jonathan: We never really stopped. We were just slow.

Daveed: I wish it was like, oh, we got to make a record now. It generally takes us four years to make something.

Jonathan: We made the first song for Dead Channel Sky during the sessions for the horror records, which were made really as one project. We thought we were making one record, and then we just realized we had way too much. And we also had way too much for this one, but decided to do it anyway.

Anthony: So not a triple album release this time around. There was no plan on that?

Jonathan: No, but usually what happens is we make a song that doesn't quite fit on whatever project we're working on, and then we save it, and sometimes for a really long time until it comes around, like "Club Down", that was on the horror records. We made that right after finishing CLPPNG. We started making some more songs, most of which ended up on the Wriggle EP, except for "Club Down", which we held on to because we knew we wanted to make a horror record. Our song this time "Run It", which we made during the horror sessions because we were asked to make a song for a video game. Or we weren't asked - we elected ourselves to make a song for a video game.

William: We were invited. Well, the label was invited, and we were on a group.

Jonathan: We were invited to submit a song, and we didn't have one that we felt was appropriate, so we made run it. Okay. And then they were like, let's make a whole record like this. Yeah.

Anthony: So that track actually did end up being a point of inspiration in terms of like, this seems like a direction.

Jonathan: Yeah, totally.

Daveed: Yeah. I think it was one of those things I don't know that we had really considered cyberpunk as a genre for us to dig into before, but in working on that song, it made so much sense. So we were like, oh, we should probably just... now we're thinking about it, we're going to have to run this idea through until we get to the end of it. It's how that always works. Well, now it exists in the world, so we got it. We're going to have to to see what happens.

Anthony: Got it. And that was the game soundtrack at the time that there was the potential inclusion for it?

William: Yeah. We would have never made a song like that except for an invitation to a video game, and we wanted it to sound like a video game song.

Anthony: Got it.

Jonathan: And we sat on it, we liked it. And I remember playing it for friends and friends all being like, Whoa, what is this? This is a cool direction, and you should guys push more here. People who hadn't heard it before but were familiar with the band, so we just show it to people. The reaction was very positive in a way that sometimes showing new music isn't positive.

William: Yeah, that's actually true. I mean, all of our friends are old ravers, so I think it was definitely like, oh, you finally got good.

Daveed: They finally made something for us.

Jonathan: The tempo is not so slow that I can't pay attention.

Anthony: I mean, speaking to that, and also I imagine there's an age demographic there that I probably fit into as well. I mean, it to me, and maybe this isn't the case for a lot of younger people, but at least for me, it read to me as being like something that was inspired by a time when I feel like I was just in high school, maybe going into college. And there was a lot of media around at that time that was like a depiction of the future, the immediate future, the tech utopia or dystopia that we could be immediately entering into in the next 10 years. And was that subconsciously operating on some level through what you guys were doing?

William: No. Very consciously.

Daveed: Very consciously.

William: Absolutely at the top of our minds. I mean, the way we talked about that. Yeah, Jonathan can...

Jonathan: Yeah, the folder for this album on my computer is still called "Hacker Techno" because that's what we were calling the album. We were like, we want to make music that sounds like surfing through the tubes of the Internet.

William: Yeah. I mean, this old fantasy of what the Internet was going to be when they were making these movies about... But before we knew what it was actually going to be like when we were watching Lawn Mower Man and Strange Days.

Anthony: Oh, my fucking God. Lawn Mower Man.

Daveed: Yeah, man.

William: And this idea... Because the album, we say it takes place in 2025, but it's the 2025 that we imagined in 1997, not the one we actually ended up in.

Jonathan: They're very similar.

William: They're largely very similar, but it's just way worse now than the fantasy of it would be. Right? I mean, so that was the way we were talking about it. As a result, all of the inspiration is that when alternative radio in the US decided they needed to find what was coming after grunge, and they hooked on to all these European dance music genres that were already imported American music genres, but got popular in the UK and in Germany and came over here. And all of alt radio was like, electronica is the new thing. And this is what you could... We were trying to imagine what we thought rap was going to sound like in 2025 in 1997. That's the original premise.

Jonathan: I think a lot of the way I approach genre and my taste and the way that I look for synchronicities and connections, I can really credit to those electronica compilation soundtracks, which was really a lot of my first exposure to the electronic music that I love and that was so formative for me. But I had no idea when I was first hearing that stuff as a teenager in the early mid '90s, that there was a difference between techno and house and drum and bass and trip hop, and that those things were genre. To me, it was all electronic music. It was like electronica. I still feel that way, I guess. I still feel like all music is the same. And so we really wanted to make something that felt like a compilation album, like a compilation soundtrack for one of those movies that we had made all the songs for.

William: Yeah. And we even have ideas about each track is by a very different rapper. They're each a different person saying these things in a way that... I mean, always the impersonal novelistic approach is there. But these, I think we had more of an idea of, oh, this is this type of a rapper. This is this type of a rapper in the way that The Saint soundtrack or the Hacker soundtrack has these separate perspectives in each track feels like it's just crammed together.

Anthony: Daveed, speaking to that, in the creation of this record, what characters and perspectives did you find yourself having to write from on all of these tracks? Were you going into every single song with a clear idea, or were maybe the instrumentals inspiring you to be like, oh, this kind of seems like this person or this sort of background?

Daveed: Yeah. I mean, most of the way we work involves, there's usually, some sort of instrumental start to an idea, and then we are all talking about what this is. So by the time I start writing words, we're usually in agreeance on, oh, this is the perspective of this song. So, what was fun for me in the writing was to imagine a world, imagine imagining a future world in the present, and figuring out what are the different pockets of that world that rappers occupy. We've still got hustlers. There's a ton of drug stuff on the album, but future drugs are not current drugs, except they sound like current drugs, but also current is '97. There's that stuff going on. There's also all of these wars happening, but where most people are very disconnected from these wars. Some of these songs are from perspectives of soldiers who are actively in the wars, sending their music back to be part of this compilation because somebody asked them to submit to this thing. And then there's politically anti-war people, there's politically pro-war people, there's computers chiming into it, and there's just all of these different perspectives that existed in this imagined future. Yeah, all submitting one song.

Anthony: It's funny. Somebody in chat was already bring this up, but I think you're already saying this is still happening in its own way. But somebody was like, Where's the story song? Why wasn't there a story on the album? And it's like, well, there's all sorts of stories on the album still. And maybe in some way, I'm sure in your head, all of this is connected because there's a clear concept driving it all together. Is that the connection?

William: There also might be a story song.

Jonathan: There might be a story song.

William: You just haven't found it.

Anthony: Right, exactly. I figured it's probably something that is in there and you really have to think about it. Given how consistently you guys have leaned into that idea up until this point, I don't think it's something you would have completely just abandoned randomly on this new album, especially with it having been so long since it came out. Since you last dropped.

Daveed: Yeah, there could very well be a story song, but you're right in that story series... I don't know. I love the feedback we get from the stories and the way people are putting them together and figuring out all of the connections that are there and the ones that aren't there that maybe are now because I've read them, and I don't know if I made it up or not. That's one of my favorite things that the fans of this band has generated, is the deep digging on that stuff. So, keep digging. I think the album rewards some pretty good digging, I think. So, yeah, there's stuff on there for you to catch. But also, I'm sure any fans who are listening, you will also certainly come up with more things than I did.

William: Yeah. I mean, there are so many things that are on the internet just accepted as canon about some of those songs that we never thought of, that now we're like, yeah, absolutely. That's totally what that is about. Those two people, yeah, they're the same person.

Daveed: Yeah, so keep doing it. It's super helpful when I have to write another story song.

Jonathan: Another thing that's like- You asked if the beats inspired David's words, and something I realized we haven't talked about and that I've forgotten is that actually a bunch of times on this record, we work with the as a way, which I really like doing, and we haven't done in a really long time. We did a little bit of Midcity that way and a little bit of CLPPNG that way, where David would show up having just written to a tempo with no preconception of what the beat would be. And then Bill and I would make something around those words, and we did that a couple of times. Some of the shorter tracks, I think "Go" was written that way, right? And "Madcap", maybe.

Anthony: No, that was our second attempt at a Pan Sonic beat that was sitting around in the folder for a year.

Jonathan: "Madcap" was? Oh, yeah.

Anthony: What kind of beat you said there?

Jonathan: Pan Sonic.

William: The Finnish electronic group Pan Sonic. I mean, that's how we talk about these things. It doesn't sound like a certain thing.

Anthony: Yeah, it reminds you of a certain thing.

William: I mean it doesn't sound anything like Pan Sonic, but our versions of certain artists that we care about, that we were trying to make this fake compilation out of.

Jonathan: The titles change a lot, too, and more so on this record, I think, than any other. Usually, the beat has a name that's evocative to me and Bill, and then Daveed writes to it, and then the name changes, and then we're done. Then the beat is no longer called what it used to be called. It's called the new thing. But on this record, a lot of these songs change titles a lot, and I actually genuinely still have trouble remembering where we landed. I may not.

William: It's funny. Some of these interviews we've been doing, they make a really big deal out of Dead Channel Sky being a reference to William Gibson's Neuromancer. I have to keep reminding myself that we didn't land on that title until the album had been mastered and Ian, who was doing the artwork, needed something to write on the cover. We had 15 titles we were bouncing between. So this idea that somehow we had made a rap retelling of Neuromancer is pretty ridiculous.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's pretty funny. But also that's totally true. That's what we did.

William: It's fine. Yeah. Sure.

Anthony: Well, speaking of some of the points of inspiration or the way that you went about creating some of these tracks, I know you guys are no strangers to performance art and process-based music and stuff like that. I wanted to ask, I'm getting a sense of that off of the degradation interludes on the record. I wanted to ask, what exactly was the way that you created those tracks to make them sound the way that they do? What makes them significant to placements within the album? And was there a certain production or synthesis process that you guys went through to create those sounds and ingrain them into the record?

William: Well, it's actually a composition from the late '80s by a friend of mine, Mark Trail, who composed music for his network computer music group called The Hub. And Bit Panic are all former students of Mark's who formed to continue performing the music Mark wrote for that group. Mark passed away a handful of years ago, but Bit Panic still play his music. And the pieces are all instructions on basically how to send some messages between musicians whose computers are networked together. So the sound is up to the players, but there are various... I mean, in that one, particularly, it's a certain plus strong wave shape that is called a pluck that is sent to everyone's instrument, and they have their own parameters in their own instrument, but they all sound at the same time and degrade at the same rate and at the same time.

Jonathan: Yeah. Everybody had... So along with the members of BitPanic, I inserted myself into that group, and we all had our custom pieces of software, and we performed that live over the Internet across continents because Scott's in Europe. But, yeah the plucks... So everybody has a set of plucks. I forget how many... I made the plucks actually out of David's voice, out of a little voice.

Anthony: Of course you did.

Jonathan: And everybody had those like 110 wave files or whatever they were on their computer. And then we would receive an instruction from the leader computer here, which was Casey Anderson was sending the plucks, and you would get a pluck number, so you would know which pluck you were supposed to pull from, and then a length. So we would play the pluck at that rate to get that length out of it. But we weren't allowed to use any audio from the plucks, only whatever analysis tools we could come up with for pitch and amplitude or whatever data we could pull out of the pluck happening to then drive our own synthesis engine. I think the plucks I made are a lot like, wackier than probably was the original intention in the '80s. They're really all over the place, and calling them plucks is really generous.

William: I don't know. Those guys were pretty wacky in the old days.

Jonathan: Yeah.

William: But yeah, the idea... We've done these things where we faithfully perform a piece of important historical electronic or new concert music on a number of the albums, and rather than close with it...

Daveed: Yeah, most of the albums close with it.

William: We wanted this one to be interludes. I mean, the whole album is also supposed to feel like this early... The density, that's why there's shorter tracks, and is that Paul's Boutique, early De la Soul, sample-heavy density. We were looking for that overwhelming information of that era, the way that... I just remember being a little kid and finding things like Paul's Boutique or Fear of a Black Planet. There's this dense forest with short tracks and weird things and just samples and just this chaos of this collage-like assembly of the album that we were trying to go for. Having the classical piece split up over the album into these bizarre things that interrupt the album was... I'm always looking for what piece could fit the themes of the album in a way. So this being this these very '80s, '90s, very futuristic at the time compositions for how to network. I mean, they were doing this with giant desktop computers in 1985 on local area networks that could only send basically on or off to each other. But this fantasy of this future of what the future of music was going to be. This is always about... This whole album is about old visions of the future, what looked like the future in past. So it's always this... You're seeing through all these eras, like transparencies on top of each other. It's an old composition that at the time was very futuristic, but now updated to... Yeah, it's pretty worldwide web composition that uses the Internet now.

Anthony: Were there any other, I guess, stipulations that came into play, especially when working with some of the collaborators on the record. I mean, maybe some are obvious and on the surface, like the Tia feature, for example. Obviously, what she says and wraps on that track plays so clearly into the overall theme of the song. She's like an essential voice and character within the track. But conversely, you also have guitarist Nels Cline on the record doing a really experimental and strange solo on the album. When going into a crossover like that, was there some idea or narrative or clueing in that you needed to do to be like, well, we're doing this album with this narrative, so your performance needs to adhere to this or do that or whatever?

William: Well, Nels got exactly what was going on because what I said was we wanted to a tribute to those old home recordings of Derek Bailey playing over drum and bass pirate radio. Radio, do you want to do a... Not a Derek impression. I wanted him to sound like Nels, but what would you have played if you found... If you tried to play along with pirate radio, drum and bass, or jungle tracks in the early '90s. I don't think I gave him much instruction at all. I mean, he just knew those recordings and was like, "Yep, got it on it."

Anthony: Was there any explanation that needed to go into, I don't know, for example, the Aesop Rock feature? Because I know he's a pretty typical creative in terms of his own tracks on a lot of his records being very narrative-based and conceptual. It seemed like you guys were very much in lockstep creatively on that one.

Daveed: Yeah. I had texted him and was like, Here's the idea. And he was like, "Yeah, got it." Yeah. I mean, it is such an Aesop Rock type of thing. But I was like, it's like recruitment for a future army, but you're just playing video games, but also the recruitment is about escapism and a return to nature. Imagine mist or something like that. And he was like, "On it. Yeah, love it." And I said back the best verse that's ever been on a clipping. album, I think. It's so fucking good. Jesus.

William: Yeah, I don't know. I just think we make things for people. We don't just go looking for features. So generally, we haven't ever had someone come back to us, ever in our career. I mean, like La Chat and Gangsta Boo, everyone's always just heard it, heard a a bare minimum of "Hey, we want you to do this a thing. This is what the song's about." And everyone's just been like, "Got it. Yup." We've really not had to have a lot of back and forth about any of this stuff that I can think of.

Jonathan: I was going to say our curation of features has gotten better, but it hasn't. It's always been good, I think in pre-clipping. projects, I didn't know how to do this is what I'm thinking of. But many times, just having that person on that track is the thing that's in theme with the whole album. We've just set them up to do what they do. If they do what they do, then it will feel theme-appropriate. That's not to say we don't tell people what album we're making or what thing we're doing. But I think we all expected when we started being able to reach out on CLPPNG, being able to reach out to people we didn't know for features, we expected pushback because the beats... We expected the beats to be too weird. But that's never been a problem.

Daveed: That was, I think, a big eye-opening moment for me early on, because it's always been true for me, but I didn't know that rappers are just like that. I've only worked with who I've worked with. We're so siloed, particularly in rap music, into our particular corners of the genre. But rappers fucking rap, man. Good rappers are good rappers over anything. Also, tend to be we've all... No matter who you are, if you've been doing this for long enough, you've done it over every type of beat there is. There's not really... I used to think, "Oh, this is going to be too weird. We need to create a spine, or we're going to surprise this person." It's never happened. It was a lesson I learned a long time ago around CLPPNG, I was like, oh, right, because Gangsta Boo has been rapping as long as I've been alive. You know what I'm like why would anything surprise her? That's not...

William: She was only four years older than us.

Daveed: No, I just think that because I've been listening to her so much longer.

William: I know. Well, she did her first song, she's 12. She has been rapping a long time, but I'm not-

Anthony: I was just going to say, also rest in peace, one of the GOATs.

William: Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

Jonathan: I do miss recording in person with people. It has moved to a point where all of our that are collected remotely. It used to be that one on an album would be. But on CLPPNG, Cocc Pistol Cree came over to my house. We recorded Gangsta Boo in person. We recorded King T in person. Guce turned his in remotely, but that was it. I don't remember who else is on that record. I think those are the ones. But I do miss that because it was a lot of fun to get to hang out with people that we admire and watch them work because I mean, I think Cree showed up with her verse written, but everybody else heard the track for the first time at the session and wrote their verse on the spot in front of us. That's one of my favorite sessions that I've ever been at or done because he refused to punch in or do anything but complete takes of the entire verse. He wrote on paper in a notebook, and to do overdubs for one word, he would run the whole thing. Every time, he's very much like...

William: Old school.

Jonathan: Yeah. I came from in the '80s. I still work that way. It's still the best way to work. And I love that verse, and his performance was so fucking precise. He would be like, "Oh, I don't like the way I said that one word." Roll the whole thing back. And he would do the whole thing exactly and then change that one thing. And it was amazing. Incredible.

Anthony: Daveed, do you ever hold yourself to a similar standard? It's something I have to wonder, especially given just how intense and speedy and detailed so many of your verses I imagine it's a pace that's difficult to keep up sometimes.

Daveed: Yeah. I did grow up recording like that, too. I was never allowed to punch in. So I still leaned in that direction. And I think I still like... And it also depends on who I'm working with. If I'm doing it by myself, I'll cheat more. Our mixing artist, Steve, if I'm recording at his house, I always have to do the whole thing a thousand times. And I think when I'm doing it with these guys, it's somewhere in the middle. It's like, we'll run it until it's very clear that I can't do a thing properly, and then we'll start punching it.

William: Yeah, it's barely ever... It's almost always a complete take. Almost every verse is a complete take, and what often happens at Steve's is you've done six complete takes that are really good, and then he'll cut two together. That's when it's done. But usually, they're all performed straight through. And honestly, you almost always, I mean, the thing about this crazy about Daveed is the way we generally work, it's harder post-COVID, and we're all in different cities and whatever. But generally, Jonathan and I have written some stuff. Daveed comes over, he goes upstairs because the studio used to be in the downstairs. Everything's moved now. But we would keep working on something downstairs, and he would write to something that we had already made. He would come down, and we would set up the mic, and he would be like, "Hey, I think I wrote something." And he will deliver it pretty much as recorded, straight through once. So the very first time we hear his verse, it sounds like the finished song. He would get through it the first time, almost every time, even if it's imperfect and we wouldn't put it out that way, his first take is always the whole fucking thing. So it's always crazy. We'll just be working on something. He'll come down and be like, "Oh, yeah, I got something." And then Jonathan and I will sit there and hear the song for the first time, just straight out of his mouth, and it'll be that.

Daveed: Yeah, because I'm old. I'm used to working like that. But then the process of recording is important for me. It's important for me to pay attention to and start switching the occasional word up if I really can't get through it, because probably I'm going to have to do this live at some point, and that's a whole different beast. I've become aware as we're recording, okay, this thing is really hard. Is it hard because I just need to learn how to breathe appropriately, or is it hard because I need to change some words in here? And sometimes, give me a second, give me a second, give me a second. Flip a few words around, okay. Because the plosives aren't in the right place or whatever. The weird technicality of fast rapping is a whole thing. But yeah, somewhere looming in the distance is always like, fuck, if anybody likes this song, I'm going to have to do it in front of people. So I got to be ready for that.

Anthony: One thing about this record that your rapping hit me. I was like, man, you guys really stood out, especially from a rap perspective, when you first broke with your early stuff. And I feel like with now 10 plus years of rap evolution and history having happened since then, I feel like what you do stands out even more. It feels like there's even less to compare it to in terms of what you guys are doing flow-wise and lyrically, too. At this point, especially, do you feel like you're the torchbearer for something that is just continuing to go out like the dinosaurs or something right now in terms of your process and your style?

Daveed: I don't know. Yeah. I'd be like, we just can only... This is the only way the three of us know how to work. It is what it is. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to work in some other way. Sometimes I look at what the kids are doing, I'm like, Man, they're having so much fun. Making rap songs is so fucking hard. Maybe it shouldn't be this hard. But it's also... This is the way we work, and it's so rewarding. When it feels good, it feels really good. I think the reason we're still doing it is there's not really a high like it. When you finish a song and it feels like the thing you were trying to make. I've said this before about this band because I make music in other contexts, too, less and less these days. But this is the only project where I've ever set out to do something, and then we do it. We're like, we're going to make this thing, and what finishes is what we said we were going to make. Maybe it's not exactly how we thought it was going to sound, which is so different than the mode of rapping, the other ways that I rap where it's like, we're just throwing verses out there, we're going to see what happens. It's like, no, this is so focused. And so the reward when the song is finished is incredible because that's not a lot of things in life that work that way, actually, where you're like, hey, I want to do this, and then you do it. It really doesn't happen that often. I don't know, not in my life. There's a lot of happenstance and falling into things. This was cool also, but it's not what I thought I was making. It was the only band where I'm like, we think of a thing, and then we make the thing.

Jonathan: Bill and I always used to say, I feel like I remember us saying this, right? I certainly used to say this, but I think you did, too. I would be like, "Well, I don't like making music, but I like having made music." I think I've come to a point now where I actually really like making music because otherwise, that's fucking unsustainable. You can't live your life doing a thing you hate every day. So I found a way to really enjoy the process in a way that I used to be very product-oriented, and I'm hopefully now in between. But this band is definitely goal-oriented in that way. It's like we do set out to do a very specific thing, and don't stop until that succeeded, until we've gotten there.

Anthony: Speak to that a little bit deeper, if you could, because I feel like this is an important point to make in the current content and creative paradigm, because I feel like with more and more prevalence of AI art, which we've been seeing on social media a lot lately, and stuff I've covered on the internet, these AI music generation engines, which are being pitched by tech bro CEOs who are like, "Man, making music is really fucking lame, and it It sucks. And everyone hates making music, which is why my product is great, because it takes all the brainpower and everything that's hard about making music out of it, and you can just click a few buttons and then say, I made a song." The musicians who I know and appreciate, those things that a lot of people say are hard or the worst, they actually enjoy that process, and they enjoy the technical stuff, and they love assembling things, and they love putting things together. But still, there is a difficulty to it. There's a learning curve. It can be a struggle. Despite those hard moments that you were just speaking of, and maybe something beyond just the accomplishment of having finished a thing, what else continues to drive you to that process and continues to keep your nose to what you're doing, even though there may be obstacles and humps along the journey.

Daveed: Yeah. I mean, of course, you love it. The thing you're talking about is so insane to me. Do anything else then if you don't like making music.

Jonathan: There's too many people making music already.

Daveed: That's awesome. Do something else. It's hard, but all we have is the process if you make it. I guess music is a little different because we'll go out and perform it, too. But that's another process thing. Once the album is done, I don't listen to it anymore. Except when I have to learn the song to perform it. My experience of anything that I make, this is true of our music is true of movies and whatever else I make, too. My experience of it is just the grind of it. It's just the actual creative phase. Once it's released, that's for everybody else. You really do have to love this part. Like I said, there's not anything like it. And when you devote enough time to it, you do start looking for ways to challenge yourself. You want to make it harder and better and different, just different. What can I do that I haven't done before? When you talk about, particularly, cadence and flows and stuff and the speed, I push myself in a lot of different ways. What I loved about the process of this album, I think for me, just from a writer's side, is I think there's a bunch of things on this record I had never done before, lyrically. Some of my favorite lyrics of all time are on here, but some cadences I had never tried before. There's ways and modes of storytelling I hadn't done before. It's cool to be doing something for this long and to still find new ways to do it. That's amazing to me.

William: Yeah, I mean, I think the whole question of the AI music generation is really interesting for me, for us, because as a group, whose central premise is this utterly de-personalized thing. To take Daveed's I, take the I, the self out of it. There is almost this sense that there is this artificial intelligence at work in art. But can you imagine listening to these songs and not thinking there was a light behind the eyes of the person who made it? Art is like a communicative act. I don't appreciate... I think trees are pretty, but I don't appreciate a tree like I do a piece of art the same. You know what I mean? I don't appreciate random assemblages of attractiveness. It's like, I want to see, I want to have a communication with another person. I don't want to just read random words, even if it looks like... I mean, even if it's the most impersonal shit, I will listen to a fucking 30 minutes of just unchanging wall noise, but that's because I know a person made that choice. There's a human on the other end of that who turned those knobs, pushed record, then dubbed it onto a tape and hand folded the J card and sent it to me. I'm not interested in art decoupled from some some sort of solar intelligence or a thought behind it. That's all I care about is that other human at the other end of it. It's communicative that way. It's so repellent to me that the idea is that somehow this product, even if it's good, even if it's a great song generated by AI, I will never care because it's not a person trying to tell me something.

Jonathan: I totally agree with you. But also there is a lot of AI art that I actually quite like, but it's always because it's a human being exploring the edges of what the AI is capable of and pushing it past its comfort zone and making it break and making it fail. And I think that stuff is really interesting. And in those ways, to play devil's advocate a little bit, sometimes I'm just seen AI as like, well, it's another tool in this long list of tools that we have started using to make art that the previous generation has decided was cheating or a shortcut. Basically, everything we use in our studio is something that somebody 20 years older than us would be like, that's cheating.

William: That's cheating.

Jonathan: Use a computer to make music? You record something, and then you only have to do it once. That's cheating. What was his name, the guy who did the laughing or whatever?

William: Who had to record it thousands and thousands of times? Yeah.

Jonathan: He had to just record it thousands of times. According to him- I'm sure he would have preferred to not have to do that. Well, eventually he didn't, and then he didn't make any money.

William: I know. That's true. Yeah, that's a terrible story.

Jonathan: They just took all the money.

Anthony: No, I mean, and I've said this before in my content, there's nothing inherently wrong with it as a tool. It's more like the implementation of it a lot of the time. That's disgusting to create cheaper, more worthless versions of things that we already have, or cut musicians out of work in terms of creating muzak or background stuff to fill playlists with on streaming platforms or train these models on other people's work without permission or giving them any credit or money or anything.

William: Yeah. It's the language around it. It's the music's hard. Why don't you just do this. It's that part. It's the whole culture around it. It's not the tool. The tool doesn't have any... It doesn't have a thought. The tool isn't evil. That's how it's used as evil.

Jonathan: That being said, too, we did use a few, like an AI voice generator a little bit on this record. We played around with them a lot. We built a little voice model out of David and ran a bunch of stuff through it and tried to find, tried to generate stuff for the album. I think the only thing that's left is the very, very last voice that you hear at the end of "Ask What Happened."

William: At the end of the intro.

Jonathan: Oh, yeah, because those are- It's the same thing. Basically, I took a lot of recordings of... I was using the Eleven Labs voice modeler, and you can feed... I've discovered that you can feed it anything. It doesn't have to be a human voice. You can feed it tons of material of some sound and say, "Oh, this is a human voice," and it'll build you a voice model. So I just built, sent it like hours and hours of raw PCM modem recordings and had it build a fake human voice out of that, so that's on the record. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about that I think is interesting, right? That's cool that you can do that.

Anthony: No, no. I always love talking to you guys about some of what goes into these records instrumentally because it seems like even some of the or some of the moments you aren't even necessarily thinking about as deeply as maybe you should are like, oh, yeah, there's this whole insane, crazy process that I went through to create this one single drum hit that you hear at three minutes and 30 seconds. But with that being said, though-

Daveed: There's almost certainly an easier way to do almost everything that you do. But again, it wouldn't communicate the same thing if you did it the easy way.

Anthony: Well, with that being said, I feel like with facts like that and some of what you were saying earlier, I think it was Jonathan just said something about the production within the group genuinely being perceived is weird and unorthodox. Going back even further, you mentioned showing some of the material you were working on with this record, like with some of your old raver friends and them saying, oh, wow, it's good now. Oh, this is great, this is cool. Do you guys feel like, despite all the processes and various experiments that might have went into these songs, do you feel like, inadvertently or inadvertently, in a way you developed maybe your most accessible album this time around? I don't know if it's a conscious deviation away from maybe more of what maybe people generally could perceive as like, oh, this is noise. This is noisy. This is very noisy. Or if it was something else that led to things turning out in the fashion that they did. Was it merely just maybe just going more in the direction of the dance beats? I don't know, but it seems like through one means or another, you guys ended up making a pretty listenable clipping. album. And I mean, obviously, I think they're all pretty listenable. They're all interesting to me. But whenever I've shown people the group in the past, I was like, I don't know so much about that, but it seems like what you've made here can appeal to a wider audience this time around, potentially.

William: I think one of the things that occurred to us, because we had made the one song and then we needed the things that go with it. But one of the things that had occurred to us is that we figured out pretty early on that we couldn't make our live shows feel like how we want our albums to feel, right? Because the albums are really super isolating, listen to you in your bedroom with the lights off and stare at your speaker and fucking feel bad. And no one actually wants that. Nobody wants that. And we do have to go out and play these for people. So our shows are, they're parties. I mean, they're rowdy parties, and it's not exactly like a rave, but it doesn't look all that different from a rave. So I think going into this, we figured out that, Oh, this is also... These are going to be really well-received live tracks no matter what. It's already... They're going to go... There's always tracks we can't really play live that we love that are just not... They just don't feel like they work in a live environment that are some of the more slow, low-key, miserable stuff that we've done in the past. And these ones, we just knew this one's going to mix into this other song that we know goes live.

Daveed: I had this thought, too, that we also, until this year, we hadn't toured in the US in a number of years. So there was also something, I think maybe you are always in conversation with your live show because we're performing even when we're not making music. And so the feedback that I'm getting actually from the music is when we're playing songs. I do remember having conversations like, We haven't had a really aggressive up-tempo, moshy song since "Face", really. You know what I'm saying? So that's "Change the Channel", it was like there were these things that we were talking about in terms of the show, but also our feedback was particularly European in the last four years, too, wadn't been playing in the States. So I don't know, I didn't think about that consciously when we were making this record, but there might be some of that in there, too. There certainly has been some UK and European influence on this record, even without thinking about it. At least for me, because... And also the genres we were mimicking were being returned to us from them stealing from us also. So we're in conversation Anyway, I had that thought earlier today. I was like, well, yeah, we haven't played in the States really at all, but we have been playing overseas quite a bit.

Jonathan: I mean, you said you suggest maybe this is the most pleasant and accessible sound palette that we're using. I think a lot of it because we're really referencing specific electronic music genres, and the signifiers of those are specific sounds that we can't really get away without using. The second you don't use that sound, it's not a reference anymore. We have to have 303, we have to have 909 kick and snare. We have to have some things we'd just… Sometimes we would make songs in the past with conventional drum sounds and then replace them with other sounds later or keep one or something. But certainly an original rule of this band was that we weren't allowed to use drum sounds. And then very few, on Midcity, we immediately break that rule pretty quickly. But on this record, we couldn't do that and have it still feel referential to the things we were trying to be referential to. I like to think that we've gotten to a point in this band where we have enough of an understanding of what the band sounds like that we actually don't need to be as rigid about our palate rules, that we can bend them and still make things that feel like a clipping. song. So, I think a lot of the tracks on this record fall into that category. There are also some really out there sounds on it, too.

Daveed: Yeah, but I do think there... We also talked about the quality of noise and what digital distortion sounds like as opposed to even a sense. Also, it just might be a less aggressive, less... It might be like... Because that... My Zoom just glitched out for a second, and it felt like a lot of the music we have on the record. It just might be stuff we're a little more accustomed to.

Jonathan: I don't know that any of this made it on, but I did a ton of stuff in lockdown, like pinging things back and forth across multiple Zoom instances and making feedback and trying to intentionally choke my internet bandwidth to get-

William: There's some that Fleeger made that I used in one.

Jonathan: That's right. I will say this record doesn't have that usually all of our records have had. This wasn't intentional, we just never thought of it. Usually, we have some really elaborate real world thing that we need to go out and record with microphones that takes fucking forever and is impossible to do, like the drums in "Dream" or the car drive-bys in "Run for Your Life" or burning a piano. Or usually our records have this really obnoxious insurmountable field trip that we have to make to accomplish something. And this one, because of the nature, again, of the things we're trying to reference, really happened in the box and in the studio a lot more than our previous records. There are fewer field recordings on this record.

Anthony: I imagine, though, there had to be some, as you were alluding to earlier, some search, though, in the process of like... Because, again, It seemed like you guys were doing a series of homages in a way to a lot of different styles of electronic music. Did that require a lot of digging and researching into like, oh, this type of song during this time period used this breakbeat or this drum pattern? Are we finding a sample? Are we creating it from scratch? Are we finding or seeking out a certain synthesizer or bass module that made this certain sound at this time period?

Jonathan: Honestly, man, I think Bill and I spend our whole lives already doing that.

William: Honestly, it didn't take a lot of digging. That shit's at the top of our heads.

Anthony: You were built for this moment is what you're saying.

Jonathan: Yeah. I'm trying to think of... I bought the 303 we used for this record. I had a bunch of clones and things, and we iterated through a bunch of clones. We ended up with the Dinsync RE 303 clone, which I decided sounded the best, short of buying a real 303, which is wildly expensive and impossible to do. But a lot of the stuff I already had, I've been collecting since for a long time. Back before it was prohibitive to get things like a real 808 and a real 909, so I have those, and we've used them before, but we got to use them for what they were intended or not intended, but what they became known for.

William: Yeah, because rave music was not what any of those were intended for either. I mean, the 303 was supposed to be like the left hand on your organ. You're supposed to play over that.

Jonathan: It was an amazing print ad of Oscar Peterson on a piano with a 303 next to him.

William: So weird. They so misunderstood what the fuck that thing sounded like.

Daveed: Yeah. There was a lot of... Breakbeats were a thing. Those often are. Every time we've tried to use that, it's a bit of a search to find the right one.

Jonathan: There's only a couple of classic breaks on the album, though. There's some Amens in there, but..

William: And a Think About It.

Jonathan: Yeah. But like, oh, yeah, totally. But a lot of the breakbeats that sound classic are things that we constructed. The breakbeat in "Keep Pushing" that comes for two bars, we made that.

Anthony: I wanted to maybe sidebar for a second and ask you guys something that I've been wondering about due to music trends in the recent year or so. And just ask you guys about the wonderful "Tipsy" cover that you put out a while ago. Since the release of that song, obviously, Shaboozey has had a number one with his own version of that track. I don't know. I'm just going to say explain yourselves. Why didn't your version go number one first? And what is it that you feel like... I mean, I prefer your version. What do you feel like Shaboozey's country version of the song has that yours doesn't, that was the special sauce?

Jonathan: Singing? I don't know.

William: Well, we appreciated learning that Shaboozey is such a big clipping. fan, clearly. That was important. It was real flattinger.

Anthony: Obviously, there's that, too.

Daveed: Yeah. I really like that Shaboozey cover, I have to say. You know what's funny about that "Tipsy" song is, again, we started playing that a bunch in Europe, and they do not have the frame of reference for J-Kwon, it turns out. We started playing both.

Anthony: Which is unfortunate. An L for them culturally, but go on.

Daveed: Yeah, no. But it was just a funny thing we were doing out there. It was fun for us for me to be like, Anybody remember J-Kwon? No? All right.

Anthony: Well, it seems he actually has more cultural capital than we thought.

Daveed: Yeah. No, I'm glad.

William: Well, we did that because that was for the Stereogum. Stereogum was like, they invited a bunch of people to cover a song that came out between 2000 and 2010 or something. I don't remember. But we were like, we don't do covers. That's a silly thing. We're not going to do that until it occurred to me that I think "Tipsy" is maybe one of the great rap songs of that period. Definitely, I mean, he's not exactly a one-hit wonder because there was another single that's also very good. But I think about how hard those fucking drums are in the original all the time. It's like, I mean, that and "Grindin'", and they were like, a year apart are like two of the greatest drum sounds in hip hop history. Just hard as fuck, like banging on, like banging on lunch table beats. Yeah, so we figured we had to do it.

Anthony: No, again, I just had to ask you guys that just because I thought it was such a funny thing.

Daveed: I don't know why we didn't chart higher with that one. I think it's a failure of management, probably.

Anthony: I would put it to management, too.

William: Blame the fact that the B-side is a bunch of field recordings, so from midnight to 6:00 AM in South Central Los Angeles by our friend Christopher. It's all Fleeger's fault.

Daveed: Fleeger's fault.

William: The B side torpedoed us.

Anthony: Yeah, the B side does tend to hold things down. If it's not as good as the A side, that's true.

William: That's brilliant. It's a fucking track.

Jonathan: Common refrain in singles.

Anthony: You guys were talking about the ways that your live shows have manifested in the past and how some of this new material with the tour coming up is going to play into that vibe very well. Is there anything else that you're going to be doing or planning to do to lean into that thrilling raver, I guess, energy-

William: You're doing a great job of pretending you like that shit.

Anthony: Right. Oh, stop, stop, stop. No, I mean, look, this is very nostalgic for me because it really did take me back to that era where I was hearing a lot of that constantly. But still, regardless, is there anything, is there something else that you're going to be planning to do during the live show to lean into that further? I guess, or really make the dystopia come to life for everybody in person?

Daveed: I don't know. The show is just an ever-evolving thing. And when we have new material and start figuring out how to add it in, it sometimes takes us. So we've played a few shows now, and we're figuring out new ways to add it. I don't know. We have a new... We're most of the time touring with a new person also, which is fucking cool. That's actually the biggest change to the show actually is our friend Sharon is playing keys and singing with us often. That has been actually the greatest... The thing that is open that has changed things most is a new energy and sound palette and opportunities to do stuff, even with old material. That's just different than we've done it, but before. I don't know. For me, I had this... The first handful of times we played with her, I had the... It suddenly felt scalable. The show felt scalable in a way it hadn't for me in a long time. There's the thing that we do, and we're very good at it. But I don't know. Now it feels like we could manipulate it to a lot of different venue sizes and conditions that we maybe couldn't have before because it's a little bit more than just this one thing now. So, yeah, I'm excited for the upcoming shows, not necessarily because they're going to be ravier, but because there's a bunch of new information we have now to keep playing with. For us, the shows are like everything else we do. We're constantly tinkering with it and being like, oh, we should try this. We also don't really... Different than most rap shows, it's like these ones don't stop basically, there's not breaks between songs. It's just one continuous mix of music and noise.

Jonathan: We've always done that.

William: Yeah. I mean, that's why I think the new songs stand out less in a live context than as an album because we've always done that where the shows are continuously mixed like a DJ set anyway. And we always play these really hype songs. I don't actually think some of the dancier ones on the new record stand out in a live context. I think the live context makes them make more sense because we don't have to stop and do a section of the new album. They actually pretty much fit right into... I mean, there's an old song on either side of each of them when we do it live, and it all feels like it's one thing. To me, I don't know. You could ask the guys. The kids at the show seem to...

Daveed: So far, so good.

William: So far, so good.

Anthony: All right. I'm going to let you guys go. I'm sure you have a lot to do. I appreciate you coming through and just shedding more light on the album and just everything that went into it because, again, I know you guys are so process oriented and very detail-oriented with everything that you do.

Daveed: Thank you, man.

William: Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much for having us, all of us. Always good to talk to you.

Anthony: All right. Have a good rest of your night. I'm going to try to make it after one of those shows. I want to see. It's been a year since I've seen you guys live.

William: I know. It's been like 10 years.

Anthony: I know.

Daveed: Yeah bro. Let us know. Whichever one you want.

Anthony: I will.

Daveed: Or all of them.

Anthony: Have a good one, guys.

Daveed: All right.