Congi

Illustration: Raphael Achache
 

How did you two meet and start working together?
Gaz: We used to go school together.
Alex: I was the year above Gaz. Back in the day we used to hang around with Luke [Youthoracle] and all his lot when they were in Vendetta. Ninja, who used to make the beats, we used to go round to his.
Gaz: From there we just started making tunes and that. We used to put Cubase on and record loads of random sounds and piece them all together, and we were like “We need to do this more often” cos we had about four tracks that were just sitting there.

What kinda music were you both listening to at the time?
Alex: Dubstep, basically. We took samples from around the house cos we wanted to make some dubstep that was outside the comfort zone.
Gaz: We used to listen to a lot of James Blake and that kind of experimental dubstep. We didn’t want to recreate it, but put our own spin on that. We both knew what we really liked and we had a lot of common interests, but it was definitely the dubstep scene and the 140 scene that got us together, making what we first started to make.
Alex: Gaz was more into grime as a teenager and I was more into hip hop, so we both brought different things to the table.
Gaz: Grime is more electronic and hip hop more sample-based, so we tried to incorporate both.

Did you used to go Blueprint?
Alex: A few times yeah. All them early dances like when Wigflex was starting, Misst, Rubberdub, stuff at the Garvey.

When did the involvement with Mimm start?
Alex: With all those early dances, because we were all about the same age and we’ve been around all them guys for years. We were all friendly with each other and we all knew each other before anything came about. A musical relationship started the first time he booked us for that Tribes night with Cameron.
Gaz: Yeah yeah, with Tesla and My Nu Leng at The Bodega. Around 2012. This wasn’t long after a group of artists and musicians started – the Mimm Collective. The first tune we made as part of that was part of a free compilation that came out last December, it was just one track and from there we really wanted to get involved with the music side of things. Then this idea came up – Nine Sessions.

How did the idea for the project come about?
Alex: We always liked the idea of moving towards a full project rather than just banging tunes out for the sake of it. We’d already done a full-length dubstep album and we wanted to test ourselves and do something different again. We were making slower beats at a hip hop tempo…
Gaz: They all kinda had a ring to them, the beats we were making. They almost painted an image.
Alex: It made us think “Let’s put a story to it, to fit the way it sounds.”
Gaz: It all had an old sound to it, so we thought we’d do something with an old gangster kind of thing. Also, we both like physical things, you know? We enjoy physical copies of things, like when you get something with a release. A physical thing to read alongside it kind of made sense.

So did you write the album and then decide on the story after?
Alex: We had about four tunes and that’s when we started thinking “Okay, let’s make this into a project. Right, okay, what shall we do with it?...
Gaz: …How can we illustrate this?” Rather than a big-budget music video, we thought a graphic novel or a comic would be able to illustrate the tracks, with three pages per track. We drew up a storyboard and nine bullet points for each song.
Alex: It helped us finish, to know what spaces we needed to fill in the story to tie it together.
Gaz: It was good like that because we could pick what samples would go with each vibe, we used a lot of older stuff that people wouldn’t know about.

Illustration: Raphael Achache

Would you do something like this again?
Alex: Yeah definitely. Obviously, we can’t do that stuff. We make music. It’s nice to be able to give someone else the idea and see how they can progress it further. They put their own spin on it and it makes you see different perspectives.
Gaz: Absolutely. Like when we met up with Ned from Ink Soup, we had the music there already. Different bits and bobs needed to be tied up, but when he came to us again with some of the drawings the guys had done, it helped to finish off the project because we had the characters in mind and everything clicked together. It made the production process a lot easier, because it solidified the idea. It’s actually happening, you can draw from everything. It was all proper natural progression.
Alex: I think we preferred it like that as well. More fluid. It was a bit hard with the others, not getting to see them face to face, they’re in Bristol.
Gaz: That was probably the only negative side of it, the distance, because it was cool to come and kick it with Ned down here and be like “Yeah, we wanna do this and we wanna do that.” I think over Facebook and email it breaks down communication because it can be quite difficult to put your idea into words. Them guys are just so open though. They make proper weird art.

Was it scary letting go of your idea, into the hands of someone else?
Alex: I’ve found being part of a duo really helps with that. For instance, when I used to make music by myself I would never show it to anyone, I never wanted to release it. I’d tell my mates that I made stuff, but I’d never show it them. Once you start working with someone else, you have to give that over, get that trust.
Gaz: Be vulnerable.
Alex: Once you can do it for so long with someone else, you can trust a bit more. Working with someone else has made me a better producer. If we can give our music to someone else and they can do their thing with it, then I’m all up for trying. It’s not always gonna work out but I’m up for giving stuff a go.
Gaz: The music’s one thing, and it’s nice to listen to and stuff, but them lot brought a piece you can read through and touch, creating an experience rather than a simple piece of music.

How does it work as a duo, making music?
Alex: We meet up… I suppose we don’t really think about what we’re gonna make. We just sit down together and chill out as friends. We go “Alright, let’s do summat.” We just bang out whatever we feel like on that day. We use Reason. And Cubase. If we’re together, one of us will just start summat, you get like five minutes into it, get a loop going…
Gaz: …we keep it going quite rapid. We’ll do five minutes each at the start, then start doing about fifteen minutes each, and then it’s like “Right bro, jump on, you take control now.”
Alex: There’s other times when we’re at home by ourselves and we send each other stuff on Dropbox. The older you get, the less time you’ve got, so sometimes we just bang a bit out and send it to each other.

What musicians inspire you these days?
Alex: Same as the past ten years really. Obviously you get new ones coming along now and again but I love the whole Flying Lotus, L.A. beat scene stuff. Obviously loads of UK stuff too like Mo Kolours, Steve Spacek, all the dubstep stuff we still love – Hyperdub and Deep Medi. K-Lone. There’s a guy in Italy called Ago...
Gaz: …it proper sounds like old music. I’ve been listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar. Since we’ve done this particular hip hop album… cos I’ve not really come from that kind of background so I get a lot of music off Tulip. That new Kendrick album, a lot of J Dilla, a lot of Madlib, and other Stones Throw stuff. It’s proper opened my mind up to that kind of thing.

Illustration: Raphael Achache
 

With Nine Sessions, there are so many different textures that jump quite dramatically from one track to the next, but it works so well…
Alex: I always loved beat tapes, whether it’s Dilla, Madlib, Premiere or Pete Rock. I’ve always loved getting them old nineties tapes with 1 minute 20 second beats, about thirty beats that are all just little loops that don’t even really fit together, they’ve all just been banged together.
Gaz: That’s what we wanted to do with this. We wanted to get as much audio on it as possible without making a chunky mixtape. We tried to cut and paste as much as possible. There’s a track on it called Black & White with five tracks mixed together. That was a switch between consciousness that goes alongside the story, after he’s made the move where he’s took the money and he’s flicking between two things, the good and the bad and what could happen from that point.

Is there anything you’d like to do differently with the project if you were to do it again?
Gaz: Personally, I’d like to get more artists involved. Not only does it split the workload, but if we all get a common character base, it’d be really good to see how all the artists interpret that, you know? Even a page per artist, maybe if we were to do Ten Sessions.
Alex: That’s the good thing about being from Nottingham – there’s such a pool of talent in every creative field. That’s why we wanted to do it – we wanted to try and utilise as many people from Nottingham as possible. As many people as we collaborate with musically, we’d like to artistically. Mainly from Nottingham because we just love being from here.
Gaz: We’re proud of what we’ve got here. We don’t need to seek stuff out on the internet, we’re about bringing it forward locally. It’s cool, before music we kicked it and we drank beer together and we danced together. From that, we’ve got to where we are now, you know what I mean? It’s good that we can still come down the shop and talk about clothes and what’s going on – it doesn’t need to just be about music.

What else have you got coming up?
Alex: Future Bubblers. It’s a scheme headed by Gilles Peterson and Brownswood. What they’re aiming to do is almost like a mentorship programme aimed at artists primarily outside of London to just grow, learn about the industry more.
Gaz: They help in any way possible. Last week we went down to London and kicked with the guys from Brownswood. It was really nice, they couldn’t have been more helpful to us. It’s like those missing bits. We really want to take our music further in terms of the live show, and in terms of making this more of an actual business, moving forward with things.
Alex: So that’s a year-long project. The focus now is just working towards the next album and try and incorporate as many things into it as possible. I think a blend of musical styles without limiting ourselves to one genre. Do what we like. And try and do some nights after it, like put on the Mimm Sessions again, but also some early evening shows
Gaz: We’d like to get more intimate shows that aren’t club venues. We play a lot of DJ shows and that’s really good, but we wanna play to an earlier crowd, where people can maybe sit down and watch us make music live. That’s where we wanna progress to really.
Alex: We don’t play much of our own music in our sets because there aren’t many that are specifically made for a dance floor. We use a lot of those elements, like a lot of sub bass and 140 drums and stuff, but a lot of it is sit-down-at-home stuff as well. This way, we’d get the best of both worlds, being able to get our own stuff out at the same time as being able to play the club venues.
Gaz: We co-run a label called Chord Marauders too. There’s ourselves in Nottingham, there’s a guy in London called Geode, a guy in Perth, Australia called B9, and a guy in Canada called Jafu. We have a final project coming out on that. We have a collection of tracks, twelves tracks – that should be released end of this year or beginning of next year.

If you had to pigeonhole Chord Marauders…
Gaz: I suppose it is dubstep.
Alex: It’s kind of melodic. People now are afraid to represent dubstep and say the word dubstep but that’s where we come from and we’re not ashamed of that. We love making 140 music. It’s a dubstep label at the end of the day. People call it future bass or whatever but at the end of the day it is dubstep, and we’re proud to fly the flag.
Gaz: We do have the scope to release other stuff as well. It is predominantly dubstep but if we want to put a bit of hip hop on the end of something it’s well received because of that melodic side of it. We’re lucky in that sense.
Alex: The balance with the dubstep that we try and make is, some of it works as well at home as it does in the club. We don’t really predetermine that, but we’ve worked together for so long that we already know that’s what we’re gonna aim for.

Is there anything else you wanted to say?
Gaz: Thank you.
Alex: Big up LeftLion.

Catch Congi at The Bodega for Nottingham rap battle league Clash Money’s event on Saturday 28 November. Get tickets here. 

Congi on Soundcloud