this audio or video is no longer availableFor over a decade, UK electronic music specialist The Herbaliser has crafted expansive hip-hop instrumentals and hybrid funk and soul that has charmed the club crowd as much as the Adult Swim marketing department. Along the way, the brainchild of DJs Ollie Teeba and Jake Wherry has enlisted a storied supporting cast to propel a series of cinematic full-lengths like Blow Your Headphones, Very Mercenary, Something Wicked This Way Comes and more into the outer limits of danceable mash-tracking.
Herbaliser's latest effort Same as It Never Was dropped on Tuesday, but it features a stack of soulful beat junkets perfectly matched for a Saturday night party. Listening Post caught up with Jake Wherry to discuss Talking Heads, soundtracking, Blackwater, sample-based hip-hop and why, when it comes to musicians, Mac still kicks PC's ass.
Wired.Com Listening Post: Same as It Never Was? Where have I heard that before?
Herbaliser: Well, 'Once in a Lifetime ' was a great track! The title is a gentle bit of reassurance that the record still sounds like The Herbaliser, with our usual instrumentals, rap tunes and so on. Yet there are new elements that we've not used before.
LP: It's a more rousing sound than your past work.
Herbaliser: We've already spoken to journalists who have said, "Oh, you've gone down a 'soul' route now." We'd argue that there always has been a soul element to our music. "Shattered Soul" from Very Mercenary and "Unsung Song" from Something Wicked This Way Comes are both soulful instrumentals. Also, it's something for when radio producers pick up the promo disc and think "Oh, Herbaliser. I know what that's all about." Not this time!
this audio or video is no longer availableLP: The instrumentals on this track are funkier than anything I've ever heard from you. Why did you decide to move into more exposition, like the horn solos on "Blackwater Drive" or the percussion madness of "Amores Bongo?"
Herbaliser: Well, I've just had to look up the word "exposition." Of course, with the internet, I get 20 different meanings too! How's this? "An analytical convenience to denote a portion of a movement identified as an example of classical tonal sonata form."
LP: That hurts, dude.
Herbaliser: It wasn't a conscious move using exposition, as I had no idea what it meant! But we have kept on getting better at production. Plus, with multi-instrumentalists Ralph Lamb and Andy Ross more involved the writing of this record, our sound has got bigger and bigger. We've always been big fans of '60s and '70s soundtracks. Those guys used big bands with loads of percussion and huge horn and string sections. It's taken us a long time to get it right, but now we can get a similar big big sound. Some of the tracks like "The Next Spot" and "Blackwater Drive" have 60 different tracks of audio.
LP: That's insane. Speaking of Blackwater...
this audio or video is no longer availableHerbaliser: No, "Blackwater Drive" isn't a reference to the security guys. The track is another piece of music from the ever-evolving Herbaliser soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist. (Hint, hint: We're still hoping for the call to do a score for someone!) I guess the "Blackwater Drive" scene would be one where the hero gets involved in a murky drug den, things go wrong and he has to escape in a high-speed chase.
LP: What about "Amores Bongo," speaking of film? Any line to be drawn to the movie Amores Perros?
Herbaliser: Well, that was a great film for sure, and this title does derive from that name, but in a weird way. I don't speak Spanish, but I did Latin at school, so I figured amores had something to do with love. So, in my head "Amores Bongo" means "I love the Bongo" – which I do!
LP: How has your sound evolved since instrumental hip-hop took over the world in the '90s. How do you feel electronic music and hip-hop have changed since then?
Herbaliser: When Ollie and I first met, we had a common love of hip-hop, funk, soul, and jazz. And we had just come out of the acid jazz era: Bands like The Young Disciples and Soul II Soul really influenced me as a teenage guitar player. I knew I had to get a sampler and start making heavy club beats, but with some live musical ideas as well. When Ollie and I started working together, we didn't know any rappers, yet we wanted to make some kind of hip-hop, so we spent a long time making instrumental tracks that weren't just pieces of looped samples. We wanted our music tracks to evolve and have big changes in them, very much like soundtrack music. When we were mostly working with samples, we worked really hard; we didn't have Recycle back then, so every sample had to be manually spliced, edited, renamed and time-stretched. It took ages.
LP: I think some forget that sampling took serious work.
Herbaliser: Working on a tiny Akai S1000 screen gave me constant headaches. We made our first two albums using a Mac Classic II with Cubase, one Akai S1000, a SP12 drum machine and one quadraverb unit. Severely limited! Since then, there have been so many changes. When we started, there was no drum 'n' bass, just hardcore. No grime or crunk; R&B either meant Ike and Tina at best, or Colour Me Badd and Boyz II Men. Yuck.
LP: Now your type of electronic funk and soul seem to be on the comeback trail.
Herbaliser: We haven't consciously tried to deviate from Herbaliser's original master plan of blending hip-hop, funk, jazz, rock, and soul. But every 10-15 years, there seems to be a commercial revival of soul and funk, hence the success of Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Mark Ronson right now. So it seems like now is a good time for our record to drop.
LP: Do you think the mainstream will catch on this time around?
Herbaliser: When we first started, 90 percent of the hip-hop we bought was independent music. We had nothing much in common with mainstream, major-label hip-hop, which seemed to have lost touch with hip-hop's original philosophy. We'll keep doing our thing, regardless of what's in vogue.
LP: You've had a tendency to work with some of the more interesting indie rappers in the game.
Herbaliser: It has been great for us. Jean Grae, MF Doom, Roots Manuva, Bahamadia. They were all fantastic to work with. As soon as we were known well enough to get people like Bahamadia and Doom on board, we felt it was important to represent the UK too. So we do try and pick a good British MC on every album.
LP: Is Jean Grae, or What What, as you have known her over the years, one of the most underrated rappers ever?
Herbaliser: Yes. Jean Grae is criminally underrated. Without a doubt, she is one of the best rappers in the world, male or female, period. That's quite a fitting title for her, as I have seen many a review that referred to us as "The Most Underrated Band In The UK." Underrated rappers sound better with underrated bands, it would seem. She came over to London for a few days and managed to write seven tracks with us. Too many to use on one album, so we saved "A Cautionary Tale" for this record.
LP: Finally, since this is for Wired, what gear are you using these days?
Herbaliser: I record everything into Logic, using Apogee converters. Then I mix out analog through my battered old desk. I have quite a few tube compressors, like Tubetech and TLA.
LP: How have advances in personal tech and the internet changed the music biz since you started out?
Herbaliser: We made the first few records with such basic gear; things are so different for us now. Something Wicked was the first record we made where the computer could handle everything we threw at it. Prior to that, our old gear was always being used to maximum capacity, and we struggled to get our mixes down as the gear was too stretched and kept crashing. Now, with my Intel Mac, we don't even use external samplers or effects units. The synths and samplers are all virtual instruments, and that's rock solid. I switched to Logic once I saw the EXS24. It's been so useful being able to store my entire sample library on one computer and to have instant access to such a wealth of sounds.
LP: In other words, you're not a PC band.
Herbaliser: No, we're Apple geeks. I never touched a PC on principle when I started out in the early '90s. It was at a time when people really thought Apple would not see out the year, so I became a diehard Mac supporter. Thankfully, I never had to use Windows 95. Today, I mess around with Boot Camp, but its kept on a different hard drive than my Apple stuff. But iPods, iPhones, iMacs? Hard to resist.
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