As one half of the duo Zion I and with his latest solo album Headphone Concerto available now, Matt Tarr spoke to US alternative hip hop producer/DJ Amp Live about his latest release, his notorious remixes of Radiohead’s In Rainbows and more…
MT: Tell me a little bit about how you got into music initially, from being brought up through to releasing your first record.
Amp: I’ve been doing it for a while. When I was younger I played the drums and piano in church. My dad was a dentist but he played jazz piano on the side and his family is full of great pianists, so I really just grew up around great music. In terms of producing, I started in high school making really horrible music and I ended up going to college in Atlanta. I got signed to Tommy Boy Records which was a major label with De La Soul and Naughty By Nature and a whole bunch of people and that’s when I really started learning how to produce and make music.
MT: Was it always hip hop that you produced or were you influenced by an other genres?
Amp: When I first started out I was actually making new wave, which was what it was called back then and this was in the late eighties; hip hop had just started to bubble so my music was kinda diverse. Nowadays it’s not uncommon cos it’s the iPhone generation where everybody is listening to everything, whereas growing up it was a little bit more segregated in terms of what people listened to but I happened to just be exposed to a lot of different types of music.
MT: Were there any particular artists that influenced you in terms of deciding that you wanted to pursue a career in music?
Amp: When I got signed I was working with a couple of really big producers at the time, Dallas Austin, a dude named Spearhead X and a guy by the name of El-Rock who produced Lil John and all these other people and they taught me how to make good hip hop music and how to really focus on the cool elements of music. In hearing that and then all the new fantastic hip hop that was coming out in the nineties, it really inspired me and I was always a really creative dude, so I just thought “I wanna make stuff like this”.
MT: What do you make of the state of hip hop in 2014 with the big trap and drill sounds featuring in a lot of artists tracks?
Amp: It’s kinda mixed up. It’s like you’ve got this big bubble and you’ve got the extremes on all sides and in the middle there’s a big grey area. I feel like hip hop, electronic music, all that is like jazz; it’s here to stay. It’s gonna just weave back and forth and there’ll be hybrids of everything.
MT: Your album Headphone Concerto is out now but tell us a little bit about how you came up with the concept for the record because it’s quite heavily influenced by classical music, so what made you pursue a classical theme?
Amp: I’ve been thinking about it for a while, it’s kind of a brain child sort of thing. But a concerto is a piece of music that has three or four movements, for people that don’t know and it also focuses on one instrument to solo throughout the whole piece. So for this particular concerto I wanted to use a cello and that’s why you have all the strings because the cello is the focus of most of the movement. I wanted to do a modern day type of classical concerto piece combining all the stuff I’m into; hip hop, electronic music, soul and put it all into this format. With adding the strings it gives it a really classical vibe. If I had another instrument like some horns or a guitar or a sax it’d be like a different feeling, so I think those string elements really give it that classical taste. I love classical music too so it was a good thing and I liked how it came out.
MT: I think having the tracks ordered in the way they are and having the intro flowing into the other tracks makes it feel orchestral and makes the record feel like a complete symphony to be honest.
Amp: Man I’m happy you said that cos that’s the point I wanted to get across. You have different types of movements but it’s kinda like the same vibe and same story.
MT: Personally, my favourite track is ‘ihearthiphop’ as the features are great and the beat really embraces the classical and hip hop mix of the record. On that track you worked with a rapper who I really like, Mike G of Odd Future, so how did that come about?
Amp: A good friend of mine is part of their [Odd Future’s] management company and he hit me up a while ago and said “yo Mike needs to work on an album and I think he should do something with you”. So Mike and I would go to the studio and vibe out and Odd Future were touring heavy so we really didn’t have a chance to finish everything, but I was like “I gotta get you on something”. When I did this track I needed someone who was newer and had a certain type of vibe so I showed him the track and told him we had to get on something so he got on it, laced it up and it turned out really tight man.
MT: In terms of your videos, are you someone who is really involved with that whole side of things or do you just leave it to a team of people?
Amp: I am involved but I think I’m about to change that cos I don’t like what I do to the video. They turn out tight but I just need to step back. I have been involved in three of the videos and the fourth one was really all the director. I thought of the concepts and the treatments and worked with the director on them but I like other people having a take on the music and having their perspective come through without me actually giving input. So I think I’m gonna step back from that aspect of it and let the director do more stuff with me giving treatment ideas or anything like that.
MT: One video that stands out from the record is ‘Penny Nickel Dime’. What was the idea behind that?
Amp: This concept isn’t a new concept but it was like the idea that money and material things will overwhelm and take over you if you let it. So with this video, I wanted to get that concept over but in a shocking type of way and we went through different characters and different things that could happen and that’s what it ended up being; a lady who is homeless ends up finding a whole bunch of money and letting it take over, going crazy and being glutenous and the money consumes her so much that it’s coming out of her, which is why at the end she’s throwing up gold.
MT: For people who don’t know, tell me a bit about your Rainydayz Remixes project and the saga of that as that must have been a massive thing in your career?
Amp: Yeah man that was a weird thing. For one, I love Radiohead, Thom Yorke is the shit to me! I came up in the hip hop world and I’ve been putting out hip hop albums for a long time and in the group Zion I, we’ve been able to build a fan base that has been pretty stable, so when I did these remixes it kind of exposed me to the rock/indie side of things. I did the first remix of ‘Nudez’ and this is when mash ups and remixing was starting to get big, there wasn’t a Soundcloud or anything but people were doing remixes and they [Radiohead] put out the In rainbows album for free, so I was like “why not!?”. So I took ‘Nudes’ and I got Too Short and Zumbi, the MC from Zion I on it, and mashed it up with a remix of one of the songs we did. I put it out and it took off, it really took off. Pitchfork posted it and they were like “why don’t you do more songs?” so I did an EP. After ‘Nudez’ came out I did ‘Weird Fishez’ and people just started posting it so the momentum grew. Their publishing company Warner/Chappell then hit me and were like “you have to stop because you haven’t cleared any of this”. I kinda knew there was some copyright infringement but everybody was remixing stuff so I said something on the internet and it went crazy. Pitchfork were like “this is a new DJ, why are you guys picking on him? This isn’t hurting anything it’s making it better!”. Then they [Warner/Chappell] fired back and said the group needed to hear it if we wanted to move forward so I ended up sending the remix album to the group and they loved it and put it out. That became the official remix album for In Rainbows.
MT: Have Radiohead asked you to do any remixes since then?
Amp: Nah. It seems that after that they started doing more remixes and stuff and FlyLo kicked in and works with them a lot so I feel like it just wasn’t that time for that, maybe in the future that’d be tight. I did meet Thom Yorke though at Low End Theory out here and that was cool. Who knows what the future holds man.
MT: You had a set at the Boiler Room in LA. How was that experience?
Amp: It was tight. I’d love to go back there. If I went back again I would do it differently but it was fun man. It’s not what you would think, at least where I was at you walk into this room that’s small and people are just setting stuff up but it’s a really cool concept. My homie Eligh passed through and did a song or two with me, it was cool, I had a lot of fun doing that. A big part of my show is me using custom controllers so I used an MPC guitar that I made and I could just go crazy on it, so I decided to use it for that set.
MT: You’ve mentioned your group, Zion I. What’s happening with Zion I at the moment?
Amp: We’ve put out two EP’s and we’re putting out a third one that’ll be free. There’s gonna be a live album of the music that was done about a month ago and so that has to be mixed and there will actually be a video for it too. So we’re just keeping things moving.
You can purchase your copy of Amp Live’s latest project Headphone Concerto on iTunes here and make sure you keep up with all the latest news and information from Amp on Twitter and Facebook.
Matt Tarr
@MattTarrJourno
Matt Tarr
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