Deltron 3030 are back with Event II in October this year. Just don’t call it a supergroup.
When the first, self-titled Deltron 3030 album dropped in the year 2000 the rap game was a very different place, as was the world. Looking around today at both hip hop and society the trio’s vision of a bleak future ruled by corporations isn’t really such a far fetched idea, discounting the 1030 odd years difference.
Back then Dan The Automator (on production), Del Tha Funkee Homosapien (on lyrics), and Kid Koala (on turntables) were a trio of underground hip hop icons that had formed like Voltron to indulge in some serious nerding out in the finest hip hop tradition. They threw references to afrofuturism and sci fi, French classical samples, cuts and chunky breaks into a blender and poured it out for the hip hop world to consume. In the 13 years since their solo careers have evolved in different ways – including more hip hop nerding in the shape of Gorillaz with whom Automator and Del worked – and yet Deltron has remained a project that never quite went away, with fans always querying its next appearance since rumours of a follow up first appeared in 2004 and the trio doing regular live appearances.
After much hinting and claims that parts of the album had been finished as far back as 2006, Event II will finally drop this October. And while the 13 years gap doesn’t appear to have made a huge difference in terms of sonics, it certainly seems to have impacted the scope of what the trio have set out to do this time round. For a start the imaginary world the group and their music inhabit has been fleshed out in way more detail, leading to a more immersive experience. Adding to this is a list of guests that includes not just musicians like Mike Patton, Damon Albarn and Zach de la Rocha, but also actors like Arrested Development’s David Cross and Amber Tamblyn, chef David Chang and comedians The Lonely Island. Imagine a hip hop concept album, but on steroids.
With the release of City Rising From The Ashes EP this week we caught up with one third of Deltron, the voice behind the main character Deltron Zero, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, to find out a bit more about it all. And, of course, to get his recommendations on what anime you should be checking out for.
You guys first hinted at a second Deltron 3030 album years ago, was there a particular reason why it took so long to come together?
Yeah… one I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to go through with it, some of the hassles you gotta deal with… ultimately I decided to do it though. Secondly the lyrics took research, it took a while for me to be able to put lyrics together like that. It’s not always the most fun thing to do, you know?
I remember reading that you’d written the lyrics for the first album quite quickly in comparison.
For the most part yeah. It was more of a freestyle vibe to it, it wasn’t… wasn’t fully formed out. But on this one I decided to take on more responsibility, add more meat to everything. The first one was more on the spot and it grew out of that into something way bigger than I thought. So for this one it took more research.
How much of the album did the three of you work on together in the same place versus on your own times?
We all worked on our parts on our own and then it kinda converged at a certain point. The bulk of it I wrote at Automator’s crib, recorded it there too. There’s a point where I had most of it done and I lost the lyrics. Somehow the files got lost, whatever. So I had to start writing new ones at Automator’s crib and he started making new beats too, we just came up with new ideas for everything. That inspired me to keep writing new lyrics, and it’s pretty much how the process went. For a long time before this we were conceptualising what we wanted to do, how we wanted to achieve it and all that. That was before we rounded everything up.
Was there any point where the three of you were in the studio together?
Well we worked together at a certain point, when we were gathering up all the pieces we all wanted to hear on the album. At one point when we were on the road Kid Koala brought crates of records to my room to listen to them. We choose stuff we wanted from them. We had time together and that’s really when we came up with the bulk of the album. Once I did my lyrics I was gone though. I let Automator handle the rest of the production. When I was writing he wasn’t sitting over my back trying to scrutinise all the lyrics I was writing. He trusted me with what I was doing, and it’s the same thing for me with him.
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Do you like that way of working? It’s like being in a group but perhaps looser and more independent.
Maybe… I tend to think of it like we just trust each other, we’re all professionals and we don’t need to be breathing down each other’s backs. Sometimes you gotta do that though, you gotta have everyone in the studio at once, make sure everyone is on the same page, etc… but we’ve already got our own standards of excellence, we know we’re going to try to get the best out of ourselves. I’m a producer as well so I get it. We have the same attitude of getting the best out of whoever the artist is we work with, and in this case it’s ourselves. We just work well together like that.
Well you don’t really get much anymore in the way of hip hop supergroups like what you guys have created with Deltron…
That’s what you call it? Hip hop supergroup?
Personally no, but it’s how you’re referred to. Let me rephrase it, I was thinking that the way you’ve built the whole Deltron mythology and how the music and group inhabits it doesn’t really happen much in hip hop anymore.
I think in some ways you’re probably right, as far as popular music goes things are pretty down the drain. It’s like a racket almost. But there’s still people out there interested in doing things on a bigger scale, the excellence level is up there. But I feel that perhaps they’re just too young right now, they’re still growing. I think they’re there, I just think that they’re younger than everybody else right now. Not everybody, but a lot of them are in the web of ‘it’s all about money’. It’s been like that for so many years, that kinda got to die off I think…
It just struck me that you’ve really gone out to try and build something with the mythology and everything else surrounding the project that’s both rarer these days and also not the easiest thing to push to people at a mainstream level.
I feel like it takes a lot of work. When I was doing this I was almost scaling back in a way. If I do stuff like this in the future again I’m going to be thinking about how I can sustain it. The people always want more, and you want to try and do more. But the musical format is not really for trying to write a book, you know? When on a track you only got so much time to say what you wanna say… and I didn’t really realise that until this Deltron album. It took a lot of work for me and it wasn’t necessarily hella fun to do either. It felt more like homework. So in the future I will probably think more about the long run, about sustaining the levels for an extended amount of time.
When it comes out people are going to be expecting more, bigger, better, you know… the audience don’t care or know how much work it takes for you to make it bigger. They might think it’s easy for you, who cares, they want it. So I think it’s up to me as an artist to think about this before I start. Can I sustain this for a long period of time?
So did you approach the lyrics and lyrical content as a book in audio format then?
That’s where I was drawing ideas from. Sci fi, manga, anime, even Star Wars or Star Trek. Those formats have more space and freedom to be able to tell a story, and you don’t really have that making music because it’s a finite type thing… the space is a lot less.
Doesn’t it then allow you to tell the story in a different way though?
I’m just realising that the music also tells a big part of the story and the words really just coach it along. You can absorb a message without focusing on the lyrics too hard. But with a book you gotta sit there and read it, engage.
Isn’t that also an effect of the commercialisation of rap you mentioned, that it dulls the message down even if the MC is still the face of hip hop? The Kendrick album was an interesting exception in that regard, commercially successful and it told a story.
Yeah definitely. Even with Kendrick the story is there but it’s loose. It’s loose enough to not get in the way of the music, you don’t have to sit there and analyse it like a book to get it. If you want to it’s there. If you want to get deeper it’s there, but it’s not so deep that you can’t enjoy it on just a musical level. I’m not saying Deltron is so deep you can’t enjoy it on a musical level either.
But for me as an artist… take the example of performing it. It’s hard to perform those raps. They’re like reading a text book. I didn’t think about that when I was writing it, but when it’s time to perform it all of a sudden I get back to that idea of can I sustain it? And sometimes it feels like it’s too much work. Again though the crowds don’t necessarily care, and it can be hard to juggle the demand and the work it takes. I’m just keeping all these things in mind as more of a learning process though, no one ever really did this before so… We kinda approached this from perhaps more of a rock aspect actually. The idea behind the record. I don’t even know if what we’re doing is even acceptable for hip hop, but we didn’t think about that.
Maybe it’s a European perspective but I see it as fitting within hip hop quite logically.
There might be something that y’all can see. Out here it just fails at all the pre-requisites that people attach to rap music or the boxes they put the music in. That’s why hip hop / rap isn’t as exciting as it has been in the past you could say. There’s all these boxes and predetermined whatever… I’m not saying it can’t be exciting because there is stuff out there I like, but as a whole it’s being watered down and homogenised.
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I sometimes feel there’s also a generational gap, between those classic 80s and 90s eras and today, as well as the commercial aspect.
I don’t know if there’s a generational gap you know? Really the younger cats are the ones that’s really saving it to me. I think they get it. But I think the older you are, the more you need to pay your rent. And the nature of the industry facilitated that in a way. It just went there. I think the younger cats are really trying to change it back to something that means something.
I was thinking more that the reference points change, kids today are growing up with hip hop as commercial music in a way that didn’t exist when I was growing up with it in the late 80s and early 90s. It was outsider music, misunderstood by the previous generation like rock before it.
True. There’s always going to be a new rock. It’s always coming from the youth, whichever way they choose to do it.
Do you subscribe to the idea that if what young people are doing or are into doesn’t bother you as an adult then there is something wrong?
I see what you’re saying but at the same time I don’t think I’ve left that place where I was when I was younger. So it doesn’t really bother me. It might be a little bit more extreme but I was kinda extreme too though when I was young. I get it. It might be more on it now, cos kids always gotta do a bit more. But that’s not enough to bother me really, cos I was over the top too. That’s just me though… I feel like things stay the same a lot of the time, so I’m not really shocked by what nobody do. People will keep on doing it till the end of time. It might be different in certain ways but kids ain’t gonna change, they’re always going to be kids and adults will always have aspects of that too.
You mentioned earlier on some of the influences you drew on for the album. Was there any sci fi in particular in that list of influences? The first album’s lyrics sometimes get bundled under the afrofuturism banner. Was that ever something you consciously thought about or did it just happen?
I dabble in a whole lot of these things. It’s not just afrofuturism or just sci fi, and so on. I just pull from a lot of these different things. Even something like Dadaism. You might not think it has anything to do with it but once I come across it I may start to look at it and see what I can get from it. I absorb that. It’s all part of a conscious effort to assimilate it all.
Is it perhaps like a hip hop approach, sampling ideas etc…?
You could look at it like that, but ultimately it’s how the human brain works. Things you come across become a part of you if you relate to them. I’m just being conscious about it. Instead of letting it happen and then dig in my brain later to try and see if it still exists there. I just try to be more conscious about what I like, what I might want to use. Make it a part of my life.
I’m not a huge sci fi fan though. I’m more into futuristic anime and even then I haven’t watched anything in quite a while. I’ve got manga around the house. That’s what I was saying about getting down to do this Deltron album. I had to sit down and dig, do research. I wasn’t knee deep in it, like I was when I was a kid, watching Robotech all the time. I had to consciously go and look at stuff in a different way.
In terms of anime, what’s some of your favourite? Things you’d recommend everybody watch.
Well Akira definitely, one of the best. Macross is another one. I always liked it, it’s what Robotech was based on. And… what’s that dude’s name? He smokes cigars… yellow, blonde hair… robotic arm.
Cobra?
That’s the one.
Was that syndicated in America?
Nah it wasn’t but when I went through my anime phase I’d watch a lot of imports. That’s one of the ones that really caught me. It was super sick.
You ever watch Cowboy Bebop?
Yeah but I don’t know if I’d consider that futuristic though… it’s definitely one of the better animes out there though. Samurai Champloo as well. I’ll take a little Bleach sometimes too, you know?
Going back to the album, I noticed there’s a lot of guests including actors. What was the idea behind it?
That would be Automator and his brain. His connections and what he can do. He knows these people so he knows he can give a certain person a character to take on. That’s what Automator does, it’s his range. It speaks more of his power as a producer really. I let him handle that side of things, I trust him. I know that he sees my vision and what I wanted to do and I know that he won’t deviate real far from that. The same way he trusts me with the lyrics. I know that when I hear it, it’ll make sense. That’s him though, I don’t know if I’d do that with everybody but with him I can do it.
Earlier on when I mentioned the hip hop supergroup idea you seemed a little shocked. So how would you describe Deltron?
Like a rock opera basically. Like Tommy and those records. That’s what we’re trying to do.
