How can music challenge systemic oppression and bring about social change? How can we envision alternative paths while avoiding the pitfalls of past paradigms? Jake Ferguson is an award-winning musician known for his work with the heliocentrics and is a solo artist under the name The Broken Record. Alongside legendary drummer Malcolm Cotto, Ferguson has composed two foam scores and over ten albums, collaborating with icons like Archie Shep, Moulatou Astake, and Melvin Van Pebbles. The album also features singer and political activist Jermaine Jackman, a former winner of The Voice 2014, and the T.S. Elliot Prize-winning poet/musician Anthony Joseph. Jake Ferguson, Anthony Joseph, and Jermaine Jackman, welcome to the creative process. Welcome, thanks for being white. So the architecture of oppression is, I think, not an album that you'd want to listen to going to sleep, it's very much about waking us up to all the systems of oppression around us. There's so many great lines, but going back for a moment to the first album, Part 1, that came out in 2019. I wish I had a lyric sheet for all of them, but, you know, starting off with your first track, assimilation is being Nigerian in the papers and British in person, and am I not English enough for you? And so many powerful lines that you start the album off with, and then assimilation is my name, I just thought maybe that should be something that you have, you know, as visitors enter the Heathrow Airport, assimilation is the name of the game, it just, how did you decide to begin the album with that? The track you're talking about is assimilation, which is the first track on Part 1, and that features a fantastic poet called Dilemma, and she was talking about her experiences as a Nigerian woman coming to the UK, and the sort of feeling of having to integrate in order to connect with people. So yeah, I've been with the Helio Centrix for 25 years, and we actually did a number of sessions with Antony in a few shows some time ago, we played in Sardinia together, and Antony will know that the Helio Centrix, like himself, we have loads of musical references from legends and whether they're from jazz, psychedelia, poetry, spoken word, and I think with the sort of musicians that allow those influences to come out into our own productions and our own compositions, and I think life, I find life very complex, very rewarding at times, but also very depressing at times, because I think as humans, we forget we're often limited by our own stereotypes, and we don't see that everyone has the potential for beauty and love and all these things, and I think the architectural repression, both parts one and two, are really a reflection of all the community work and civil rights work that I've been doing for the same amount of time, really, 25 years, and I wanted to try and mix my day job and my music side, so bringing those two sides of my life together. But because I'm not a spoken word, I'm not very good, I can write a good story, I can write a good essay, but my ability to write stories or write lyrics is very limited, hence why I was so keen to get Anthony and Jermaine involved, and Jermaine is somebody I've worked with for probably about six, seven years now, he's also in the trenches of the black civil rights struggle, and we worked together on a number of projects, but it was very interesting to then work with Jermaine in a purely artistic capacity, and I think the bringing together those two worlds really created the album. I wanted to create a platform for black artists, black singers, poets who I really admire, and it was a no-brainer to give Anthony a call for the second album, because I know of his pedigree, and he's much more able to put ideas and thoughts on paper than I would be able to. I can do that musically, but in terms of the written word, I really struggle, and I always, whenever I do music, I'm my own worst critic, because I'm trying to really be as good as the people that have gone before us, whether that's Gil Scott Herron, James Brown, the Sunrock Orchestra. These guys really led the way and showed us how it can be and should be done, and I find, it's not criticism, but I find modern music is a little bit throwaway, it doesn't tend to go that deep, it doesn't really look to those old references, so it was really exciting to try and merge all those records that I've got, and how Anthony collects records as well. Mix, take all those brilliant, amazing references from the past, and whether that's the last poets or tribe who were a fantastic, retroid-based jazz group, and bring that in and try and do something with it that was modern, so it wasn't necessarily a pastiche, "Oh look, we sound like James Brown, oh look, we sound like Gil Scott Herron, we wanted to do something that was quite fresh as well," so some of the sounds and instrumentation is unusual. So for me it was really about bringing, "I've always kept those two worlds separate in order to protect myself, protect the music from my day job, which can be very trauma-inducing, and Jermaine knows what I'm talking about here, I keep those two worlds separate for my own sanity, but actually, a couple years ago I had a really tough time moving from one job to the next, and I just felt I'm not being true to myself, I've got to be more honest, I've got to talk about the music in my day job and my day job and my music, because that is me, I'm one person, I'm not two separate beings, so for me it was an opportunity to bring those two worlds together to create something really unique, and I'm just so privileged to have worked with some great poets and singers really. Indeed, could you talk a little bit about talking about your day job, how you write into a feeling without you, as you say, you must be using language a lot in your day job, but when you make your music it's not something that gives shape to it exactly? The day job is difficult, you know, it's trying to change societies, trying to go into the belly of the beast, and that beast is the monolith, the British colonial attitudes, right, that still exist today, and I do a lot of work trying to change how the police interact with black folk, I do a lot of work with the NHS to help educate the NHS that one service for everyone isn't going to work for a lot of people, especially people who have African heritage, I work a lot with leaders in the system and government to help them understand that they can't talk about problems we have in society without looking at British history, the British responsibility to those they previously either enslaved or raped or stole their resources, you know, it's still going on today. Africa, it feels like it's just like a trough and the pigs who've got their noses in the trough and are just using Africa for their own means, and I'd like to think that in 2024 we won't be having this conversation, but sadly we are. Black people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, they are more likely to be sectioned if they have a mental health problem, secondary school, they are more likely to be excluded just because of the way they look, the way we look, what's that about? We can't carry on as is because it's just totally unfair, but that doing that every day, day in, day out takes its toll, but I find music, it fuels the music, it means that when I finish my day job, I'm full of anger and rage and I've got to put that somewhere because I'm not a boxer, I'm not a football player, so that goes into the music and it means that some of the music is really, it has to have a strong rhythmic core, it has to have a strong melodic basis, but also it needs to speak and that's why I work with Anthony and Jermaine and a whole host of others because they say what I can't say purely musically and I think that's the exciting thing where we come together. Anthony and Jermaine, you could reflect how you came together and just expand upon some of the themes that Jake was talking about. I'll start, I don't mind Jermaine, I've known Jake for many, many, many, many, many, many years, probably since the 90s, I think maybe, yeah, it's going all the way back, true friends of friends and I think we're probably around the same age or maybe I'm a little bit older, but we're from the same generation of British, black British musicians who are kind of hip to the outside world or hip to a particular kind of musical sensibility that begins with jazz and ends and, well, it doesn't end anywhere, but includes the Caribbean and includes London, but it really steeped in sort of classic revolutionary black music. Let's put it like that, you know, I think that is one of the things that brought us together many, many years ago, I love for that kind of music, I love for those artists like Coltrane and that whole sort of generation, Archie Shep, whatever, a lot of psychedelic music as well, we share an affinity and I love for that kind of music and that brought us together. So as Jake says, we've worked together in the past with the Helios, we had a mutual friend in the Helios who brought me into the project, I call Adrian Lusu guitarist, two is a close friend of mine and true him, I met Jake and Malcolm and we did tours, we played out a few shows live with the Helios, Malcolm actually, Malcolm who is one of Jake's musical partners, actually produced one of my albums with my band many years ago. So there's a lot of spillover between me and Jake in that way, personal, both personal and music, which is the same thing, I think. So I'm coming from it from that context and in terms of the sort of political underpinnings, I think you can't be a black, British artist and escape the sort of stuff that Jake is talking about because that's the kind of, that's the the mess that we work in, it's the mess that we sort of inherit and the mess that we try to push through to make art. We can't escape the sort of political ramifications, colonialism or racism, they are the things that sort of underpin a lot of all lived experience. And I think Jake says it quite eloquently, I mean, he says he's not a writer, but he's definitely a thinker and he knows what he's talking about. So yeah, exactly as he said, we're still dealing with these things in 2024, we shouldn't be, but I think records like the two volumes actually of this record are quite important because a lot of black artists, hardly any sort of black artists are directly addressing these issues in a very in the concentrated focused way. At the beginning you said, Mia, that it's not something you want to listen to before bed. And yeah, it is, they are difficult records. I think this, I think the new one is a lot more accessible in a way than the first one was the first one was is a scary listen, absolutely, it's not easy, it's not easy listening, but then the experience is not easy. Yeah, just to add, I found it interesting when Jake said he's not a writer, but he is able to articulate through instruments, through producing and it's just, it's great how it marries with one another with the lyrics and the songs. A lot of the songs, well, music in general is all about storytelling and it speaks to our lived experience. So when I'm on the record part two, I'm talking about black gold and it's something so simple. As the term black, as we know, a lot of people see as in a dodgy way, but to put it next to gold and actually say that our culture is rich, is rich, black is, has value, that's why they stripped Africa from all of its resources. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] So, yeah, it was great to really pull our hearts out into these records, into these songs. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] It's really a nod to George Floyd's mother and what she must have had to witness all those years ago live on television and I still get emotional talking about it now because I remember at the time, I said, oh, Jimin, we should get together and do something and you pop down the studio. We had a glass of wine, plays you this backing track and you're like, no, no, no, no, I can do something on this. And then in you went straight into the room and it just flowed and it was almost like that you were channeling George Floyd's mother the cry of losing a loved one, your own child to racist brutal policing must be and it's not just happening in America, it's just happening here. And a few years before George Floyd, Jermaine, myself, others have been thinking about other black folk, black young people that had died when we had to witness a young man being throttled by the police on camera in the UK, so although everyone thinks George Floyd was almost like the first sort of big moment, there were many moments in the UK being for decades. So although many of us weren't surprised, the shock and horror and the ripple effects that had around the globe was so important and it was good to know that George Floyd's family gave everyone their blessing to carry on the struggle and I think consent from the family of a deceased family is so important. We shouldn't use an abused people's death for our own means, but in this case, I think it was an opportunity for Jermaine and myself to really say how we genuinely felt about what had happened because of the shock and then you get the sort of realization that actually this world is not fair place. I'm going to have to teach my own children about not looking at the police in a strange way, don't stare at them because they could come and hurt you. We shouldn't have to do that, police are the protectors, that's what we pay our taxes for. And you mentioned Anthony, I know you're a father, what were those conversations all of you've had with your parents, with your children, I mean, some of us don't even ever have to experience, but that's like just a reality that you might have to say a way of behaving in the world that you have to pass on at such a young age. Yeah, I think we can all agree that we've all had the talk with our parents, my parents definitely have the talk with me and my brothers and my sister about the fact that you're black, you need to work twice as hard. They didn't really tell me about the police, but I was very early in my age when I experienced negativity from the police being stopped in search, countless of times, I'm going to school, I'm going to college and it became like an everyday thing. So you just taught how to navigate the world as a young black man, growing up in East London. I have a different upbringing though, I was raised in Trinidad as I grew up in Trinidad, which is essentially a black country. So yeah, I didn't have the sort of struggles, I mean, my struggles were different. We were a post-colonial country, struggling with its own issues, but those issues didn't involve the upward challenging day-to-day racism that I guess people like Jermaine or Jake faced. Mines were different, mines was more built into a colonial structure around me in terms of education, business, economics, culture to a certain extent. It was a different experience of race and culture. My children today, I don't need to tell them anything actually, they're a lot smarter than I ever can be, they're a lot more aware. They teach me, they teach, they're two girls and they're very, very wise and they teach me stuff. My youngest one is 14 and she is, I think she's the smartest one in the house and she is a hardcore feminist, she wants to be a human rights lawyer, her bookshelf is full of Angela Davis and Mayor Angelou and yeah, she teaches me, I'm scared of her. I think we're in good hands. I think the kids, you know, I know Jake has kids as well and I don't know about Jermaine, but I think the generation that's coming now, I think they're taken us definitely into a new space in history, which is why sometimes I get, I don't say tired, but yeah, tired is doing it. I get tired of conversations that are centered around blackness and race because I almost feel like we need to find a way to not shift out of it, but a way to negotiate it without it being something that pulls us back. It's heavy, it's a heavy, heavy thing to carry your whole life, it's a heavy thing. Yeah, I didn't agree though, it's hopeful in amongst the youth, AC the world differently to the way we do. It's important that we always understand our ancestors' struggle, but we're not confined by it. We can use it as a platform to do and try other things and certainly from a musical perspective, I don't feel like, oh, I'm black, so I've got to do grime or I've got to be at the cutting edge of the latest urban fashion or what those stereotypes are. For me, I just love there was a time particularly in the 50s and 60s and to a certain extent, the early 70s, where that fried in your blackness was something to be really free of. Positive black joy, that positive unity, and that was in many ways response to the oppression that people were feeling then. The different form of oppression now is a lot more subtle and I think there's still a long way to go. But for me, this record is trying to act as a sort of moment in time. It's trying to say, listen, this is where things are now and actually there's many directions we can take from here. I love the way Anthony talks about school tax, but he doesn't leave you feeling despondent. It actually almost suggests there is a different way of looking at the world. Similarly, when Jermaine talks about we need freedom that you can feel that there's a, it's right there if we work together to get it and it will require a lot of collaboration. I think certainly the work that Jermaine and I do on a day-to-day basis, collaboration between different parts of the black, British, and African diaspora, probably the most radical thing we can do because the system doesn't want us to organize, right? That's the reality. So the more we organize and more we support each other, the more we collect the diverse which you use within our communities and use that for the greater good. That for me, it is the way forward and we've been just working on, in my day job, we've been working on a black manifesto ahead of the election and that's been led by young people and actually it's interesting Anthony talking about his daughter teaching him some of the young people we've met and worked with are amazing because they're able to have one foot in the past, but it's not like a shackle holding them back, making them angry, making them think, oh, there's no way out, they're actually going, yeah, we know that, but we want to do it this way. So I've got every faith in the next generation, friendly. So this isn't all about negativity, it's really about saying things will change, have to change and you guys know what you're talking about, so job done. I'm not saying we're giving up on what we need to do right now but the future does look brighter and I think Africa will be one of the most important, but it will be the most important continent without a doubt because those resources that you may talk about earlier, Africa's now, a lot of the African nations now are able to own their own resources. So the power dynamics in the world are shifting and that's why probably there's an increase in far-right activity because the white colonial ex-masters of the world are realising the games that they can't carry on doing what they're doing, so they're going to try and control as much as they can to the bitter end. [Music] No prayer can hold your house, but it's time to fall, but even the people of the youth are interjecting and putting a word in the big man to eat your hair. Some of us are... Yeah, it's well, it makes sure we don't have a repeat of the black collar cost which you also write about, make music around as that scramble for resources which we have seen. We have a lot of young people, university students as Anthony Joseph Nocek as he came on the program before, and it's so wonderful to see that they're not, as you say, burdened so much from the past and they have this real sense of it doesn't have to be this way. But looking back, I'm wondering what activist movements from the past or like Black Panthers or others that you've been inspired by and how do you like to like take that forward? I was listening to your music, I was thinking of Sol Dad brother, the prison letters of George Jackson and it seems like, well to me it's just, I don't know why I was thinking of that, it's, they go in your music, it's very powerful and I think it shares with that book that those collections of letters, it's very powerful and quiet and psychological, like it operates on a lot of different levels at the same time. Personally, I think we probably all got a slightly different take on this but I've always been massively impressed by a guy called Eugene McDaniel, he was a writer and a ranger for Roberta Flack and Roberta Flack's made some of the best protest music I think but Eugene McDaniel's did his own take on it so he started off as an R&B soul singer and then I think was affected by the civil rights movement and then started to dream a little bit different. It was that his ability on tracks like Cherry Stones and Unspoken Dreams of Light which were on his Outlaw album, just the way he presented the sort of Black struggle differently. I was just really impressed by that. I was lucky though because when I was a kid, my dad had a few records and he would play Guildscot Hammer in 1980, Secrets album, a bit of Revolution will not be televised so from a very early age that stuck in my mind but I was also impressed by people like Prince because what I love about Prince, I mean I don't like his later music but set the early stuff. He just did it his way, he claimed shit for himself and he wasn't following any potential particular tribe, he just said I'm Prince, I'm going to be Androgynous, I'm going to speak to my feminine and masculine side, I'm going to be this virtuoso, I'm going to paint the world pink or in his later period, what was his look, it was black peach, what do you say? Fuchsia, purple, well he started off as the purple legend didn't he, but then in Simon the Times he sort of went a little bit peach didn't he, but yeah just artists who just they don't hold back, they give you the listener, their whole self and I think that's important for me when I'm looking to be inspired by anybody, I don't deliberately go oh I must listen to every single civil rights record there ever has been, you hear it a few times and it should really give you enough fuel for your own help and one of the things that we all do, I think as artists, Anthony, you recognize Anthony's voice, you recognize his prose as soon as you hear it, Jermaine's voice, you know it straight away and hopefully my music will be something that people go oh that's definitely the broken record, I know it because it's got such a distinct style, you can't expect people to have a certain view about you, you just hope that they pick up on what's really been said by the music, so yeah Anthony I'm sure you've got a whole library of black, white poets who've inspired me right, yeah I've got a lot of folks, I think one of my influences is a funny thing, I mean Gil Scott Heron, a lot of people have compared what I do to Gil Scott Heron, but I started writing when I was 11, I didn't really hear Gil Scott Heron until properly until I came to London in 89, so that's a long gap, when I heard people like Gil Scott Heron and the last poets and stuff, it was more, it was influential in the sense that they weren't at the root of what I was doing but they definitely would have checked the things that you sprinkle on top, the sort of inspirations, the things that make you think oh I can do this as well, I can do this so I can try this, they gave you, they made you see that you weren't in a vacuum and there were things that you could try, but my influences as a writer would be my grandmother who would tell me stories, really surreal, weird shit that she would just make up on the spot, that was really interesting, and I grew up listening to Calypso, I think Calypso was the first, probably one of the first sort of revolutionary responses to slavery and colonialism was the Calypso, but these guys in the Caribbean in the 1800s that were using language to fight against enslavement in a very witty and clever way, which became the Calypso, that is a revolutionary act, to find a way to speak about a slave master in a way that sounds funny, but when you listen to it there's a message of revolutionary action in there, in the same way that you have, I mean I'm kind of going everywhere now, but black American literals do the same thing, go down Moses and steal away and you know swing down sweet chariot, they're revolutionary coded songs that are inviting people to take action, and Calypso is a similar thing, it does that, so that was an inspiration for me, the Calypso, but it's sort of surreal, the surrealism, the wit, the fun of it, and then I was really influenced a lot by surrealist writing, like Amos' heir from Martinique, Ted Jones, American African American surrealist poet, I was really interested in black surrealist, absurdist language poets, you know, Bob Corfman, who is this amazing mixed race poet from New Orleans, Jewish mixed race poet from New Orleans, who for a long period of his life didn't write anything down and was just would just recite poetry, really interesting, I was yeah those were kind of my inspirations as a poet and of course people like Derek Walcott who came out a great way and Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas and Alan Ginsburg and etc. etc. etc. And your father you most recently wrote about? Yeah, well my father was more of a kind of a muse, he wasn't a literary influencer such, he was kind of a muse, yeah, definitely someone that made me want to write about him, but he didn't read poetry, that wasn't into that, but yeah, we've had all conversations here, so you know my literary thing. I like Anthony, I like the way you spun it because I was actually thinking about artists like Dave, George the Poet, Cleosor, who are amazing artists and spoken with artists who also speak about their experiences, their lived experiences, pain struggle, but you spun it and to talk about family and actually my grandmother is the hugest inspiration to me as well. That's it. And when you're saying the story I think it's something about that region, I'm going to my family. Okay, okay, oh man. And my granny would make up stories, folk tell stories about her being chased by ghosts, like it's things that will make you laugh and things that will make you cry and it's all about communicating and bringing people together. It's all about saying you're not alone in how you feel surrounded by a music my granny would sing. She would even was it the day before she passed away, she made sure she went to the team towards songs of phrases so she can sing along to the music. There's something really comforting with Black people. There's something really comforted about music, rhythm, patterns and sound that brings us together. So that's why when we talk about our lived experience through some of these songs, it resonates a lot with other people other Black people because like I'm not alone in my experience and someone else is articulating in a different way and that's the beauty and the power of music. And Jake can you share some of those whether they're biographical details or just those early soundscapes, all these things that must combine in your creative process? Well look, I'm a massive fan of Jimi Hendrick for obvious reasons but also because again he was unique. He did it Jimi's way and he wasn't putting himself out there as a Black artist because some of his music wasn't play on Black radio shows because in his era the radio was still segregated, large extent, but he also wasn't accepted by the White community either. So he was just himself. He was in many ways without getting too airy-fairy. He's one of those angels that came down to show us a different way and it really shows in his music. So he was a massive influence for me but then also Anthony talking about Calypso. I instantly thought of my dad's mighty Sparrow records. It would be played every Sunday morning. You didn't go to church then, although my dad was brought up in church and it was his way of reconnecting with the Caribbean because you live in the north of England, miserable, raining, grey, you step out your door, people's doing monkey chants at you and all this sort of stuff when you're a kid. That was my dad's way. Music was often the way people reconnected with their roots. Well, where was your dad from again, Jake, sorry. Lee's. Lee's, yeah, yeah, yeah. Formerly British, Honduras, so formerly British colony. It's something a small country and a lot of folk over here don't even know where it is or what it is but we tried to live there as a young family but my dad, he was a mental health nurse and in those days they used to put mental health patients on a island off the mainland. They were treated really badly and put in chains and stuff like that but my dad complained about it and the authorities didn't like him protesting about the treatment so they sort of said you'd better leave town mate so we had to, what would have been a beautiful Caribbean existence as a four or five year old young child we then had to come back to England and you felt the difference and I've only just realised the traumatic impact that had on me as a child so it means that I'm more of a risk taker these days I'm less like trust people and trusting but I'm getting over it but music has always been there as that sort of warm hug. I listen to quite a lot of classical music I listen to quite a lot of folk music as well so you know I've always liked things like Roy Harper some of the more fokier sides of Led Zeppelin, particularly Led Zeppelin, three album Garland Jefferies you probably know and to me so I've always not tried to restrict myself to one genre because I think it's important as a musician you just soak it all up and then you'll come you'll be able to make a recipe you'll be able to cook something with all these different ingredients but to your own taste I've never closed my eyes off to anything although pop music has never really been big on my radar although I was a raver for a war of five years because that for me was the ultimate rebellion of the teenager you could take loads of drugs go crazy fuck with system by whoever you wanted to party and I think that sort of rhythmic grounding helped me because I wasn't able to be brought up in the dental era or with the reggae sound system because I wasn't part of that UK culture that was so leading the way then I was in the north and to be honest we you didn't see many black people I was probably one of two black families in 50,000 people so I didn't have the luxury of being brought up in London or Birmingham or still where there are strong black music cultures so I almost had to invent my own in many ways but rave music and everyone getting together thousands of people all worshiping a similar rhythm as did have its place in my life I must admit I suppose if I wasn't into jazz I'd probably be doing some sort of rave or dance music or some sort and that's so interesting because though you have this very distinctive styles I never feel like we through these two albums and then your wider body of work that you are imposing one style on a subject like the song has its reason for being and then you adapt that whether it's sometimes it's time to say it louder sometimes to go to a softer intimate place can you just walk us through the two albums and maybe see how different songs are in dialogue with each other or listening to each other which I think is always so important to in in activism is to listen and then to to reflect you know that's a complex question I'm not sure when I'm writing music anyway I just play whatever comes and then it's a bit like painting lots of layers because what I because I love the idea of big orchestras right and if I had all the money in the world I would have a big orchestra and it'd be Anthony and Jermaine and the other vocalist up front and I would either be the conductor or just playing a little instrument at the side but I love big arrangement I love using strings horns to play melody lines I love using the voice to almost be a string instrument I'm a member of the orchestra so I didn't really set out to try and play two or three fast songs slow songs a couple of love songs a couple of you don't know where you I the way I compose I don't know where I'm going to go and often I go too far and I've got to roll back and go mmm I put too many instruments on that I need to just strip it back to what is the real core of what's being said here what am I actually trying to communicate so I wouldn't say that any of the tracks are particularly linked but what I did say to Anthony and all the vocalist I worked with was look dig deep into your mind and try and write something that represents your sense of place in this world and also you know what is it you want to say about systemic racism and for some that was a more of a struggle than others so Percy P you haven't really done a helical with a small P record before he was a rapper did his thing and he talked about what it was like to live relatively poor upbringing but to then overlay that with his view of systemic oppression was a struggle for him you know he didn't send me the lyrics for about a year well they came I was happy I was really pleased with what he'd done so each track had its own evolution I wouldn't say I've got a formula really I don't start by playing the bass always although obviously that's my main instrument but for me there has to be a strong mood from the outset and then I go with that mood but that mood might change because I might spend the whole week doing a track and by the time I've got some weekend I'm actually a really good mood and that that positive feeling starts to weave into the latest stage of the track what I'm trying to say there isn't a formula there's not one way of doing things it's the song speaks to you especially when you put lyrics on it it really tells you what the music should be skulltax is distraction is moving through the jungle the suit back killer bees it's the rule of threes skulltax is intact his hip is the head bump really contagious are you feeling this skulltax is good talk it's big talk it's dumb talk it's free talk skulltax they sign here by now right now vote now because once it's done it's gone right now vote out you go as you've just heard anthony germane and jake describe the process of putting together an album like the broken records architecture repression is an enormous yet joyful undertaking informed by social bonds long-standing creative practices whether they be music or poetry the unique and often challenging experience of growing up black and britain and so much more my name is lyle hutchins and i'm an associate music podcaster for the creative process i'm currently working on an album of my own and though the genre leans more towards the rock and folk end of things i can relate to a lot of what these incredible musicians are reflecting on i especially enjoyed jake's comment about not thinking too much or over analyzing while creating and allowing a mood for a piece to develop over longer stretches of time because that's exactly how the process feels like to me though i've heard some describe the exacting and meticulous ways to write songs it seems like the best musical works in my humble opinion emerge from a combination of practice craft and subconscious absorption and inspiration one of the books that i look to for advice when songwriting writing down the bones by writer and zen Buddhist natalie goldberg champions the concept of writing without much judgment or critique and only after going in and editing and i think a similar process occurs with music because of this everyone's art is informed by their lived experience in my songs drawn from growing up in a tiny corner of new england as well as going to school down in the vibrant city of new orleans certainly reflects a different perspective than the broken record songs do and for that reason it is incredibly important that we as a culture decide to prioritize voices that have been historically shut out of the mainstream and that we have the courage to face societal ills like the systemic oppression of africa and the african diaspora in the western world and beyond including in our music not only while having all perspectives represented in our art brought in our compassion and understanding of our fellow human beings but also make us better creatives better poets better musicians because ultimately art is about being moved to an emotion through an aesthetic work and often the most powerful emotions don't come from us alone they arise most importantly together now back to the interview because i want to ask about your film scoring experience jake so you talk about painting pictures with your music you're the first you're laying the sound and then others are adding their voices as you describe and i guess with your film scoring experience usually other sometimes this is different for different films like you scored for the films me tane mama and the sunshine makers and others you're doing now through the last sound so how does that work reacting to the images it is a different process and with the sunshine makers we worked with the director cosmo fielding and it was the first film he'd done so he was new to it myself and malcolm and new to it so you were sort of babies kind of scrabble around trying to do something but he would send us three four-minute video tips of certain scenes and say could you write something to this but i think why don't i come back to that and then he and germane i want to ask about your reflections on the importance of the arts or in education and ai and all these other things that are kind of being shaken up at the moment in the music field and just everywhere and your reflections on the kind of world where leaving the next generation it's in an ai germane jackman out there potentially over the way things are going right now i want to be surprised spending a cell watching a film early today that's one netflix and it's about ai germane philovis is in it oh atlas yeah what's atlas yeah what's this afternoon and what what i found interesting i said 25 years ago we had crazy sci-fi films about a pandemic taking over the whole world and 25 years later we had a pandemic and i wonder in 25 years time will these movies now be our reality we're starting to see how ai i think scarlet johansen has just taken a filmmaker to court because they've used her voice as an ai bot and made out the ai bot sound like her and we're seeing ai being used in music as well and i think we can all agree that it's developing and progressing so much further than our legal systems can even keep up then society can actually keep up chapped tdp is just the tip of the iceberg there's more developed ai tools and resources that are in the vaults or google that they haven't even brought out yet it's interested what the future will hold i just hope that as we build and go into this new age with more technology that we aren't keeping that we aren't holding human beings back communities can still benefit from new structure and systems in society because we're seeing what's happening in google we're seeing how many are being displacing being chilled we're seeing children pick from those cobalt mines for apple and other tech companies i just hope that we can evolve to benefit from a new society as we progress in the future as my outlook on ai i guess to embrace its possibilities and not and let it be another system of oppression by continuing that the same old story to create new stories with our ai co-creators if i'm not being too techno optimistic because i'm not yeah yeah and to be honest voices have been manipulated particularly in pop music in the last 10-15 years so much anyway you're not really hearing the original singer singing more into something you would have done if it was seraphor or Nina Simone then you knew you were getting Nina Simone whereas she was working with a producer now they'd be using melodine or one of those nude plugins to distort the voice for me it's all i'm not too worried about ai in terms of music anyway because it'll be used to make companies more money which will be used to then mimic what they think he's making money as opposed to really impact on the people who are purely focused on creating art so and it will have its place but i also am confident enough in humans ability to see the difference and to feel the difference i think it will force us to feel more and be more present about what we're experiencing rather than we'll just blindly go into this ai world and nothing will feel real and we'll just be happy with it i think humans inherently want one authenticity and we'll seek that out and it'll almost become a trend in itself you know find the real vocalist as opposed to the ai version so i think some really interesting things will come out from that journey to all and and take this this and to the record the outcomes there's something will rule about the architectural oppression both part one and part two there's a raw realness and authenticity in that in those songs that heart create there's a living experience that ai won't understand and there's a feeling in those songs and if it's not just in in the words from the spoken art spoken word artists if it's not in the the instruments that are being played it's in the voice that you hear it's being simply you hear the pain you hear the struggle you hear the joy you hear all of those emotions in all those songs and that's something that yeah they make up or create and it's been a pleasure to work with jake as jake was saying earlier i know him before i went on the first record and you know me that in a work capacity so i've only ever seen one side of jake but in the studio is a whole number jake there and it's it's been eye-opening i've learned so much work with him too all right thanks you man appreciate that you know that on camera wicked i think that's so beautiful how you can bring that sense of community and work and bring that into your artistic practice and you can have this shorthand can you talk a little bit about that kind of shorthand you have between musicians where you almost it's a kind of telepathic sense of where you can express things without words or just express things to your instrument it's a hard one now actually because it's just a feeling really it's like you can play so Anthony will know this from rehearsing for a show you can sometimes you'll you play best when you're in the rehearsal room as opposed to in front of a crowd because there isn't the pressure of having to perform or somebody looking at you or any distractions and actually especially with music where you've got the rhythm is quite important and the groove and the swing i think swinging probably is the most important thing you have to feel it and it's hard to put into words but when i'm playing with melton the drama of played with as long as i've known Anthony if not a bit longer 20 years now we both can anticipate each of those next moves and so our subconscious is listening to his subconscious then and when when we're in the present we're also saying to each other oh you're slightly behind the beat there or can you just be a bit more ahead and sometimes that can make you angry because somebody's telling you that what you're doing is not good enough but what so long as you focus on the end goal which is to create something that really does lock together then any criticisms or diversions you are bothered by you just really focus as bass player and drummer we call it the one and James Brown used to call it the one which is you know you hit that beat together and there's that unity and it means that you're playing as one one musician rather than two and i think that was always the thing that we focused on as a band and i use that in my own composition i am very if you listen to the music there's always a dip there's always one instrument being backed up by another so in a lot of time with the melodies or little riff i'll have two instruments playing the same riff but one will be either slightly out of tune or it will be an octave a par or maybe a fist or a third and it just means sort of two guitars playing a melody slightly differently to the other one makes that melody even better than just having one instrument play it or playing exactly the same thing twice and old mate boy he'll expect to use to use that technique on a lot of those records it's three bass players or playing slightly similar stuff but not exactly the same and what that means is you've got three different characters forming one end product and that there's something powerful about that so when i am writing i'm often using different instruments that you wouldn't expect to play a melody so i use the harp a lot i use vibes a lot i use certain keyboards a lot i've got like a tag guitar which i love i use that a lot that's a four-stringed guitar and people don't use that but i just love the tone of it it feels like a proper bluesy it's got a real strong bluesy earthy feel so i don't tend to use the sort of traditional bass drums piano saxophone i do occasionally but i try and avoid that try and use more interesting instruments just pushes you a bit more. all around the world it's the same more story unemployment just rising with a different black glass and it is not surprising who is not surprised in this prison prison of the end it is a prison of skin that i am living in where i like that very much i don't know if Anthony wants to say something about that but i like it seems like a spiritual element to that to say that we're all one and i think that if we could all have this kind of collective experience we wouldn't have to have these like diversity equity and inclusion courses because we would there would be no you and there would be no me it would just we would all depend on each other to make each other better there's spiritual aspect to all of this to art to creating poetry to creating music i mean that's another chapter of an interview i think i think that is for me i don't know i think it's a it's magic i think there's a magical element to at least a writing poetry because you are using materials the material of the poet is what everyone uses words everyone uses words everyone that speaks it has the ability to speak we're using the same tools and the musician as well you're using the same tools as everybody else you got a certain amount of possibilities i'm not sure musically how that works but i'm sure you know you're using a particular scale or you're using a series of scales that is available to everyone but you're able to craft something out of that which is uniquely your vision or your voice and i think that is that's the spiritual act in itself you're creating something that transcends is quite transcendent and has a has the ability to move people to make people weep to make people happy but you're using the same tools as everybody else and how are you doing that that is mystery that is a mystery no one could really describe i mean Jake couldn't tell you how you know how exactly do i put these notes together that makes in this minor key or whatever that makes you feel this particular thing he can't explain that it's just a magical process i can't explain a lot of stuff that how the poetry works it's a magical process that you get from devoting a lot of years to your craft i think i always remember this quote that i heard Tony Bennett the singer the American singer say one time in an interview he said it takes 10 years to become a consummate artist so you got to work at whatever craft it is whether it's bass playing bass or singing or writing poetry you got to work at it for 10 years before you can get to a point where you not even mastering it but you feel that you can do it you can definitely play bass or you can definitely write poetry and at that point it's really about moving out what's into the world and spreading spreading it out so that's how i see it i don't get too tied up in the sort of esoteric thing i think it's all tied to the spirit is tied to work this the spiritual is tied to the word that you do you have to put the work in and the working working and working at a thing eventually the universe will give up its secrets to you i'm sure you you know what i mean you work at something i mean amiri baraka american poet african-american poet has actually no it's not him this is an african proverb that he quotes one time but it's uh anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough you know that's what it is and if you love the music like jake and i does it will give up its secrets and you will be able to harness the power of the thing because you love it you come to it with love which is essentially what spirit is isn't it love this is a love it's a love thing but let's not get too esoteric no but i love i love the notion of magic and the fact it's there it's around you all the time yeah you know yeah you need to be open to it to be able to grab on to it and latch on to it yeah but you need to work at the craft you can't come to it as someone who's just trying your luck it's not going to work later you might be lucky but you've got to put in you got to you got to work you got to dedicate yourself to a thing in order for you to really give you something a substance back i think you know i think so i agree indeed it's a very important message that you say there about it doesn't come it's a life's work it's everything of value takes time so as you reflect on the future and education and the kind of world we're leaving for the next generation how do you feel that we're preparing students for the uncertainties that lie ahead and and what would you like them to know preserve and remember i think i'll leave that to Anthony he's the one who's lecturing the use yeah i i think we live in a very different world and i think the world that Jake and i grew up in and compared to the world that we live in now is the access to information back in our day i mean when i was in Trinidad if i wanted to hear particular music let's say if i wanted to hear Van Morrison music it was hard i had to really go and seek that out i had to find a friend who had a tape who had a borrowed a tape from somebody who might have a Van Morrison album now you can get that at the click of your fingers you can get anything you can find anything out you can google anything out if i want to find out what's the distance between here and i don't know nothing home i could find that out in an instant and i think that is shaping the way it has to have an impact on how the brain is evolving it has to have an impact on how the kids the young people nowadays how their brains are evolving and how they access information and knowledge i think that's really significant i'm not sure i'm not a scientist in that way but i think that it's hard it's becoming very difficult now to compare the world today and the processes we use today with the processes that we use 20-30 years ago it's very different space and what i find is that you know for instance i teach poetry i teach fiction as well now you're at a stage where people can learn to be they can learn to write poetry pretty quickly they can learn it because they have all the information there information that i would take five six years to find or learn they haven't had to click on their fingers they can go online and do a course or a workshop for a week and they can come out of it learning how to write a sonnet absolutely but is it a sonnet that is going to move people and resonate and last for years maybe not but they can definitely learn how to do it so they have an advantage that for at that point they can take the knowledge that they have now the access to it and really build on it and sort of achieve great things i think so that's why we're hopeful because the information is there they have the ability to find it and it's just about living with the knowledge for a period of time shake what's been important to you well i agree with all that anthony's just said i think we're experiencing things differently or young people are to the way we used to or are doing now and i think time is really important and this speaks to anthony's point about learning your craft all the things that we express as artists are based on experiences that we've had generally speaking but if you've not had the experiences and they've been purely virtual or very quick experiences they're therefore not going to be as imprinted in your brain my message to young people is take the time to have the experience whatever it is you're trying to do because if you try and think you can get away with doing it quick it's not going to be any good or it's not going to be a fulfilling experience you're just going to want the next quick fix yeah and sometimes that work sometimes it's just instantaneous but it's because you've had all that certainly with me i've been collecting records 25 30 years i've sat for hours going deep into that record letting it i'm soaking it up i'm letting i'm absorbing it in real time so therefore when i need to call on that for inspiration it's already there in my system i'm not having to look on my phone and go oh yeah somebody said you should check out lap bands i'm quickly looking there oh yeah that's pretty cool and how do you know that if you've only spent two seconds listening something you have to let it soak in and that's particularly true of rhythm and swing music when i first started trying to play afro beat we were playing with belando julius because i've not been brought up in legos listening to high life with my parents when i was younger it's not in me so i had to really go away and school myself i had to switch the lights off both the curtains and just headphones on really absorb it over weeks and weeks and then i could slowly start to oh right the bass players playing slightly you're playing that note slightly different to one of them i think it should be played and i need to almost deconstruct my own mind in order to try and emulate a different musical form and that's really important i think that goes for a visual artist as well when you ask a kid now to explain what picasso pains look like they'll probably do this weird thing with an eye over here and an ear over here picasso didn't start painting like that he he was classically trained and then he's read hundreds and hundreds of bucks that's given him more of a palette to work with jazz musicians miles david's particularly didn't like the new fusion sound when what it did is it let loads of young musicians just stayed on one key and solo forever without any musical form and that's why a lot of the original jazz was pushed back against fusion so i think if it's not played with love and with passion it's gonna sound rubbish and i think that goes for poetry is singing anything really visual art you've got to put yourself into it otherwise what's the point in doing it in my opinion but you shouldn't be seeking fame or notoriety or popularity but the problem is the pressure on musicians and artists now you've got to have your own following you've got to do your own promo you've got to do your own artwork you etc etc whereas in the old days you could just be a musician and a damn good one and then there'd be other people handling all that now you've got to be somehow this whole business wrapped up in one person and some of us aren't great at the business side or some of us aren't great at self promotion and i i hate it but i know i've got to do it otherwise nobody will be able to hear what i'm doing you know so that that for me i'm glad that i've seen it work differently because if i was young now making music i'd be spending probably more time posting about useless things on instagram than about anything real or meaningful so yes but depressing that but i'm glad we don't know the future because if we did it life would be really boring right i'm young people who will surprise us and amaze us that i know for sure that's the one thing i think i can feel so confidently about the future there'll be people who will blow our minds in terms of music or poetry singing so thank you jake vocation anthony joseph and germane jackman for the intimacy and honesty of your work and for shining a light on injustice and bringing your art to bear witness to the architecture of oppression and the paths we can as you say dream a little different and understand that we are all one thank you for adding your voice to the creative process you're welcome thank you mano the creative process podcast is supported by the and michowski foundation the associate interview producers on this episode were sam meyers and lyle hudgens associate text editor was not a land the creative process is produced by mia funk additional production of support by sovie garnie we hope you enjoy listening to this podcast if you'd like to get involved with our creative community exhibitions podcasts or submit your creative works for review just drop us a line at team@creativeprocess.info thanks for listening
