'Dally' / Interview with Teether & Hextape
Navigating collaboration in a pandemic, self-imposed creative restriction and the spiritual power of raves.
“Dally” is the first collaboration between Too Birds rapper Teether and electronic mastermind Hextape released via budding Naarm label X Amount Records Named after the ill-fated character from S.E Hinton’s The Outsiders who is gunned down police, the track hones in on the unsettling and abhorrent incidents of this year with dark, industrial drum and bass matched with fiery yet subdued vocals.
I had a chance to connect with the duo over the telephone to discuss the track, the evolution of their creative processes and the unifying feeling of raves. Read the interview below.
First of all - really cool track. You’ve really nailed something different and intriguing here -. I’m interested to know how this collaboration began, how did you set this up?
Hextape: I hit up Teether because I am a long time fan and invited his group Too Birds to play at this drain show I put on pretty much bang on a year ago. I had been wanting to work with rappers for a while because friends of mine would say ‘oh it’s so easy - you have this unfinished beat and you don’t know what to do with it so you just send it to someone and they do their shit over the top of it and then it’s done’. I thought that sounded really intriguing.
Teether: Likewise, I’ve been trying to branch out of just making rap shit for a while. I just want to switch it up. Obviously this is a collaboration that I would love to be a part of but I didn’t really think it would ever happen. But life works in mysterious ways and it does some cool shit.
Hextape: Yeah I really wanted to make it a jungle or drum and bass vibe as well. I was really curious to see how that affected your flow and stuff Josh, because I don’t actually know if that was challenging or interesting for you in particular ways.
Teether: It was mad tricky. I got into a rut of always writing in the same tempo, always putting the snare on the third beat. It was cool because it forced me to switch up a lot and try and fit it in.
In what ways did you find that you approached rapping on this beat differently to, say, a classic hip-hop or trap beat?
Teether: I feel like with a lot of my own music you can tell that I’m alone and thinking too much, making tracks that aren’t too profound… although I was trying to be. I just wanted to rap and not think about it too much. It’s kind of the same feeling as when you walk into a rave and you don’t know what’s going to happen but you know that it’s going to be interesting.
Captured by Nicole Goodes (@ninnkole)
The mood of this year has certainly been tumultuous, but it has been imbued with a certain impassioned spirit and ruckus for change. What sort of mood, energy and thoughts underpinned your creation of this track?
Teether: I had been listening to the beats over and over. I had written the first part of the song but I couldn’t crack the second bit, but then it all came to me.
It was about an incident, before Corona, when I was outside the front of my house in Brunswick waiting for a lift. The cops pulled up next to me and began grilling me, ID’d me and asked what I was doing there. I said it was my house and then they asked whether I had any proof of that or had had any prior trouble with the cops. I just smiled and gave them my ID to make it easy. I wrote about it that week and it really had me thinking. You know, that was a good day. It’s cooked that you can have a good day and then things like that happen but if it’s a bad day you could end up dead if you’re in the wrong situation.
I juxtaposed that with the first part of the track, which is more just about getting fucked up. I feel as though this is a city with lots of problems in it, lots of people going through their own shit. But everyone is on the same sort of wavelength when they’re getting fucked up and trying to forget all that.
What about you Bridget?
Hextape: It was at the start of this year when I was visiting my family in the mountains. I return to my teenage sleeping pattern when I’m there - I make music all night and then sleep half of the day. I used a lot of field recordings that I had taken when I was back there as well. I really like taking field recordings from nature and industrial stuff to build new virtual drum machines out of. It feels more organic than just using the prescribed sounds.
Teether: It’s a really cool touch. It adds such a dimension and depth. Shit that no one else could have possibly sampled.
Captured by Lou Wheeler
I’m curious to hear how you craft all of these sounds. Are you both more hardware or DAW people?
Hextape: I’m so software now, I’m such an imposter. I have all these synthesiser tattoos, I teach synthesiser as a job and I think people consider me to be this extreme synth nerd which I guess I was, but now I just do everything in Ableton.
Teether: Ableton is fucked. You can literally make any sound. All I have is a laptop with a broken screen that’s plugged into a TV and a shit microphone. It’s the worst set-up of all time.
The worst set-up producing great music. It reminds me of that saying that limitation and restriction breeds creativity. In a sense, the more restrictions, the more possibilities for manipulating technologies in new and exciting ways.
Teether: I think limitations and restrictions are really cool obstacles to have. If you are boxed in you can really get some shit out of it that would have never occurred if you had a huge palette of sounds available to you.
Captured by Keelan O'Hehir (@keelanohehir)
I feel as though rap and jungle/breakbeat/D&B is such a great collaboration because they both started as counter-culture movements historically and socially with so much passion and anger behind them. That sort of fuel is exemplified in an outdoor party or rave like the one you curated, Bridget.
Why do you think that raves tend to have this sort of unifying feeling?
Hextape: Because they suspend reality. There’s a sense of all conspiring together and even a vague sense of risk hanging over you. Maybe you’ll get shut down, so you’re all also united against a common enemy. I think it’s a great training ground for being political in other ways but I like that it is not explicitly political.
Teether: It was great at the start of the year. Raves were really filling the void that wasn’t funded by the government.
Definitely. Even seeing how much the music community bonded together to fundraise for the bushfires was very inspiring and heart-warming.
Hextape: Yeah I think fund raves are really important. I notice this growing culture in the Melbourne music scene - oh man i am going to say something that maybe not everybody is on board with - where everyone just wants to get paid for everything. To even ask people to play a fundraiser, people are always like what about my artist fee? Maybe the bushfires, at the very least, spurred people into thinking oh I could just do this thing where I don’t personally get paid but I get to contribute to a bigger cause.
Same with raves. You can ask quite famous people to play and you’re not going to give them good equipment and you’re not going to get them a rider and you’re not going to get them any money but they’ll do it because they’re really desperate to play a real, live underground rave.
Teether: Yeah, it is really cool. It is really strange to me how many people are really chasing an artist fee or getting money up front. I guess the chances of making money in this part of the industry is really slim; you might as well just contribute everything you make off it - put it back into the world.
I’m totally with you. I guess the frustration more so lies in the inequitable division of funds in the process. Though I think this is more of a problem in the commercial and mainstream music world where industry bosses higher up tend to get a larger cut than perhaps they necessarily deserve.
How have you both been keeping creative during lockdown?
Hextape: You’ve had a million releases coming out Josh.
Teether: It was just so much shit all piled up. I don’t think it’s that much to be proud of. There’s just nothing else to do. I was really hyped for Dally - a lot more than the album, actually.
I think it’s great that you’ve been releasing a bunch of music. There’s such a hesitation around it because everyone keeps crafting their tracks in the hope of reaching a semblance of perfection because everyday you get better: you learn how to mix better, you learn how to use your synth better, etc, so you keep improving your music. Though in the midst of this you never see your progress because you always see the current state of your music as opposed to being able to go back to old releases to see how much you’ve progressed and developed.
I’m curious to hear what both of your relationships are with releasing music. Do you tend to hold onto releases until you get sick of them, or are you more into releasing culture?
Hextape: I think I’m the same. At the other end of the spectrum you have people like Aphex Twin, who I'm pretty sure uploads everything he’s ever made to Soundcloud the second he renders it.
Teether: That’s dope. Huge flex.
Hextape: I’m too excited about something to sit on it. There’s a critical window that you need to get something out in before you get bored of it or start to criticise it. There’s a really weird timeline with art and music where you have this intense period of staying up late and making something and being really charged on it before you have to then send it to whoever, whether it’s the label or the gallery or mastering engineer. Then you do not see it again for months, so you just have to wait for it to come out. Sometimes when it comes out you’re sick of it, sometimes you get excited about it again. I think we could all stand to be like Aphex Twin in that way.
Teether: the critical window is a really good way to put it. If you listen to it too soon after you’ve made it you may be harsh - it could sound like complete shit. If you wait too long, it’s hard to release anymore. It’s weird. I feel like I change my mind every day. Sometimes you just have to drop it so you can stop with those thoughts.
Hextape: Dally is actually going to have another stage in its life when our friend Ahmed finishes making the video for it. We filmed the first bit between the two lockdowns. We went to these silos in Sunshine where I hung out quite a bit when I lived in Melbourne. I had this idea that we would all get to the top, then we got half a flight of stairs up (there are maybe eight flights of stairs) and almost everyone revealed that they’re afraid of heights.
Teether; Yeah that shit was crazy. It was see through. You could just look at your potential doom.
Hextape: Yeah I felt really bad. I was like fuck, I didn’t ask anyone how they were going to feel about this.
Teether: It was good though. I liked the surprise. I never would have gone in there if I knew, but now I have experienced that.
Captured by Nicole Goodes (@ninnkole)
What would your ideal music world look like post-COVID?
Teether: I think we should get rid of all the shit venues and just leave them as abandoned buildings so we can just have unofficial gigs everywhere.
That would be amazing. That is the ideal world - you’re dreaming big.
Hextape: I second that. Just heaps of raves. I had this idea when Corona first happened like oh man, just think about how spiritual that first rave is going to be for everyone. I kind of took for granted how paranoid everyone is about being around each other, and that feeling is going to stick around for a bit.
Teether: I think the first rave is going to be a really short one because everyone will have forgotten their tolerance and will pass out.
Hextape: Yeah because everyone has been going to sleep at like 9pm.
Captured by Keelan O'Hehir (@keelanohehir)
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Header image art by pv3000 (@pv3000)
Article and interview by Margarita Bassova (@rxtabass)
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