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Oh my God,
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Opening on a patchwork of soundbites about music as global social glue, The Spirit of Apollo isn’t shy about its purpose. Assembled over half a decade by L.A. DJ/producer Squeak E. Clean and Brazil’s DJ Zegon, the duo known as N.A.S.A., it’s not just a delicious, multicoloured batch of quality funk-hop recalling the finest moments of the Beastie Boys, with a strong added dose of Brazilian flair. It’s also a gathering of top-shelf guest-vocal talent than spans two continents, countless styles and a couple of generations, from really current cats—the Cool Kids, M.I.A., Lykke Li—right back to KRS-One and N.A.S.A.’s surly labelmate on Epitaph offshoot Anti-, Tom Waits (playing off Kool Keith!). Brazil is of course represented, with Seu Jorge, Lovefoxxx of CSS and others aboard the spacecraft. N.A.S.A. have plenty of follow-up in the works—a remix album and another of apocryphal tracks with Cee-Lo, De La Soul and more, for starters—but first they’re hitting the road with their “intergalactic circus.” The Mirror reached former New Yorker Squeak E. Clean, aka Sam Spiegel (brother of Spike Jonze), by phone at his home in Los Angeles. Mirror: You and Zegon both have strong links to skateboard culture. I’m curious if that’s why you originally relocated from New York to L.A.? Squeak E. Clean: Not really, but it’s always been part of both of our lives. Zegon grew up in Brazil and he’s a pro skater, and actually, that’s how he discovered DJing and even hip hop. He tells me that the park he used to skate in is the same one the first Brazilian B-boys would dance in. He was kind of a punk rocker at the time, and those B-boys introduced him and his friends to hip hop—and he and his friends introduced them to punk rock. It’s always been a part of me too. Growing up, I was always skateboarding, and would discover music through skateboarding films. Some of the first film-score stuff I did was for skateboard films too, so it’s always been a part of both of us. It’s all about being an individual and doing your own thing, and I’m sure that same attitude fuelled the making of the N.A.S.A. record, which we did very independently, exactly how we wanted to do it, without having to conform to any musical genre or album conventions. M: You and Zegon met at a party in L.A. Tell me a bit about that fateful occurrence. SEC: This guy DVNO, who’s part of the Ed Bangers crew from Paris, was making a record there at the time. He had a party up in his studio, celebrating the finishing of his record. Zegon and I were there and had a bunch of friends in common. Zegon was actually living in L.A. at the time, at Mario C’s house—the producer Mario [Caldato Jr.] who produced the Beastie Boys and stuff. We started talking about Brazilian music and really hit it off. Literally the next day, I was over at his house with my MPC and my drum-machine sampler, and we made a track together. We connected through the music and kept building from there. Joint effortM: How soon did you guys settle on the idea and intention of The Spirit of Apollo? SEC: You know, I think it was something that just kinda grew. At first we were just making music, but then one night, we made this track that took a sound from Sputnik. We were like, “Wow, this is spacey.” We were just smoking a joint in the backyard and came up with the idea for the name, N.A.S.A.—North America, South America. But the idea really clicked with one of the first tracks, maybe the second or third we did—“Strange Enough” with Karen O, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Fatlip. Fatlip was always around the studio, just because he was a good friend, and we decided we wanted to do a song with him and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Actually, Karen was always around the studio at the time too because I was working on her solo record. One night, we were drunk and I asked Karen, “You wanna get in the booth and write a hook for this song?” After we did that song, the idea for the record really clicked, like, “Wow, we’re onto something. Let’s do every song with different crazy, crazy combinations of artists. We’ve come together from very different worlds through music, let’s explore that idea on every song and bring totally unexpected people together through music. Ignore boundaries and borders that are there and just make a totally open-minded, exploratory record.” M: I’d imagine some guests were easier to rope in than others. Who were the more difficult ones, the real scores? SEC: Well, a lot of people. Chuck D was one of the first people we reached out to, but it was really hard to get in touch. Finally, right towards the end of the record, he came through. We ended up linking up with him through DJ Z-Trip, who did cuts on “Money” and is friends with him. You know, a lot of times, we’d reach out through all the conventional ways and spend a long time doing that, then we’d find someone who was friends with the artist and reach out through them, and that turned out to be more effective. Another example of that is David Byrne, who’s on the same song. We tried for a year and had no luck, and then I realized that one of my friends is his niece. I asked her to get in touch with him, she said sure, e-mailed him and literally that day, he got back in touch and said he’d do it. M: I’m almost afraid to ask who you hoped to get on there but didn’t—but I’ll ask anyway. Any big fish that got away? SEC: Yeah, so many people. I wish I had a list, but just a few of them are James Brown, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, Björk, Al Green, Morrissey, Mos Def—the list is insane. M: No one can accuse you guys of not aiming high. SEC: That’s true. We would never be like, “Aw, fuck it, we’ll never get that person.” We always shot as high as we could, reached out and did everything in our power to get who we wanted. Calling all aliensM: There’s a visual dimension to N.A.S.A. as well, with artists like Shepard Fairey and Marcel Dzama contributing alternating cover art and animated videos. Tell me about that side of things. SEC: We wanted to further the idea of bringing the world together, so we teamed up our favourite visual artists with animators and brought their work to life. Almost all of them had never had their stuff move before. Each one did a music video for a different song, and then we had these other animated bits that are part of this film we decided to make, half animation and half documentary footage, because we shot the whole making of the record too. It’s about 75 per cent finished. It’s coming together. We just shot the whole making of the record, whether it’s us down in New York digging for records, or going to Jamaica to record with Sizzla at his Rasta compound in Kingston with Amanda Blank, or George Clinton coming to the studio in a very, very heavily medicated state to record with us all night. We got all that stuff. You see all these amazing artists doing their thing and their creative processes. M: How much of the recording was done with the guest vocalists directly in the studio and how much was long-distance, bouncing sound files around? SEC: Almost everybody, we recorded in the same room with them. There were two or three exceptions, but we wanted to be part of every session to make sure the record had cohesion and felt like one piece of art rather than just a bunch of random songs stuck together like a compilation. By being there, we could guide the songs along and keep them within the framework we’d created, the idea of the record. We also tried as much as possible to get the different guest vocalists together in the same room, to have them bouncing off each other and create chemistry. It was really cool how people would raise the bar when they’re in the room with one another. M: For your live shows, you’ll mostly have to compensate for the absence of the album’s cavalcade of stars. So whatcha got going on for the live tour? SEC: Me and Zegon are DJs, so it’s a DJ tour, two-by-four—two DJs, four turntables. We’re playing all our original music, and remixes and edits. We’ve edited a video for every song, and we can actually control the video with our turntables as well as the audio, so we can manipulate and scratch the images, which is cool. It’s a four-turntable audio-video set, but then we also recruit aliens from whatever city we may be in. We get local extraterrestrials to show up, dance and party with us at the show, so it ends up being this big, intergalactic circus. WITH DJ KHIASMA AT LA SALA ROSSA |
