Sunday, April 15, 2012

Evian Christ - Kings and Them

Kings and Them

Evian Christ



01. Drip
02. MYD
03. Go Girl
04.Fuck It None Of Ya'll Don't Rap
05. Horses in Motor 
06. Snapback Back
07. Thrown Like Jacks
08. Fridge, Crank, Gun


 (PF)- These days, there's no shortage of R&B/rap-influenced producers releasing pitch-dark music behind a cryptic veil. And it's easy to peg that increasingly tired narrative on Evian Christ, who enigmatically put songs up on YouTube in December, released a mixtape, Kings and Them, on Tri Angle in February, and generated plenty of web chatter in the process. But Joshua Leary, 22, says he never really cared about anonymity, and that he wasn't being strategic by originally holding back his real name. He only put his songs online for his friends to hear, but then Dummy caught on, and he started getting tons of messages from "quite big record labels, managers, booking agents, visual artists, and French fashion magazines."


 But he didn't respond to any of them for weeks, partly due to the fact that he's currently going to school full-time at Edge Hill University in Northwest England, where he's studying to be a teacher for kids between 4 and 6. Leary lives in Ellesmere Port, a sleepy town just south of Liverpool, and initially got interested in making music while playing around with his dad's vintage keyboards as a teenager. At 19, he produced a batch of Donuts-inspired edits of soul songs, and actually had plans to release those early tracks, but the label intending to put them out went under. "The songs were pretty awful and never should've been released anyway," he says now. So he walked away from music for a while, opting instead to focus on school.


Last year, he downloaded the music program Cubase and tried again, this time incorporating a different set of influences: hip-hop and R&B he heard on MTV growing up as well as more ambient music. For example, mixtape track "Thrown Like Jacks" samples both drone auteurGrouper and Cash Money disciple Tyga-- that rapper's voice (along with a snippet of Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner") is also used on the previously unreleased Kings and Them bonus cut "Payo Rent", above.


Although Leary listens to Clams Casino, Odd Future, and Spaceghostpurrp, he isn't exactly tuned into every player, subgenre, and movement being discussed online. (On the term cloud rap: "Shit, you're asking the wrong person.") The guy, after all, has a lot of schoolwork on his plate. "I have to listen to some more of these people I'm being compared to," he says. "I've read a couple of reviews and they just made no sense to me."


Leary's got another EP in the works, which he plans on getting out later this year, and he's talking to some MCs and singers about producing tracks and doing remixes, though he was scarce on specifics. After he graduates in June, Leary plans to postpone his teaching career a year to try his luck with music, and he's already plotting his first series of live shows over the summer. He cut out of a lecture in order to speak with us over the phone.




Pitchfork: Did you tip any of the blogs and websites off on the existence of your music before it started getting around a couple months ago?


EC: I've got no idea how anybody found it. That's the truth. I sent it to five or six friends, so maybe they just sent it to a couple of other people, and it's gone around. I'd done absolutely nothing to promote it other than that. It's quite strange. I'm not hugely well-versed in categories and types of music, and I don't have much time to get online, so I hadn't heard of Dummy. I'd be interested to know how they found it first. I just thought, "Oh, this is quite cool," not really realizing the significance of it. And then I logged onto my YouTube account and had like 40 messages, and it all started from there. By chance, I replied to one from Tri Angle; I hadn't heard of Tri Angle at the time, but I just got talking to Robin [Carolan], who runs the label, and he settled me about the whole thing and slowly helped me through the various aspects of all the attention that I was getting.


Evian Christ: "Fuck It None of Y'all Don't Rap" (via SoundCloud)


Pitchfork: Had you listened to any of the artists on that label?


EC: I knew Clams Casino, that's kind of why I replied. Because my life is so hectic, I don't get a chance to stay very up-to-date with things that are coming out. I'm fairly oblivious to everything. When Robin approached me about signing to Tri Angle, I did make a point of listening to all their music and I said to him, "Wow, this is actually the same as what I'm trying to do here."


Pitchfork: Was it an intentional decision to stay anonymous at first?


EC: It wasn't an intentional thing. But in hindsight, I wasn't into Twitter, and I wasn't really replying to messages, so it did seem like I was perhaps making an effort to be mysterious. But I didn't really know what was going on, and I just let it drift by until I got signed, and then we started making announcements. It was never a contrived thing, but it actually did work out. I mean, it did get people interested. But it was never a thought that I had in mind, by any means.


Pitchfork: Do you feel like not being too aware of the online music world works in your favor?


EC: Possibly. The bits that I've read sometimes compare me to artists and genres that I haven't even heard of. [laughs] It can be really easy to hear something, and then be like, "Oh shit, this is amazing," and then try to reproduce it. So not hearing a lot of current stuff means you're not consciously following trends, which is probably a good thing.


Evian Christ: "Payo Rent"


Pitchfork: A lot of people bring up juke and footwork when they talk about your music. Are you well-versed in those styles?


EC: I've never really listened to much of it. I thought juke was faster than my music, but someone told me it has to do with the way that I chop up chords. But it wasn't like I was just going to sit down and make a juke song. Essentially, I just tried to make a rap song at 70 bpm, and if it felt like it was too slow, so I just doubled the speed, and that's basically how those faster tracks came out.


Pitchfork: Have you started working on any new stuff?


EC: I've tried to, but I'm so busy for the minute. I've been making music between midnight and three in the morning and then waking up at six. It's in the really early stages: finding samples, seeing what works, downloading new sounds, looking into buying new keyboards. I'm gonna try and make it a bit more expansive.