Brian Hayes Curtin interviews Edan for the Cork Independent in advance of his 2 shows in Ireland (Twisted Pepper 18 Dec, Cyprus Avenue 19 Dec) this weekend and gets the skinny on Echo Party his new mix.

EDAN was part of a small but vital hip-hop genesis in Boston at the tail-end of the 1990s who shared a number of musical attributes – a love of block-rockin’ retro-beats and veneration for the hip-hop “new school” of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and a proclivity for irreverent, tongue-in-cheek lyrical styles. Though he collaborates a extensively still, he is very much his own man.

Echo Party is Edan’s new album and first full-length release in a few years. Echo Party is not a traditional release, however, it is a continuous 30-minute mix sourced from old-school classics from the back catalogue of Traffic Entertainment Group.The album was the Plugd album of the week in the paper last week as it is. The affable and humble man with the odd Boston / Brooklyn accent is in engaging and expansive form and is happy to discuss hip hop as an art form and some of the genre’s current inadequacies.
First though, he talks about the process of creating ‘Echo Party’ from the vast amount of music he had to work with. “The process was comparable to a painter who at times has to step back and stare at a particular part of the painting to get a proper sense of perspective on it and then dive back into it. On the back catalogue there were a load of old, indie rap labels, mainly from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. A lot of them focused mainly on disco-funk punk!” That has to be one of the most intriguing descriptions of any music I have ever heard. And Edan is certainly an engaging interviewee.

“I was approached to do this thing on commission. I had to step it up in terms of technique as I wasn’t going to scratch on it and use instruments instead.” Edan explains how he tried to use the huge amount of potential material at his fingertips. “

I used every record like a vignette and then stitched it all together. I sometimes used instrumentation to do that, to link different pieces.” At times the effect is fantastic, with a short sample used, which soon morphs seamlessly into something else again. This happens a number of times in each song so you end up in an entirely different place from where you started. It displays the startling virtuosity of the man that he sustains this for the entire album.

Not that it was easy going work for him. “Sometimes I would work for around six or eight hours and get only 20 to 30 seconds of usable material. Then I’d listen to it the next day and scrap it ‘cos I thought it was crap! I have no interest in mediocrity, so maybe that’s why it took so long to make the album. It’s hard going but it only took about six months actual work. I did teach myself new techniques while making the record.”

Somewhat unusually for a hip-hop artist, Edan went to the world famous Berklee College of Music in Boston. The Boston native explains how he ended up there. “ I played guitar and then wanted to study bass. I needed to play and instrument to get in and then I wanted to focus on product. I was only there two and a half years and then I left.” Graduates of Berklee include world-renowned jazz pianist Keith Jarrett as well as many others.

Edan has been much associated with psychedelic rock, also something not really associated with people working in his genre. In truth he seems as much drawn to the mindset as much as the music. “It’s just one of those things I like. Striving to a beautiful way of seeing the world. It’s like a way to make you see the world in the eyes of a newborn. That’s the way I try to see the world.” It’s not all about bitches and hoes then Edan? It’s good to hear someone from the uber-macho rap world talk about trying to see the world in a different way.

More interesting yet is some of his theorizing on the state of hip-hop at the moment and on its avant-garde history. “In its heyday, rap was avant-garde and subversive. The techniques used at the time like cutting up were like Marcel Duchamp using a urinal as a piece of art. It was a majestic artistic thing.” He sees rap as having been a new vibrant art form when it first arrived but gradually has become less so as it moved towards the mainstream.

However, he rails against and says, “Perception is the only limit. Hip-hop can be perceived as antsy and urgent. Now it’s not very urgent. Some guys are just talking about much s**t they got! It’s all grandiosity. If you were stuck in a conversation with some of them, and they talked how they rapped, you’d tell them to go f**k themselves!”

“On a mainstream level, rap isn’t benefitting society. You have to weed out the bulls**t and look out for the more interesting underground stuff. But dwelling on the negative is a waste of time.”

Edan himself is relentlessly positive and certainly doesn’t seem to dwell on the negative. His album Echo Party has nothing negative about it and the live show should be great.

Echo Party Launch featuring Edan and special guest Ricky Powell support DJ Scope is on Saturday 19 December at Cyprus Avenue. Admission is €15 and doors are at 11pm. Check www.cyprusavenue.ie, www.choicecuts.ie, and www.tickets.ie for further details.