The terrific 2006 sci-fi hip-hop album from Pete Sasqwax
Waxfactor was a moniker of the artist now known as Pete Sasqwax, who remains active via his Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages. Sci-Fu itself has often proven rather hard to obtain. I think I originally grabbed a free copy off Pete's website after hearing him in a DJ Cheeba mix (this one, in fact). Today, you won't find the album on Spotify -- but it IS on Apple Music and Bleep. I'm not privy to the reasons for this, but I will stress: Buy a copy of this album if you can.
The whole album is great, but I typically recommend a couple of Sci-Fu tracks to anyone who wants some isolated tastes: Sci Fu Ism and Beat Meld.
I'm also really fond of Waxfactor's Gameface EP, which features the excellent track Better Days, which is probably the absolute best Winston Churchill hip-hop track imaginable. Plus, Pete's other releases and collaborations are worth checking out as well. He's shared a number of these via his Bandcamp page. Here's one I particularly dig, Temporal Audio Psychosis Exercise, recorded with Steve Madslo in 2016:
I actually interviewed Pete back in 2011 about his work -- and the website that hosted that interview has sadly passed over into oblivion. But until such time as those archives should officially see the light of day, I'd like to share the interview here:
Q: Your 2006 album Sci-Fu makes fantastic use of science fiction and horror samples, weaving them with intense beats, funk, scratch and hip-hop. How do you pick your samples? Do you draw from old favorites or dig for new sources?
Pete Sasqwax: That's a really tough question, to be honest. Musically I tend to not sample much other than drums these days. Over the years I've developed a complex about taking samples from other peoples music. Not like in a moral sense. I remember in the '90s, Shawn J Period (who had blown up particularly for his work with the likes of Mos Def and other NYC-based lyricists) decided that he was a born-again Christian and that, with that in mind, he felt that sampling was wrong and he could no longer do it... that's not it at all for me! I'm a control-freak on some level I guess. I need to reduce things to individual instrument hits and then build songs from the ground up that way so that I have the maximum level of control over everything. When I used to use samples I would drive myself insane trying to work out what key a particular bass-line was in and why it didn't work with a guitar sample I was trying to use or whatever, but I didn't have the musical knowledge to figure out how to make it work. Gradually it just made more sense to take samples from instruments rather than records.
In terms of the vocal samples -- I go right across the board. Films, TV, old spoken word records or tapes. Anywhere I stumble across them. A lot of the time I pick up audio books and things like that -- radio plays -- adaptations of comic books and old films. For a while I was hung up on those old comic book records and tapes which would have a book with them and when the record made a particular noise you would turn the page over. In general I'm kind of in love with the old version of the future. How the future used to be -- from the 50s and onwards, although the trigger for a lot of that is probably earlier. It's quite possible that the genesis of that for me came from Welles' "War of The Worlds," which I used to have on an old cassette.
What makes a great sample?
Ideally, something that responds with other things in the track. With vocal samples, I often like to try and put some sort of narrative in there. Maybe not a complete story, but something evocative of a larger narrative.
Whenever I listen to "Sci-Fu," I find that the samples and music come together to create fresh narratives in my mind, even if I know where a sample came from. Was this your intention? Do you feel each track tells a story?
Originally, I had this overblown concept for it whereby it all fitted together to make a complete story. I had a narrative I wanted to convey and I pored over masses of sample sources in order to find things that fitted in with that. I dug through loads of old B-movies and space radio plays and sorted things out in a fashion similar to the way you might if you were editing together a documentary from masses of tapes worth of footage -- cataloging and doing paper edits -- that sort of thing. When I started working on the tracks, I would try and focus on what I wanted to say in each one I was working on and then attempt to stick to that, bringing in other elements as I went along in order to add to and further reinforce that. Ultimately, I think I got sidetracked here and there and eventually ended in a situation whereby the only coherent version of the full story resided in my own head. The fact that you take any sort of narrative from it is immensely gratifying, I have to admit!
I've found that artists such as DJ Irk like to make a game for listeners out of guessing a sample's origin, where as DJ Food seems to gravitate more towards obscurity in his choices -- and believes obscurity is important. Where do you fall on this scale?
I think I fall into both camps. I've done some things where I've sampled from very obscure sources -- down to sampling old films I've made with friends and things of that nature -- and other times I've gone all out to use things people could clearly recognize. On the first 7" I did there's examples of both of those things within the first track. It starts with a sample I took of my friend Nikita and I which I took from an old video recording of us, then goes into a Jeru phrase I've heard loads of people sample "bring ya skills to the battle" which I cut up with a Mr. Men record so that it said "bring ya cake to the battle" because I'm part of a loose collective of likeminded artists called Battlecake... That's a corny example, I guess, but it probably explains my outlook better than anything else I can think of.
Your track "Better Days" combines Winston Churchill and hip-hop with amazing results. How did this track come about?
It started off with the strings. I'd taken those from a pretty unlikely source and had layered up a few sets of drums to get a thick accompaniment to them. The track kind of had a momentum of its own so I was thinking of samples to help reflect that. I'm a huge DITC fan so the lyrics of people like Lord Finesse and Diamond D tend to stick in my mind -- that's where the "on and on and on, like the Mississippi" and "my style is tricky -- like spelling Mississippi" parts came from. After that I just felt like it needed something else that alluded to the Mississippi river. I had picked up the Churchill record on the basis that it must surely come in handy one day, so I just flicked through it and came across him saying that. One of those completely accident/coincidence sort of events that you have an odd feeling might not have been entirely accidental, if that makes any sense.
You're already an accomplished musical artist and graphic designer. Now you're turning your hand to writing. What can you tell us about your upcoming science fiction novel?
It's funny, the book kind of dovetails into that concept I was just talking about regarding whether things are ever really accidental and so on. I don't know how well I can describe it to you but I'll endeavor to do my best...
It's about an author called Lundr Fades who had an almost overnight success of a first novel and is feeling the pressure of having signed a book deal and being asked to deliver a follow up to it. He has horrific writers block and, on the advice of his literary agent, decides to get a complete change of scenery. He's in his thirties and, having been a writer for some time now (writing smaller pieces, long before his novel got picked up and became successful) has the kind of life style which means he has no major attachments to anywhere or anyone. As a result, moving to the nearby city is a pretty simple process and he manages to cut himself off from his friends rather more easily than he had hoped he might (he has become the kind of aloof, unmarried friend in a very married, family-orientated social circle).
The city is a kind of romanticized version of a real place, but I've called it something else in order to take liberties with it. The geography of it is somewhat elastic in relation to the real place -- I've moved things around and put things in where they actually don't exist etc. He rents a place on the outskirts of the city and begins writing his book in almost total isolation, save for regular contact with his agent (who is feeling the heat from the publishers) and the odd bits of contact from his parents (who have retired and essentially travel the world constantly doing he knows not entirely what, although they do send curios back to him on a semi-regular basis). The book he writes is a kind of existentialist nightmare -- perhaps I ought not to go into so much detail about it as it might spoil it a little -- but that forms a third of the narrative. One third is the book he is writing; one third is the process of writing the book; and the third focuses on another author: Milos Rande. When asked about his influences and so on during the book tour for his first novel, Fades talks about an author called Milos Rande who, it turns out, nobody in the entire world seems to know anything about (or at least, is prepared to talk about). People assume that Rande is an invention of Fades' -- an added publicity feature -- although actually his book was merely one of a great number Fades found upon the book shelves of his parents. It's through Rande that things really become involved in science fiction.
Do you find any similarities between your musical creative process and writing?
Absolutely. Most creative processes feel like expressions of the same thing in different ways (to me) and specifically the process of drafting and revision is very similar with both writing and making music. Also I tend to work in a kind of non-linear fashion with both things -- skipping from one part to the next. I don't know many people who make albums where they start at track one and continue track by track until they reach the end -- for me, writing is very similar to that too. I tend to sketch out an outline of what I want to achieve with the story and then write different parts as they become more resolved in my mind. The same with tracks in an album. I very rarely start out with the intro, for example.
Can we expect more music from Pete SasqWax in the near future?
Definitely. I've been focusing on the book for a while and as a result I've not really been all that productive musically, but I've been working on things over the past few months and have a lot of releases planned for this year. The first thing that will appear is probably the mix I've been doing for Six Ton Armor (sixtonarmor.com). I don't tend to do mixes in the traditional sense much these days so essentially what I'm working on is a continuous 30min track utilizing other peoples' sounds which I've dismantled and reconstructed. Following that I have: a solo EP (which is rapidly becoming an album); an EP with Tony Stone under the name Stove; an album with Andy Zuk under the name Ambulance Chasers; an EP with two DJ friends of mine (Blistaphist and Ralphabet) under the name Hood Ornament; and a load of other things including three or four more collaborative releases, production for some emcees and quite probably another mix or two.
If we're craving space or sci-fi related music, what else should we be listening to?
Honestly, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is the first name that comes to mind! I find the sounds they made so inspirational on that front. The notion of taking fragments of sound -- natural, organic sounds -- and twisting them into something entirely different and alien is the most sci-fi way to make music I can think of. More contemporary artists I'd have to mention are people like El-P, who is somebody I've always massively appreciated and who wears his love of sci-fi literature (in particular Philip K Dick) firmly on his sleeve. When I think of space or sci-fi music, though, I tend to think of scratch-based music more often than not. The album Q-Bert did, "Wave Twisters," is a perfect example of that, but also people like Mixmaster Mike, DJ Disk, The Space Travelers (Eddie Def, DJ Quest etc.) and many others are all of a similar mindset.
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