Interview with Green T

Tell us about your new album.

Well, the new ASM record is Platypus Funk. That’s been a year and a half in the making or so, and it should be coming out in January, which leaves us enough time for pre-release promotional stuff. I feel really good about it. We’re still developing as far as craftsmanship [is concerned], but we’re finally at a point where we’re more comfortable with the position we’re in, creatively. In a few weeks I won’t be like, ‘f**k it’. Not to say there’s no room for development. This time round we’re working with real quality session musicians, and feature-wise we’ve been doing stuff with Vadim and Bonobo, and people we respected when we were younger, who were open to working with us.

I was listening to some of your stuff and there’s a kind of Jurassic 5, barbershop quartet quality to it. ‘Root to the Fruit’ has a Bootie Brown-type, Pharcyde thing going on. I haven’t heard that kind of flow in a while.

It’s weird, a lot of people have said that. For us it was always natural, growing up and going to an international school in Germany, but all of us were mixed nationalities. We made our own scene with a lot of what I just mentioned – old-school stuff like De La Soul and Brand Nubian and all that. We’re all avid sample diggers, and jazz, soul and funk for us was the most natural thing in the world.

So how do you go about sample hunting?

Records, man, old records. We’re always digging for funk from the ’70s and Motown soul to play at parties. But we dig a lot for jazz and bossa nova and Jamaican roots, stuff that’s independent of sample-seeking – we love all that too. Hip hop gave us an open ear to everything – musical education stems from a sample and if that’s your base, the possibilities are endless.

You guys seem to be doing pretty well in Japan. There’s a huge old-school jazzy hip-hop scene there for some reason. Why do you think that’s so?

We actually released a Japan-only album, Cosmic Flavor. The Japanese market is interesting, we got lucky – we got signed to the Jazzy Sport main rival, Miclife. The Japanese are really on that jazzy vibe but it’s an unpredictable market – maybe it’s because they’ve always been a bit culturally isolationist. Eastern Europe is a bit like that too – out there it’s all about ‘real’ old-school hip hop, and when they have shows there’s graffiti and breakdancing and people firing up a barbecue. S**t like that doesn’t go down in western Europe. Then again I feel like the time has come where early-’90s hip-hop s**t from the basic vibe is becoming retro again.

You know, Common just did a song with the Jonas Brothers.

That s**t is depressing, man. These days I don’t have any expectations when I get new records. I always get disappointed but there’s still a couple of cats doing good stuff. Like MF Doom, he’ll never fall off. The new Mos Def too, and the new Q-Tip album.

The new Jay-Z is surprisingly not bad.

Yeah, he’s still from the generation of rappers that were great. In terms of that stuff, in a hip-hop crew it gets kind of incestuous if you’re always only listening to that stuff. For us we have that background but now we listen mostly to roots and reggae, with a glitchy snares sort of direction.

Speaking of reggae, we’ve got a reggae festival happening in November. The first ever in Singapore…but it’s more on the commercial side, they’re bringing in Shaggy and Beenie Man.

I think reggae is a fascinating phenomenon in that there’s still a scene. Just the fact that there are still reggae festivals is fascinating to me, because it had its peak, like, 30 years ago. The reggae vibe – it’s a tribal, instinctive, archaic sort of form, and people are always going to try and tap into that. But if you’re looking to make a profit, you’ll book Shaggy. With any kind of niche that has a ‘cult’ following, there are going to be diehard fans, but everyone knows f**kin’ Shaggy so he’ll sell tickets. If they brought in, say, The Congos or Horace Andy there’ll maybe be a hundred people who’ll be like, ‘f**k yeah!’ but the general masses don’t care. Then again, they have to fly these guys out from Jamaica, and they usually roll with an entourage and then you have to put them up in a hotel. It’s tricky, but it’s important to stay positive about these things. The fact that I can catch some of these old legends in different parts of the world is a tribute to the timeless nature of reggae. In fact, the fact that anyone listens to reggae in Singapore, which is miles away from Jamaica, is amazing.

Check out A State of Mind at MySpace.