Interview: Exile and his Universal Sound

Exile Interview (original)


Exile Interview (with beat)


I had the chance to chop it up with Exile after his performance with Blu at Berkeley's annual Hiphop in the Park festival. We sat on a gnarled park bench straight out of Middle Earth, and Exile traced the journey from his humble beginnings making music to where life is taking him now. I already thought Exile demonstrated some mad ingenuity in his creative process, but now I am ever more convinced that the man has just got a serious gift, and deep sympathy, for stylizing sound.

If you're not familiar with Exile's unique brand of earth power production, then you've got an expansive catalogue of music to experience. Spanning the gamut from soul spliced grooves tapping into the richness of the human spirit to gritty beats urgently calling forth action, this Los Angeles beatsmith is capable of a universe of sounds.

Exile gained notoriety for his masterful production for Blu on their seminal 2007 release, Below the Heavens, an album quickly garnering recognition as a Hiphop classic. However, Exile got his start much earlier in the game, collaborating with LA rapper and crooner, Aloe Blacc, in the noname backwards group Emanon. In 2004 they released a groundbreaking soundscape harmoniously politicizing music (or to coin a phrase, musicifying politics), The Waiting Room, and recently reissued their smoked out underground tape, Imaginary Friends, originally put out on the grind in '96. And before all that, dude made his way around beatboxing and flipping loops on the tape deck, or spitting helium induced raps about scandalous moms light years before Quas. And amidst all that science, he made a name for himself bombing the walls with sweet and sticky aerosol paint.


The honey drenched drums and textured harmonies don't stop there. Exile dropped Dirty Science in 2006, showcasing his talent collaborating with monster lyricists like Oh No, Ta'Raach, and Ghostface. And most recently, Exile concocted his first instrumental album purely out of samples from the radio. This concept album, simply titled Radio, stretches the creative process of Hiphop to its limits. Exile crafts music out of disparate elements broadcast on the air, bits and pieces of sound which he affirms himself, you're not supposed to make music out of. The end product is a compelling montage of human voices and mechanical noises layered upon each other, a rhythmic sound sphere depicting the way we see the world.

In tune with "Radio", we broadcast the interview with Exile on Sanguine Sunday Radio for our dedication to Hiphop in the Park episode. I decided to post up the interview separately in two forms. The first is tiered with Exile's beat mix for Mary Anne Hobb's Radio 1 show, and the second is the sparse interview in its original taping, full with the lush sounds of Berkeley's very liberated and never duplicated, People's Park. You can also cop the Radio 1 mix and peep the playlist of unreleased beats at her BBC home.