Sat, Mar 3, 2001 01:35

He is the poster boy for hip-hop’s contemporary golden age, true studio renaissance man, and one half of the critically acclaimed L.A. based super group, Dilated Peoples. Read on to discover what Supreme Court Justices have known since the dawn of the judiciary branch: Anything is possible as long as you have strong backing Evidence.

ANO: What can you tell us about the LP and when is it coming out?

EV: The LP is called “The Platform” with 17 cuts, including the intro. I did about 5-6 cuts, Alchemist did 5 cuts, Joey Chavez is on there, T Ray (who did Artifacts, Big L, Search and Nas), E Swift of the Alkoholiks, and Babu. As far as guest emceeing, it's strictly west coast - B Real from Cypress, The Alkoholiks, Aceyalone, Everlast, Planet Asia, Phil the Agony, and Defari.

ANO: Will all the singles be on the LP?

EV: The only cuts that will be on the LP that have been released previously are “Guaranteed” which has a twist at the end with a new intro with Babu at the beginning.. “Work the Angles”, “Main Event”, and “Triple Optics”.

ANO: Are you appearing on any projects coming out besides the LP?

EV: Yeah, Dilated Peoples just did a soundtrack to “Jails, Hip-Hop and Hospitals”… It's a film that's coming out Rawkus. We [Dilated] did a track for DJ Muggs' new Soul Assassin compilation. Myself, I'm appearing on the new Revolution LP, we did the single “Evolution”. Iriscience did a cut on there called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. There are a number of tracks I've been working on for Phil the Agony, Planet Asia's albums and actually just finished a remix for the Beastie Boys- for their new single “Live”.

ANO: Word, sounds like you've been busy recently.

EV: There's been a lot of good opportunities this year. I'm talking to people like Common and built with Reflection Eternal and some other people about working, but nothing is set in stone yet.

ANO: Being that you're known just as much for your production as much as emceeing, how long have you been making beats, and what got you started?

EV: I've been rhyming a lot longer than I have been making beats. I've been rhyming since ‘89, but I’ve only been making beats since ‘95. Basically, I’ve been into hip-hop and graffiti for a long time, but what changed me over to actually doing it myself was when I moved to Venice when I was real young and moved next to this cat named QD3.. he's Quincy Jones' son. He was producing Justin Warfield, Everlast, and a bunch of projects going in and out. Living next to him, I learned what being a producer really is. Most kids grow up [listening to hip-hop] and think a beat just appears, or a DJ rocked it back and forth for like an hour, but that's not the case, there's production. Basically, my first introduction to doing hip-hop was through a producer, not through an emcee's perspective. I was sitting around watching QD3 do that. It just so happened that I didn't have the money or the patience to learn the equipment at that time, so I chose rhyming ‘cause that was what was also more in the forefront. I wanted to be the man, not behind so much. I had a record deal in ’94 with a certain label and I didn't produce anything on that album. When we got out of that contract in ‘95, we didn’t have shit, so I basically bought a keyboard and started from there.

ANO: Are you ever going to try a more “organic” sound at any point?

EV: I'm not the one for it. There's two ways of doing it… One, being flexible and open and having your motto be: “If I'm flexible, I can never break so I can always go with the trend. There's that side or two, this is what I do and this is how I do it.. Fuck with me or don't. That's kinda where I wanna go. I love live music, all music is from live, everything I sample is live music, so I can't knock it. There's something about hip-hop when it's repeated through the redundancy of a drum machine or sampler. It's the repetitiveness of it. Once live instrumentation comes in, it's only human nature to want to innovate more than that and it's very limiting, and if you're a musician you don't want to be limited.. you want to expand. I think the only way I can truly be creative is through sampling.

ANO: What equipment do you prefer when you make beats?

EV: I like Ensoniq. I started with an EPS and now work with an ASR-10. I have an MPC, but drum machines put your beats where THEY like ‘em. I like putting them where I like ’em. A keyboard wasn't really meant for drum sequencing, so I like it better ‘cause it allows me more freedom to do what I want to do.

ANO: Does it ever seem difficult to juggle both producing and emceeing?

EV: It’s just time consuming. It's not difficult, it's just hard to have a life and do all this at the same time. Producing is a very lonely thing. I spend a lot of time by myself and people benefit off of my loneliness… and I have benefited from others' loneliness. If you're an emcee, you're going to parties, and you're speaking to people, and in the mix. When you're producing it's more like alone time, which is actually more of a cool balance for me to be honest.

ANO: When you're by yourself, what do you consider your main influences musically?

EV: I have a wide variety of records, some things put me in certain moods. I'm a

hip-hop fanatic, number one, first and foremost. I don't have a problem with hip hop, waking up to it or going to sleep to it. I know some people who don't want to have sex to hip-hop… I'm hip-hop all the way around. I grew up in the party era, I was exposed to a lot of good music like the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Aretha Franklin, so all of it stuck with me.

ANO: Do you and Iriscience have plans to release projects separately?

EV: Yes, definitely. We're both solo artists. I had a beat tape and we were like, ”Let's do a song.“ The song came out good so we turned into a group. We limit each other and we balance each other. I can't fully say what I want 100% and he can't either, but our styles are very different, so our whole point is balance with Dilated. I would very much like to have an Evidence record all the way I want to do it, he's going to wanna have an Iriscience record the way he would want to do it. We're going to, and then we're going to do Dilated records. He and I are brothers and we will be forever. We will be making records forever.

ANO: Will you be touring with Platform, and will you be hitting the Midwest and East?

EV: Definitely, last summer we did the Word of Mouth tour, it was the Breakestra, Beat Junkies, Dilated, and Jurassic 5, and it was a big success. We went from Cali to New York and all the way through the Midwest. We plan on doing the same lineup this year in April, and we're gonna have Supernatural host it and freestyle throughout the show. We just came off tour with Rage Against the Machine and Gangstarr, and we did the Midwest there too. We've been blessed with a lot of cool touring opportunities lately.

ANO: Was that the largest audience you've played to on that last tour?

EV: Nightly, yeah. When we did Word of Mouth, it was nothing less than three or four hundred people and nothing more than two thousand. When you're opening for Rage Against the Machine, they're selling out stadiums, so we're opening up to 15,000 people every night, and by the time they go on, there's like 20 or 30,000. We've done European festivals bigger than that, 30 or 40,000.. but that's one show.

ANO: Did you have any jitters, or did your nerves get to you?

EV: Yeah, I always get nervous. If I don't get nervous anymore, that's when I'll call it quits. It's that nervousness, that hunger that makes me get out there. Once I set the stage, forget about it. Plus going on the road with Gangstarr, and having Premier watch your show or chilling with Guru or Freddie Foxxx, you wanna be on your toes. We were making sure we were on point every night.

ANO: What are you personally looking to accomplish in hip-hop within five years, or have you even looked that far ahead into the future?

EV: I don't wanna be the guy who makes the singles… I wanna be the guy who makes the b-sides, the back of the records. My main concern as far as production is just to make bedroom beats, beats that I made in my mom's house, I hold on to that mentality and I don't forget about it. When you're young is when hip-hop is the realest to you. The way I see it, the older and older my heroes have gotten, the less in touch with hip-hop they've gotten. I'm trying to hold on to what got me into this and harness that. For Dilated, just keep doing Dilated Peoples records and have a catalogue of shit, and be like the Beastie Boys and RUN DMC and shit.

ANO: The L.A. hip-hop scene has definitely come a long way in the last few years. Are there any L.A. people that have influenced your music?

EV: My family is from New York, I've been going back and forth my whole life, so the east coast has always been an influence in my personality. But I grew up on NWA, Too Short, King Tee, and Ice Cube. In more recent times, the Alkaholiks, Freestyle Fellowship, Good Life Movement, and stuff like that has been real powerful. Now it's just like Planet Asia, Rasco, Dilated… all these west coast acts and I'm real proud. ‘92-’93, I was going back to New York and they were like, ”What does west coast have?" I'd be like, ‘we got Pharcyde, Cypress Hill, Freestyle Fellowship’ and they'd be like ‘alright’… but now if somebody on the east coast were to ask on the west coast and what we have, we would come up in that list. Nobody would have ever told me our group would have been represented. It's real ill that I can actually equate myself into west coast hip-hop ‘cause it’s been a real big influence on my shit. If you go to Fat Beats or places for underground hip-hop, a big portion is west coast shit.