Interview with Burning House: A New Musical Venture

1. Separately, you are known as Chief Xcel (Blackalicous) and General Elektriks and you worked together in the past. How come you finally created Burning House?

Every time we would get together to make music, cool stuff would seem to happen, so we thought we should make it official, find a band name, and make a record. You know when you meet someone and you can just tell you’re on the same wavelength by the way the conversation just flows? Burning House is the musical equivalent: we fire up the gear and ideas just start flowing. The process is a lot of fun, which I think you can tell when listening to the album.

image

2. How does working together as Burning House pushes each of you out of your comfort zones and into a new place of musical creation?

I wouldn’t necessarily say that we find ourselves out of our comfort zones, it’s more like we find ourselves in a new zone that we both feel comfortable in. That said, this new zone springs from the fact that, as Burning House, we’re not making exactly the music we would be making by ourselves. ‘Walking into a Burning House’ is obviously related to Chief Xcel’s productions and to General Elektriks, but it’s a grown up kid with its own personality. This is what’s so great about taking part in a collaboration: the surprise. Neither X nor myself can predict where a track is going to go, we just watch the kid take us where it wants to go. Letting the song grow and listening to where it needs to go as much as dictating where it’s headed is something you do in any writing or production process, but the ‘letting the song grow’ part is even more accentuated in a collaboration.

image

3. How would you describe your first track Turn Off The Robot?

Future Funk! We could go into more detail but i don’t know if it would be very interesting, like a cook describing how he whipped up his last dish. I think it’s better to let people taste the dish by themselves and decide what it tastes like.

4. Does your inspiration for the album come from the same places, or are you each drawing from separate sources and combining the result?

We both have a similar taste in both music and aesthetics but at the same time we traveled down different musical paths to get to where we are today. Those paths have rendered different experiences. Those experiences have given us different musical perspectives and that is what makes the sound unique. 

image

5. What should we look forward to in the near future?

We’ll be on tour in Europe and the UK this fall. So hopefully more great music and great live experiences in a venue near you. 

6. What do you think of the Hip-hop / Electro funk scene today?

We don’t really consider ourselves part of any particular scene. We just do what we do, make the music that inspires us, and let the listeners categorize it.

Thanks guys! Make sure you subscribe to them on Whyd and like them on Facebook and check out their upcoming tour dates to catch their epic shows! 

9th July 2013

1 note

  1. whyd posted this