Interview: Electric Wire Hustle

Tell me it’s a beautiful day in Wellington.
It is! It’s lovely day here in Wellington City. It’s almost cloudless so we’re enjoying the sunshine over the harbour. 

Are you Wellington Natives?
I actually spent most of my childhood in Christchurch. But we [Electric Wire Hustle] all met up here in Wellington and we’ve been here for four or five years now.

Are you just concentrating on doing the band thing over there?
There are a few little side-project things going on, but mainly we’re concentrating on pushing forward with this band and happily so. It’s been a slow build, but having the good fortune to travel and do things abroad has been great for us – it helps obviously because you get [your name] out there in an international sense, but you also get more locals coming to your shows back home.

Electric Wire Hustle is often billed as this soul/funk/hip-hop/electro hodgepodge, which I think is very unspecific. Would you care to shed some light?
I guess there’s some funk in there, but for us it’s just soul music. And by that I mean music from our souls – we’re writing a new album at the moment, so our sound is morphing as we try new things, but it’s always going to be soul music in the end. We love listening to all sorts of psychedelic music from way back, and guitar driven music, and the three of us are definitely hip-hop heads, so we try to have a bit of fun and mash it together.

This is the first I’ve heard of a new album! Tell me about that.
We’ve had a couple of weeks of rehearsal and writing in between touring to start to put the wheels on it. At the moment the problem – and it’s a nice problem – is trying to find time between touring to write and record. We’ve been doing that in bits and pieces over the last year. We’re finally in a really good place now; we’ve managed to sketch out all of our ideas and we’re trying to rail it in now so that we can put it out early next year.

What’s your process like in the studio?
There’s no set process. We’re all instrumentalists and beat-makers at the same time, so a lot of our stuff is just born out of sitting in the back of our tour-van putting down beats. Other times an idea will pop up at soundcheck, and we’ll capture it however we can, and then we’ll flesh it out in rehearsals. As a general rule if we’re all nodding our heads to something, it’s worth pursuing.

There’s not a wealth of information on the band that’s broadly available on EWH here in Australia. Would you mind taking us back to your origins?
We all met here in New Zealand – everybody had moved to Wellington around the same time. I met Myele [Manzanza, drums/production] busking in the city. He had a real flavour to his playing, and we got together and realised we had similar interests. Mara [TK, multi-instrumentalist] and I met at around the same time playing in different bands, and it turned out that he was interested in working together as well. We really got to know each other while we were in the studio making music together, and from there, things began happening quite quickly. We all come from a love of hip-hop, and that’s what came through initially.

We sent out some demos with nothing to lose, and they got picked up by Benji B on BBC Radio 1 in the UK. He gave us quite a bit of shine on his show, and then quite a lot of people picked up on it – Giles Peterson picked it up and really liked it and put us on one of his compilations. Things picked up in Europe more quickly than they did here at home, and that’s how things got underway.

Without spoiling things, what can we expect from an EWH live show come October?
It’s like going on safari, you know? It’s like diving headfirst into an armoured, four-wheel-drive type scenario. You’re going to get that full gamete of long-necked animals through to wild, sabre-toothed tigers trying to nab at your tyres and scrape at your windows. Come prepared.

I’ll wear my khakis.
Let’s not go all Steve Irwin, here. Bring a safari hat.

Tell me about some of your hip-hop influences.
I love A Tribe Called Quest … Common … The Roots … De La Soul, of course … and the cat that we really want to collaborate with at the moment is Jay Electronica. He’s got some crazy shit. So if you’re reading this, Jay!

I know for a fact that Jay Electronica loves reading boutique, Brisbane-based arts/entertainment websites. He can’t get enough.
Hah! You never know. The man seems to be really into expanding his mind, so I’m keeping mine open as well.

Haven’t heard of Island Vibe Festival? You’re missing out! Spanning this weekend, it’s a spectacle taking over Stradbroke Island. For more details, head here.