Hudson Mohawke - "A Constant State Of Amazing"

Hudson Mohawke, known to his familiars as Ross Birchard, is responsible for producing some of the most fluorescent and experimental forward thinking hip-hop of the year. Alongside the LuckyMe collective he’s representing the Scottish beat scene to the fullest and despite him having only just released his long awaited debut long player, ‘Butter,’ on Warp Records, its already on some of the biggest and best of 2009 lists.

Born and raised in Scotland’s second largest city, Glasgow, Birchard - alongside the likes of Flying Lotus, Samiyam and his sometime sparring partner, Rustie - are pushing the notion of instrumental hip-hop into the furthest cataclysms of the experimental electronic dimension before ripping it straight back out again. But despite the obvious and hugely complementary comparisons to his contemporaries ad to the current wave of dubstep, thugstep and funkstep, trademarked by Geenus in an interview with XLR8R, he’s managed to capably carve out his own unmistakable ‘sound.’

“I hate that I have to call it anything to be honest with you, but I know it can just exist on its own. I’ve heard a lot of really bad names, but my main problem I have is people calling my music is wonky. Just because it doesn’t fit into a category and it has a slight rumble of bass they say its ‘wonky mate,” he says in an a hilarious mockney accent. “But you know what I mean though? Labels, labels, labels... It gets boring very quickly. I like to call it Turbo Soul”

Birchard’s adoration for music began from an early age, practically surrounded by vinyl since birth, his dad held down an American “top 40” style radio show in his hometown in the early eighties. He began mixing when he was just eight years old on a “shitty little hi-fi turntable and cassette deck” that he spent hours on mixing between vinyl and tape. “I owe my mixing skills to that basic set-up!” he proclaims with a wide eyed grin on his face but that tireless attention to detail paid off as Hudson went on to become one of the youngest finalists in the UK leg of the DMC World Championships, spinning under the name of DJ Itchy. When asked if he scooped the top prize he deftly responds, “Nah. They’d never let a Scot win.”

It wasn’t until he was thirteen that he made his first beat and like a lot of the new generation of beatmakers -Skream, Gemmy & Benga have also cited this method for the earliest audio dabbling - Birchard cut his first track on Playstation’s Music 2000 game. “That’s how I first learnt to sample” he recalls, “It was completely laborious and stupidly complicated, even more than traditional methods of sampling. It was really time consuming to find that little bit you wanted; but it makes you a perfectionist and was really good training for sampling.”

His debut album, ‘Butter’ follows on from where his ‘Polyfolk Dance EP’ - also on Warp Records – left off, packed with the same careering melodies and chopped drum textures. It’s a journey from the depths of traditional hip-hop melodies all the way to Prince-esque funk, and beyond. Aiming to feature a handful of artists across the collection of dazzling instrumentals, Hudson hooked up Olivier Daysoul, LuckyMe’s first lady Nadsoric and he called on LA’s Ambassador of Boogie, Dam Funk to lay down some vocals. “I was a fan of Dam and I liked what he doing for a while. I had a track of his that had his vocals on it and although he’s not an incredible singer, he has a sort of charm which really appealed to me, we were gonna do some instrumental collaborations together but I wanted to do some vocals and luckily he was up for it.”



“I froze.” He admits, when I asked what he felt when signed to Warp Records in 2007, “I don’t think I made anything for about nine months after I got picked up by the label, I didn’t really have a back catalogue, I lost everything I made before 2000 in a flood at home and only a few releases on Ubiquity and LuckyMe, so to potentially have this massive exposure with such a prestigious label…? It freaked me out. It freaked me out for a long time.”

Luckily he needn’t have worried about a thing, with big support from UK radio DJs, Benji B and Mary Anne Hobbs well before his first EP dropped, the love extended all the way to Los Angeles with Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder crew taking him under their wing. “I’ve only been to LA twice, last time I was there I played at the Low End Theory Club, the club is infested with cockroaches.” He laughs, “Seriously” he goes on, “I’ve got this video of 'roaches running across my laptop, it’s pretty real out there. But it was really good fun, there was a really good crowd, amazing sound system and I think Gaslamp Killer is a fantastic DJ, just in terms of his impact as a DJ, he’s one the best and one of the best performers as well.”

Name checking the likes of Dimlite “he’s suffered a lot from being a pioneer”, James Pants, “I heard some new material the other day and I like the way it’s been recorded, it sounds really shitty and lo-fi but I really like that” and T-Pain, “he’s done some pretty good productions actually” among the artists whose work he’s enjoying lately, who would Hudson really like to work with? “I really want to work with Tweet” he tells me, “I did a bootleg record of her ‘Ooops, Oh My’ track and I really liked her acapella. But I have no idea what she is doing now, she’s kinda disappeared.”

So other than impossible collaborations what’s in the pipeline for Hudson Mohawke? Already a master of the instrumentals, Hudson mentions that he’d liked to work alongside other vocalists and tells me he may have something on Erykah Badu’s forthcoming LP - “It’s only at the initial stages” he adds coyly. Naming Jadakiss and Freeway as the emcees he’d like to work alongside - “I think they always pick really great beats, and although they might not have anything particularly good to say in their lyrics, they have good voices.”

He’s set to work on his next LP already, “I wanna build more of an impressive approach to the live show, work on the visuals and the feeling of it, get to some of the those big festivals next year. I can’t believe all this is happening…” he reveals humbly, “I'm honestly in a constant state of amazing shit happening all the time, so I’m not really taking it all in. Recently Steve Beckett, the founder of Warp Records, told me about the album cover being on the main crossroads in Shibuya, Tokyo, which is pretty far out! If I get to see that I’ll be totally amazed, but more than anything though, I wanna keep looking for the next step and keep moving forward.”

‘Butter’ is out now on Warp. His track ‘FUSE’ also appears on the recent North/South/East/West compilation too. Catch Hudson Mohawke’s live show in the Numbers Room on the 8th January alongside Todd Edwards, Rustie, Deadboy, Jackmaster and more.