Catching Up With Orifice Vulgatron of Foreign Beggars

Having rising through the ranks of UK hip hop, Foreign Beggar’s newer output is a genre-defying blend of their former work, with the two emcee and DJ trio applying their rambunctious rap formula to an array of electronic styles. Releasing their latest album The Uprising on Deadmau5’s mau5trap imprint opened their music and personalities up to a slightly different, more EDM aware audience. They’ve worked with an incredible lineage of producers and supported all manner of artists (from The Prodigy to Wu Tang Clan) and this Friday they’ll be returning to the Room One stage so we caught up with emcee Orifice Vulgatron (pictured on the left above) to discuss how the group approaches the different styles and how that’s effected their live performances. So what’s going on with you guys at the minute? What are you up to at the moment? This and that… lots of international shows, gearing up for the Summer festival season and preparing a brand new show to take on the road. How did The Uprising album go down? Are you happy with the reception the album got? Uprising went pretty well. It was an album we made almost nearly on the spot between touring, which made 2012 one of our busiest years to date. I'm happy with the reception it got in certain respects and glad that we could take underground UK rap to a worldwide audience without really having to make any pop music. There were a few things that I thought would get a better reception, ie. ‘Flying to Mars’ ft Donae'o. The sound was a real throwback to the early UK dubstep years, so I thought a few more of the heads would pick up on it. However good music lasts so I guess that one will have to be a slow burner. It was interesting to release on Mau5trap too as it really opened a lot of people around the world to our sound and the scenes that we come from. Obviously the album kind of cemented even further your move in more electronic realms, imparting hip hop sensibilities to a new kind of raw and gutteral music. Do you feel like you’ve been hitting a different audience with this new material? Again, I guess to a degree, but the album is very varied and we approached the writing and lyrical side to the songs in a similar way we'd approach hip hop as opposed to the dance music we've released. There's more lyrical content and interesting song structure as opposed to tracks formatted for DJs. The music is definitely more representative of the sounds and styles we've been repping in our live show for years, however everything is still a little crossover and no one track fits directly into a single genre bar a couple of the hip hop joints. Even the dubstep tracks we're rhyming on have distinctive grime, hip hop and even reggae influences. Do you feel like your live shows changed as a result? I think we've played in front of some newer audiences, but our current show is pretty much similar in how we've always built the show, just with newer material. We play raw hip hop, garage, grime, even some dirty house, dubstep, trappy beats, drum and bass; but that's what we've been doing since about 2005. It's just that now we've released so much in each genre, most of the music we're playing is original material, rather than dropping other peoples beats to rhyme over. Essentially it's still the same hard-core, energised rap/rave experience of a showcase we've always aspired towards. Given the style, do you guys approach the writing any differently do you think? Leaving more space for the music to impact etc etc. I think each track you make has to be treated as its own island. Even when making very genre specific tracks. i.e. leaving Space is something one can do on a hip hop instro or a d&b tune, it's just down to what you want to do with the song. There's a track we did with Alix Perez called ‘Dark Days’ and we only ended up using an 8 bar chorus as that's all the track needed… What’s next for you guys? We have a very exciting project in the pipeline, probably one of our most accomplished efforts, dropping this year. There is a single dropping from this project in the next 6 weeks so keep your eyes and ears peeled for that. What can we expect from your imminent live show? Madness... we have a bunch of special stuff in the bag we're going to debut. We've done some insane collabs recently and some newer stuff we have specifically prepared for the live show. Plus it's my birthday so it's gonna be a double celebration. Also, as we just had the 10 year anniversary of our album Asylum Speakers, we may throw a couple of Foreign Beggars classics into the mix as well. Catch Foreign Beggars performing live in Room One this Friday.