MarQ Spekt “Sometimes a treasure’s better when you have to dig it up.”

That’s a good segue, because just earlier today in preparation for the interview I was revisiting some of your CDs and listening to Pretty Weapons. “Armor Truck Rap” always hit me, maybe initially because of the beat, but it’s the type of track that I still go back to and it isn’t aging at all; if anything, it’s getting better.

My man Hassan Chop did that beat, and he used to run around with DOOM right around that time as well. That was one where I wrote it, I was probably at one of the most brokest points of my life, back in like 2004, and when I heard that beat I was like, ‘Man, I’ve gotta prove something to everybody with this track. Every verse, I’ve gotta prove something to somebody.’ So I went in with that frame of mind, where I was like, man listen, “You are now rockin’ with the best.” And the aggression of everything — I try to say my style is like humble arrogance, because it’s a real nonchalance but it’s still hard delivery, you know what I’m saying? That’s the perfect example.

It also kind of embodies what I was saying about near-rhymes, where you’re syllabically riding the sounds of words rather than stressing if a rhyme is perfect.

Exactly, but I mean I’m a painter, though. I’m not a sketch artist. Lines aren’t going to be always sharp when you’re dealing with paint, so you’ve just gotta make it work, you know what I’m saying? There’s a precision there in it being off.

What other producer collaborations can we expect to hear from you in the months ahead? You mentioned Bionic Jazz. Do you want to touch on that?

“I done seen people get punched in the face, knocked out, you know, cut, whatever, for being wack. I’m not saying that was right or whatever, but I’m just saying that’s the era I come from.”

Yeah, Bionic Jazz is a nice little plate. It’s me and my man MOBONIX who was also in the Metal Face Akademy with DOOM. He was on Born Like This and has been my man since like 97. He’s from the West Coast. We’ve always been talking about doing stuff, and we started doing some joints a couple years ago and leaked a couple.

I remember one that you put out was mind-blowing, with some kind of warped narcotic horns in it.

That might’ve been the joint that DOOM did [“Heroin Jonezz”]. We went back in on that. We kind of scrapped it and revamped that song actually, so you’ll hear a new version of that on the project. Lex Boogie’s got a bunch of bangers on there that we cooked up together. There’s some production from me on there as well, some joints I did with Lex in the lab, so you’ll hear some of my production on there and some darts. We got beats from Blockhead, DOOM… It’s like a jazz record where you’re not expecting anything; you just hear it and get different feels from different tracks. That’s probably gonna come in the next couple months and then I’ve got a follow-up with Blockhead. I got half of it done on stash, and he sent me a new package. I’m working on it now, and I kind of wanna scrap everything and just start fresh because the package he sent me is so crazy.

Is Keep Playin’ still the working title?

Yeah, that’s the working title now. Then I’ve got a whole project with Back Row, which is probably going to be a nice EP or something: live instrumentation, lush instrumentals, I’m working on that too.

The New Orleans cats you were talking about who did “Murderface Splash”?

Yeah, and then I’ma release Ghostmaker Special Edition.

So you think a good amount of this is coming out in 2015?

Grilchy Era’s about to drop next week, I think Bionic Jazz will be out in the next couple months, and I think Keep Playin’ will be out by the end of the year. And I think that in between all of that, I’ma get a cover together and I’ll put Ghostmaker up, and I might do limited-edition CDs of that. I’m tryna release at least three or four projects this year.

There are a couple previous projects. I don’t know if these are dead, but you’ve mentioned Gutterfly Knives and one called Persona Non Grata.

Both of those merged into The Grilchy Era.. Those were just working titles, but that’s officially Grilchy Era.

I also have to ask you about Broken Mazes, man. [A collaboration between Spekt and Gary Wilson, this EP was available on Bandcamp until recently when it was taken down for reasons that become somewhat clearer below.]

Sometimes when you get done doing a project you want to relax your brain and not stress anything, and do something different. I had just done MacheteVision and, [funnily] enough, I reached out to Gary Wilson on Twitter and was like, “Yo I’m a fan,” and he was like, “Let’s work,” and started sending me the instrumentals to some songs he did. And I would go in the lab and just knock ‘em out and send them back.

How did you get put on to Gary Wilson’s music?

I got put on to him years ago just on some musician stuff, because I listen to everything. I listen to New Wave, rock, jazz, reggae, Brazilian music… I’ve always loved “Dreams.” He was telling me he’s still got the reels, and he was sending me the tracks off the reels. I was like, ‘Man, come on, who else is gonna do this?’ People probably won’t even recognize until he passes or I pass 20/50 years from now. I also put it out on some, ‘This wasn’t for everybody and it’s not going to be out there forever.’ That’s why we took it down.

On top of taking it down, you initially released that thing with no promotion. There was a trailer, but it wasn’t an event.

Yeah, sometimes you have to do stuff like that with 100 percent artistic purposes only. You’re not trying to get with a label and get them to use a publicist and people to promote. It’s not about that all the time. That was one of those projects that was 100 percent art.

That being said, I’d love to hear and own a physical copy of that, and I’m sure I’m not alone here.

We were gonna do vinyl, but Chopped Herring just ended up doing the other release instead of that, the mix of songs from me [Mark of the Beast], but we were definitely going to do a vinyl project, which would have been crazy. We were floating it around. [The owner of Chopped Herring] loved the project, but he was like, “The people who buy from me may not be that progressive. They like a lot of stuff that’s like 90s sounds.” But that was definitely progressive, because I still haven’t heard anybody do anything really like that, and it’s just challenging yourself, too. You have to challenge yourself.

What are some lessons you’d say you learned from MacheteVision that you took with you and maybe carried over to JustPlayWitIt?

Timing is everything, because MacheteVision could’ve came out and flopped. There was no guarantee on anything, and I don’t think a lot of Kno’s in-house people really dug it, because it was such a different sound from him. I think it was really aggressive, not to say that Cunninlynguists isn’t dope — they’re very dope — but they make feel-good music, so people really appreciate that. Whereas [MacheteVision] was darker, more aggressive, harder, harsher, so that came out in 2011, and there’s people that hit me now like, “You know I slept on this when it came out and I knew it was out, but I just wasn’t feeling totally into it.” They didn’t like the joint with Bronson and now Bronson is blowing up, they didn’t like the singles, and everything else. Sometimes it takes time to go back to things and realize that you missed it. So, that’s an example right there that sometimes people have to grow on their own and come back around. It’s not necessarily you doing anything wrong; it’s just the timing.

You have a very interesting Twitter account. You’ve run a couple sites of your own in the past too, but your Twitter account is off the chain. Did you ever think of compiling [your posts] into a book?

You know, I thought about that in like 2010, because I looked at what I was writing from 2010-08 and I was like, ‘Yo, I had a lot of really good ideas if you go back to the beginning of my account.’ There was a lot of wit that I was putting out there and a lot of ideas and concepts, and I thought about doing that then. I think somebody else did that by now, but I definitely thought about doing it, because it reads kind of like a book sometimes.

I’ve been through a lot and I’ve been a lot of places, so I can expound on a lot of different things. I’m not just Joe Dude that’s been in a cul-de-sac my whole life; I’ve been blessed to be all over the planet, and not just on some rap shit, like fly in, get in the fucking limo, go to the hotel, go to the show, go back to the limo and fly out. I’ll go to countries, and I’m in that country amongst the people, walking around, eating street food and restaurant food, going to different sites. Being on shit tours with other people showed me that people just generally stay in the hotel, artists especially. It’s rare you see an artist go somewhere and get out. It could be just time constraints, but I’ve always preached [that] there is no better learning experience than travel.

You do yourself a disservice getting all this free information and experience just sitting in the fucking house. It’s like going on vacation and staying at the fucking resort. You could be at the pool anywhere, down the street from your house, you don’t need to fly anywhere to go there, but there’s different things you need to see and learn, so I’ve always been a big proponent of that, plus my mom raised me to be my own man with everything, to be creative and move my own way, and don’t follow the crowd, so I never [do].

How do you think you picked up the travel bug?

From my folks; my people from the islands, so I’ve been flying since like 5 years old [or] earlier. I remember being in a Pan Am plane.

Is it just something about travel by air, or do you like road trips too?

Road trips, man? I was in fucking Thailand riding a elephant back up the side of a mountain, man. I was on a standing raft where you’ve gotta move your stick in the water. I’ve been on a train for 24 hours going through countryside up and down hills on the side of Canada, you know what I’m saying? So it doesn’t matter to me.

Anything else you’d like to add?

All I can say is I’m big on individuality. I know that I’m creating art that may not get appreciated for 20-30 years, and that’s fine with me, as long as it can survive and people like yourself are willing to dig and find stuff. And I know that there are people out there who will, because they do hit me. The amount of people that hit me about Ghostmaker is ridiculous. I get emails about that shit almost every month.

I know you’ve got to be getting sick of hearing the question, but I had to ask you about it. I’d be doing MarQ Spekt fans everywhere a disservice if I didn’t press you on it.

It’s coming and I think it’s going to be dope when it comes, because people have a point of reference now with MacheteVision and JustPlayWitIt. It’s not often where you’re gonna be able to go and see somebody who was actually in the 90s era of the underground who brings that sound and feel to it, so it’s kind of a dope snapshot for people who want to go back and appreciate it. I was actually there, and I have proof. I’m not just talking about it like some outsider or journalist that read a whole lot about it and can tell you everything about it. No, I can give you the feeling of what it was.

I’m looking forward to hearing that.

It’s coming. Everything else is cooking up, and it’s just expressing freedom through art and getting out of these bullshit constraints that people put on themselves. I think that there’s a lot people upset with me just for the fact that I don’t have any constraints, and you see me popping up with new creative projects all the time, and they may be silent somewhere. They can’t do what they want to do when they sign the contract. They gotta do what these other people tell them to do. Contract money don’t be that much, even on majors. Dudes ain’t seeing a lot of paper. So, it’s like, if you not cutting up the check why would you compromise your creativity, and people do, for pennies, because the glare of the spotlight of being out and being seen and having that perception is more important [to them] than actually being real with it.

It may be a matter of convenience for some too. People aren’t willing to individually put in the work.

Put it like this: I’m kind of signed to HipNOTT but at the same time it’s a partnership. I handle everything creatively, they handle the business, and we both come together with splashes of both. They’re basically helping me distribute my product further than before and market it a little bit better than I could have on my own, so that’s what it becomes, and for that I give them a little piece of the profit, and we move on. It’s a business deal, and I move business-like with life. I enjoy life, but I’m definitely about my business. And that goes with everything: travel, investing…

How’d you link up with HipNOTT?

Kev[in Nottingham, owner of HipNOTT records] and some writers have always shown me love on their site, always from day one, even before MacheteVision, so they had me do some showcases or whatever. We were shopping [JustPlayWitIt] around. I think we shopped it to Man Bites Dog and a couple of other people, and they declined it. And I’m looking at the stuff they’re putting out, like, ‘Yeah OK,’ so I get with Kev. I think I was like, ‘Man, if nobody else picks this up, I’m just putting it out on my own,’ and I sent it to Kev and it didn’t even take a day. He got back to me that night, like, “Yes, we want it, let’s take it.” And you know what? We recouped within a month and I’ve been getting royalties off that, so it’s like what can you say? And then you look at some of these rosters and these other labels, and they not making no money off 90 percent of the people they’re putting out.

It goes back to what I just told you: sometimes people just like to have the perception of being around certain people, even though it’s not profitable; like the perception means more to them than actually having something real. There’s people that right now will sell you their souls for $600 and the chance to be on 106 and Park, and that was “on.” They just wanted to go sit on the couch just so that they could tell people they was on 106 and Park. But the money they got was gone before they even made the trip to the couch.

Me, I don’t give a fuck about any of that. I want rights to all my stuff, I want my credit, and I don’t care who knows — it could be 50 people, it could be 100 people. We just put out a tape in 2015 and people are actually interested and buying it and supporting it, and it’s a cassette, man. People want that physical product. You want physical product? Alright, here’s a tape, yo. Whether you could play this or not, just put some value on it and get it and we’ll give you the digital free, you know what I’m saying?

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