Interviews
If the adage that a team is only as strong as its weakest member is true, there's no scale to measure the strength of Psychokinetics. A powerful, potent mix of two writers, a programmer and a producer who are each so talented and intense they border on savant. There's no risk here, however, of a bedroom band that can't play out. Psychokinetics also put on a compelling, fun live show. To break it down they are (recorded, live and in interview) a quarter sexy party dogs, a quarter hilarious self-effacing clowns, a quarter philosophers and a quarter pure love. The binding agents? Dedication, focus and hard work. The result? A band more than ready for the next level. And they're here to say it's time, they're ready and they deserve it. They collaborate with dozens of artists, but Psychokinetics is at its core Jacob "Celsius 7" Battersby, Domingo "Spider" Reynolds, Dave "DJ Denizen" Gramarossa and Jamie "Vapor Child" Hill. Jacob and Domingo, friends since grammar school, chose the name in '95. "One day we were just thinking of names, or maybe we were listening to Jaeru the Damager and he has this lyric: 'psychokinetic forces proceed to smash in the cerebellum,'" explains Jacob. "And that word just struck us. Plus we're big comic book geeks, if you google that word it often comes up in terms of Dungeons and Dragons and comic books. It's just the whole idea of moving things with your mind and what you are capable of when using your mental energy. We thought it was a really powerful name and it matches us were because we're both really animated, live we're moving all over the stage, that energy transmits to the people out in the crowd and they move too. It explains how we want to create movement through music and hip-hop, positive movement." The band's based out of the Bay Area. "Jacob and I grew up in Alameda," says Domingo. "We grew up when underground hip-hop was starting to blow up, we got adapted to it, and marinated in it, and started freestyling... playing hackey sack and making up beats over kareoke back in the day." "Domingo used to make tape splices. In ninth grade he used to take one tape and play the loop part of the beat, record it, rewind, and record it again. The first time I ever performed I was 14 and he made the beat. It was so high tech!" laughs Jacob. The performance was a talent show, Jacob forgot the words and ended up freestyling by necessity, freestyling cuss words that left his teacher less than pleased. The band jokes about their past, but the lyrics from "How'd I Get Here," slated for their next album are telling: "I made mistakes I guess we all do / Call me two Jakes / One's way too nice he got a smile for your face / The other's ready to die better leave from this place / And that's astronomy's dichotomy curious you oughta be / And allow my throat to [????] while I'm spitting on your Wallabies / Oh stop it pimp, let him, then why you here / Give him three cups of that all temperature cheer / Dude he wasn't drunk always cheating what a punk yes I love him but he flunked so I'm dealing with his junk / And girl she wasn't having it and that's rightfully so just a kid having kids taking bids on skid row / uh-oh time to split up the jig's up jigger / what in the cuts my pop bounced out the house I'm the man now / ... / meanwhile, my momma's working her ass off y'all, so it's Kristen who be taking care of me off I go to the yogurt shop / nachoes, free chip and soda pop hey I love you for it sis and it's never gonna stop until our spirits reach the cosmos and we are truly free." Speaking of Kristen, Jacob's [older?] sister, who is a talented preformer in her own right, played a crucial role in the coalescense of the group. "I met the group through Kristen," explains Jamie. "She had a CD release party for an album I produced and I met them there and told Jacob that we should record and he thought that I was a total idiot --" "Well, you were ripped," laughs Jacob. "And you were this kid with long, red hair." "We always have people coming up to us and saying they want to produce our album, that they have 20G and stuff, and we're like pshaw, but Jamie came through man," Jacob says. "Jamie is crucial in that he takes everything we bring in and he records our vocals and is an engineer, but he's also a classically trained pianist, so he plays a lot of instruments and adds a lot of flavor. When we first started working together he didn't have a lot of experience, he wasn't too much into hip-hop so he'd turn in these things and he'd have made it all Depeche-Modey. Listen to Century Descent and it's a different album. With our new album, Jamie's gotten more of an ear for more straightforward cutting, pounding hip-hop." Jamie concurs, "In the beginning I was taking more of a re-mix approach to it, I took their emotion and I ran with it into the trip-hop 'field.' Now I'm more about respecting their emotion, because they're at their core amazing writers and emotional writers and I want to emphasize that." Slightly savant, and more than slightly Attention Deficit Disordered, the band's always got a lot of projects going on. "We were thinking about calling our new album 'Attention Deficit Delight,' explains Jacob. "Because we all to a certain degree have it. It's looked upon negatively, but I think it can be a cool thing, you're creative. How we've harnessed it for our new album is a delight." In addition to the new album there are plans in the works for a hip-hop lounge album. It will be a character driven piece with several guest MCs, all recounting lounge lizard tales of the loser variety over samples from '40s and '50s lounge music. As a theraputic release from the unrelenting focus the new album, the band's recorded some of the lounge songs already, and they are truly hilarious. Also on the drawing board is a plan to release Jacob and Domingo's solo records as a double CD. But for now there's a consensus to keep their energy, and this article, focused on what they're hoping is their break-out album. It will be their second full-length (the aforementioned Century Descent being their first) in a discography that contains several EPs and a CD release of remastered tapes from back in the day. A full discography can be seen on their website, www.psychokinetics.com. "It's 15-songs, maybe a hidden track or two," Jacob describes the new project. "There are some party songs but it's our most straightforward hip-hop album, and will probably be self-titled. We're focusing on that, we want to see some doors open, we're ready for some scholarship as artists. Hopefully we'll get the notice that I feel like we deserve definitely because we've been doing the independent thing for a long time and I've been managing us, and I think I've gotten us, or we've gotten ourselves as far as we can go and we're ready to build it. We want management to get us to the next level, get a label, and tour the whole world. I want to get our music out, and have the freedom to chill and know that we can make music and a label or someone is going to put it out there, I feel it, we've been getting better and better every year." The Psychokinetics get by with help from some powerful friends. Guests on the new album include Omega, Zion Eye, Rashan (Crown City Rockers), Most Chill Slack Mob and Kirby Dominant. Dave "DJ Denizen" Gramarossa is the fourth member of the group. "He's our live act, sometimes we'll write with him too. He's incredible," says Jacob. "I want to manage this guy, get his music out there because he has thousands of beats." "When I started hanging out with him when he became the DJ three years ago," explains Jamie. "The first four times he came to hang out with me, which was like once a week, he'd bring me a CD of 10-12 tracks of original instrumental music that he had written that week. Fifty tracks written THAT month. All of them finished, all of them produced, all of them very intricate. He's a programming machine. And they were all over the map genre-wise." "You know what his superpower is?" Jacob asks rhetorically, ever the comic book geek. "I finally figured it out, while all of us are spending our time chasing girls he makes beats." Ah, yes, chasing girls. Definitely a theme in the Psychokinetics' world. But this isn't a place for humorless reactionary rhetoric, because they're so clever about it. For example, from "Done," which is slated for the new album: "Girl imagine this me and you at the park / ooh Romeo moonlight after dark / sitting on the bench looking at the swans / making out with my black finger in your thong / I'm dying baby my doctor told me / I only got sixty years to live please hold me." In the end they cut sympathetic figures because this isn't a particularly successful crew with the ladies, at least musically. Jacob and Domingo get shot down a lot. "Hey, where you going?" comes up more than once in Psychokinetics material. Plus they just can't hide their huge hearts. "We've got a lot of love, we're programming the love back into hip-hop," says Jacob. "We're not one of those groups that when something goes wrong we're talking shit about the promoter. We understand people on a human level. Hopefully that will help us out at some point, but if not, it doesn't matter, because we aren't going to stop being good people." The band forced themselves to stay put all summer and focus. "This time we made a concerted effort to make some head-knock, let's make some slump. Our last album was pretty experimental. But keep the quality and the content, it's still remaining true to what we write about, not like 'okay, here's a konk song, let's talk about tits,'" says Jacob, "But there's definitely a lot of bump in it." "On a personal level," says Jamie. "I wanted to make an album that was punchy as fuck. So I got these guys to do shorter verses, shorter songs, focused and concise as statements. I want people to want to play a song again then be tired of it before it's over." A listen to the new material confirms that approach is working. Many of the songs are chorus driven, with no compromises in the writing department. For example, the insanely catchy chorus from "The Hypnotist:" "This is a crazy world / I woke from my dream to a three ring circus / Given the part I'll play 'til the curtains close / The crowds put their make-up on / the hypnotist twisted his mustache laughing / as pretty girls dance to distract / my suspicions grow." Psychokinetics are starting to get itchy to get their high energy live act on the road again. "Century Descent had cool songs, but that was more of a listening album," explains Jacob. "I'm ready with this one to be about the live, to travel, to have enough money to travel. We love to perform and travel, meet new people, experience, see the world." "We get a great response," says Domingo. "It feels really good that what we're doing is getting a response whenever we go out of state or even here, we meet people and they're shocked." . "When we played Hawaii people knew all the words, it blew me away," says Jamie. "And afterwards people were coming up to these guys and talking to them about the content of the songs, so it's obvious that they were connecting." "I definitely think we have a large potential fan base out there," continues Jacob. "Just from the little markets we've tested in, or played in. We've had people come up to us and say 'you know i really don't really like hip-hop, but I love you guys.' I feel like we'll get people into hip-hop who aren't into it, they'll come to our show and see how live it is, how positive and how fun and we joke a lot with each other and we move around. It's fun party music but it's also introspective at times. We'll play the songs that are out there and more fun at parties, but then you listen to the album and you'll listen to the words. We are writers, so even if it's not a party we're still saying something. When we get that catapult, that help to get out there, I have no doubt that we have a huge fan base out there that hasn't even been exposed to us yet." "We like to party and write about that, but I think we both just write about life, issues, it's personal things but the thing about life is everyone's looking for love in some kind of way," says Jacob. "We're not the most political group, but we definitely write about political things, thinking outside the box. We're about breaking free, about self-liberation, about knowledge of self, about finding the power that you have so you can go out and do anything you want to do." "Inspire yourself to inspire others," adds Domingo. "Self-empowerment is a common thread." He proves that and how with "Stop It," also slated for the new album. It's a sparse, beautiful, slap-in-the-face of a song, made more arresting because it's almost a dirge in contrast to the other more hooky songs. It's an unambiguous message with so much power the group decided to leave Domingo's words alone, rapped one time, over a spare keyboard loop: "Do your emotions tend to your thought process / Is it hard to see your live objectively / Do you tend to ignore all the good in your life / but then find you have an excellent memory / when it comes to the shit you regret in your life do you surround your heart with negativity / and is it hard to forgive all the people in your life / so you treat us all like we are enemies / and do beliefs and traditions in your mind hold you down but you know they're important to you family / ... / and do you take everything that they say personal when they don't give the answers that you want / and does the lack of attention that you get build up around it make you yell, scream and cry for the want / you gotta stop it." "We write to work things out for ourselves," says Jacob. "And it feels good and then other people listen to it and it helps them too and they see there's a common thread and they'll come up to me and say 'oh, man that song was dope and it inspired me to start dancing and writing.' We've had people send us paintings and the coolest shit and you see your ripple going out." "We're speaking to ourselves when we write," continues Domingo, "we're saying I don't like how the world is, I don't like how society is, I don't want to be a part of that, I'm going to do this. I'm going to not have a regular job, I'm going to make music, I'm going to chase my dream. And we write about it, and it helps us and it helps others to listen but beyond that we're just a fun group, it's fun, I don't want to do anything else and that's why -- no regrets, I'm doing what I want a do." Jacob raps an echoed "no regrets, doin' what I want to do," looks at Domingo respectfully and says "you go." "And we need help," Domingo laughs. "Could you put that on the cover?" The band cracks up but the line starts a discussion about the band's goals. "Do you guys want to get rich?" asks Jacob. "I don't care about rich," answers Jamie. "I care about touching people ... you know, without them calling the cops. Seriously, I want to travel, I'd like to play more for strangers, playing for friends is cool, but I want to see how other people react to it, what other people have to bring." "This would be my typical day," is Domingo's response. "Wake up, exercise, write, produce, let's say we have a studio in Hawaii, be calm and open. More free." Jacob answers his own question. "I used to think that I didn't care if I don't get rich, and I don't want that necessarily, I understand that as an artist today it's incredibly difficult to sell a ton of records. But at the same time I don't want to sell us short. I believe you put what you want out there and it comes back. And if you don't ask, then what you want doesn't have any space." It's Psychokinetics' time, and here is their space. Check em'MINDBENDINGBEATS Copyright 2005 Danielle Barnett and Mischief Photo |
