Bisc1

The themes are brilliant. Moving from the chaos of New York’s street life and the overwhelming “Paranoia” of the big city to the interconnected relationships that keep you moving through it all, Queens rapper Bisc1 has constructed his own gritty poetry on his latest, When Electric Night Falls.

Early on, Bisc1 got his start as a graphic designer for some of hip-hop’s greatest: Aesop Rock, RJD2, The Perceptionists and several others. Those relationships opened musical possibilities with Embedded Music, sister label to the legendary Definitive Jux label. After a successful EP (Basics) and mixtape (The Stay Up Project), he now emerges with a stellar full length.

We recently caught up with Bisc1 to discuss NYC and what’s happening with the album and he more than obliged no matter where the conversation took us.

SSv: Obviously I want to get to the new album, but the graphic designer side of you is so involved in the music business as well. Do you feel that side of things affecting your music?

Bisc1: The record talks a lot about the struggle between the left and right side of the brain. I think two work well together – the visual helps to bring out the audio. The way I see the world is very visual and the way I like to describe things is to paint that picture.

SSv: Does it flow out of the same side?

Bisc1: Well, they are both creative releases, but I think they are very different. I feel it most when I’m chillin’ doin’ design stuff and I’m just dying to write music instead. But I mean, the beauty is that they do also function together in a sense, like I am definitely trying to do this whole thing with this project where I have 25-30 canvases interpreting the record. I don’t talk about that a lot.

SSv: Can you tell us about the record and the concept for When Electric Night Falls?

Bisc1: Yeah, it wasn’t something I sat down and said, “Okay, now I’m gonna work on a project called When Electric Night Falls.” It wasn’t that planned out. I did go out to record x amount of songs that felt the vibe that I was going for.

SSv: Which was?

Bisc1: It was this heavy with electronic sounds vibe. I think it came out that way. It comes out of New York and my perception of it, which is heavy and electronic. So being a designer, I stay up digitally as much as possible. I’m on the web 24/7. We’re living in a very digital world and so the sound that I was looking for with the producer Johnny Vegas – who produced most of it and recorded everything pretty much – we sat back and just kind of picked which sound we really wanted to push.

So we went in that direction and in terms of structure and concepts and shit, it’s all very personal. It is something that I function within most in the evening. I just can’t write songs during the day. It has to be at night. I don’t know why, but when night falls, that’s when I do what I do.

SSv: So there’s a complete creative block when the sun’s up?

Bisc1: No, it’s not a complete creative block. I don’t know what it is. I guess it’s just the way I function. It’s hard to kick back in the daytime. I do a lot of design in the daytime, but it’s only at night that I write music. It’s this weird split, man, and I need to figure how to mesh them.

SSv: New York City seems to really play into your creative flow…

Bisc1: I really think it’s a lot of everything. I would say the pace of it, the size of it, the demographics and difference in people… I travel the train and there’s every kind of human being. And there’s something about that – even the block I live on in Queens, there’s every kind right here. I tend to see the world very large. It’s hard for me not to be overwhelmed with the size and shit. With New York, I’m constantly overwhelmed and no matter how crazy it is, there’s always movies about the end of New York and after 9/11 and the whole terrorist thing, just riding with people you also get to see the light, too.

SSv: That really comes out in “Paranoia.”

Bisc1: Yeah, that is the city. That really is. That’s also part of the state of America is paranoia. I don’t have a TV and I try not to absorb myself with the media, but it’s hard to avoid. The headlines are right there and when you walk into the subway, the police are ready to search your bags. That shit is definitely paranoia and here it’s intensified 100 times anywhere else you go.

SSv: The scope of the city is also balanced by intimacy on the record, like “Unconditional.”

Bisc1: One thing I wanted to do is that I wanted to do something as close to myself as possible. I didn’t want to do a hip-hop record about hip-hop. That song “Unconditional,” I even struggled to put that on the record. Johnny was like, “Yo, that’s a dope song.” And my girl was like, “That’s too personal. You shouldn’t put that shit out.”

But at the end of the day, it’s about the really human shit. My parents are people I respect a lot, so if I’m gonna make a track for somebody, like I’m on my dying bed so take this track and listen to it, that’s just a powerful thing for me to be able to give back. I think hip-hop has a lot of walls to it. There’s this thing if you’re not from this place with this type of family structure, then you’re not genuine hip-hop. But I’m like, “Yo, this is as genuine as I can be.”

SSv: Do you feel that’s lying saying that you have to be this or that?

Bisc1: It doesn’t allow for evolution. I feel like obviously the art culture or form was shown to the whole world, so everyone will have seen that and will be influenced by it. You have people growing up on hip-hop who didn’t grow up in the same places as it came from. These influences come out with a rock sound and hip-hop sound and electronic sound and all these things together and it can’t be… I just think it’s a boxed-in culture. It’s slowly breaking, but I’m trying not to sit in the box. I could write songs about DJing and rapping and rap to rappers, but I feel there’s a bigger world. Rap is just a dope medium.

SSv: If anything seems to be plaguing hip-hop, what would you say it is?

Bisc1: [Pause] I don’t know. I teach kids hip-hop. I do this program working with kids in the South Bronx and I go up there and there I am in the South Bronx with hip-hop. It’s an amazing place to be working with kids. And I think to myself, “They’re very influenced by what they hear.” They listen to what’s on the radio. It’s like watching Terminator on the TV.

Is it plaguing? I don’t know. I can’t really define it because there’s a beauty to it. That’s a tough question. But all in all, maybe I would say materialism. But I think that’s a global problem. Take Slick Rick right – that dude has so much gold on. But the content wasn’t about his gold. It’s always been about showing off and being an entertainer and being stylish, but the content has become where it used to be more uplifting, at least mainstream hip-hop was. It was more uplifting than it is now.

SSv: Is that a goal of yours to bring something more uplifting?

Bisc1: I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to say that I’m the savior of hip-hop. I like to make people feel good, but I end up writing darker shit. I want to write jams that make people dance around and shit but maybe that’s not me. I don’t know. Ultimately, I don’t have this mega-goal of where I want to be. That’s as real as I can be is to write a sound that’s encompassing all that I can vibe to.

SSv: But that is an interesting dichotomy – wanting to be uplifting and positive and yet writing all night overwhelmed by NYC.

Bisc1: Oh man, I tell you. Like in every relationship I have, it’s the same fuckin’ back and forth. Like in the song “Turbulence” with a pendulum that swings back and forth, that’s the story of my decision-making life. Forever. It’s always been that way. When I decided to go to college and shit, I was DJing and making mix tapes at the time. Art had taken a backseat, but I went to school for art. Then getting out I’ve been faced with so much shit, that I just go back and forth. There’s grittiness but I’m trying to put life into it. Will I ever find a balance? I don’t know. These days I’m just trying to embrace it and say, “Fuck it, that’s what it means to me.”

SSv: What are you doing for the album?

Bisc1: I will be on the road for a month in March. We’ll go up north, wrap around the West Coast and then hit the south. I’ll be at SXSW and A3C in Atlanta. Then down to Winter Music Conference. And then I’m definitely working on a lot of video projects. I’m really dying to get visual. I’ve been so focused on this record and getting shit together that I haven’t been able to push my visual aspect.

I’d also say that I’ll be performing as much as it is healthy for me to. Not every night of course. In New York, there are so many venues, it’s easy to perform every fuckin’ night. But I don’t need to do that. I need to learn my limitations. And also work on new music. We’re already sitting down and starting to think about that. I know the sound and style of this record so I don’t want to do that again. I think being on the road for a month will allow us to take this shit somewhere else.