Doomtree: TAS In Session
The Twin Cities hip hop scene has local luminaries like Atmosphere and Har Mar Superstar, but the rap collective Doomtree claims a strong mix of that region's most notable MCs and producers.
The six-man, one-woman crew released its second "official" album, No Kings, last fall, which they call their first truly collaborative effort. They'll kick off a UK and European tour on May 5 in Italy and will return to the States for more gigs this summer, including Lollapalooza in August. Several of Doomtree's many members — rappers Mike Mictlan (Mike Marquez), Cecil Otter (Kyle Smith), Dessa (Maggie Wander), P.O.S. (Stefon Alexander), Sims (Andrew Sims) and producers/DJs Lazerbeak (John Samuels) amd Paper Tiger (John Samuels) — will also branch out on solo tours.
Recently the septet visited Studio A for terrific, fun session that airs on TAS on 91.5 WNYE and streams on the TAS site this Friday, May 4 at 11 a.m. EDT. Watch performance videos and interview highlights below:
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piO-3I9VTDg]
Alisa Ali: That was fresh. Your new album is out on your own label, right? Now what number record is this?
Dessa: Counting is not Doomtree’s very strongest suit, but we’ve done over 30 records and we’re seven artists who all have solo careers. Once in a while, when the opportunity presents itself we hunker down and work together to do a collaborative project.
P.O.S.: I think it’s the second official collaborative record.
Dessa: And the eighth unofficial.
Alisa: So there’s a bunch. That’s a technical term. How long was it between the last full collaboration?
P.O.S.: 2008.
Mike Mictlan: But I feel that this record is a real actual collaboration whereas the last record was more or less like a sampler. We would write songs together, but it wasn’t in the same format that we wrote them the last time. We would pair off on the last album, the Doomtree self-titled album, and Dessa and I would write a song or Cecil and whoever would write a song. This record we kind of all separated ourselves. We drove out of the city where cell phones didn’t work and sat in a cabin for about five days and wrote all the songs at the same time together, at the same time, in the same room.
Dessa: We’ve done a lot of compilations and this is our first really, truly collaborative [effort].
Cecil Otter: I feel like the first one was to show everyone that we are solo artists. We’re not one big mashed up group.
Paper Tiger: Our self-titled [album] is more of a treehouse and this one, we sewed our clothes together.
Alisa: Why is it in rap, there’s always a beef going on? You don’t see that in singer-songwriter circles.
P.O.S.: Oh, I’m sure it’s there.
Dessa: Whereever there’s more than one person, there’s a disagreement, for sure. You’re going to have infighting. But no singer-songwriters are like, “I’m going to handle THIS, 12-string man!”
Lazerbeak: It’s just hip-hop. Grafitti writers write over each other, B-boys dance battle each other, MCs battle each other.
Dessa: It’s half music and half sports.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ylbeN7wK5c]
Sims: Believe it or not, a lot of rappers arent’ that selfless (all laugh). Believe it or not. They’re very egotistical and braggadocious and they want the spotlight, which is weird.
Alisa: I bet there’s braggadocious-ness going on in this crew.
P.O.S.: We’ve been a rap crew together for ten years and we spent the first part of those years really fighting for our place within our local community and for some sort of reasonable noting outside of it. There’s definitely “inner crew,” us versus the world vibes. It’s all tuned to a way that we all recognize rap as this totally ridiculous, fake, action-adventure world when you listen to it. A lot of us feel silly rapping songs about how incredibly cool we are when there’s so much actually important things to rap about. So that doesn’t come out nearly as much as it does with a lot of other rap music. But it’s still fun to go up and be fly.
Mike Mictlan: It’s kind of the ethos with this record. A mature call to the world. A call to arms but, in a way, we’re definitively saying, "We’re here and we have carved our lane now."
Dessa: You called it "adult rebellion" once and I liked that phrase. I think there are a lot of ways to rebel that do ring adolescent and I liked the idea that this is teenager-dom, for adults!
P.O.S.: All of us get better when any of us make music. If Dessa puts out a record, all of us have gotten better because we need to move ourselves to get as good as she just got. Same thing happens when Sims makes a record or I do or Mike or Cecil. Any time any of us push, all of us, without saying anything, feel like we have to push.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4TPCI8ZQfE]
Alisa: I want to revisit this idea of the Wisconsin cabin that you went into. How long did you sequester yourselves?
Sims: Six days.
Dessa: And then you get the seventh off, just like the bible. The production team had been working on the beats for longer so when we arrived at the cabin, Cecil and Lazerbeak ….
Lazerbeak: Cecil and myself worked at our respective houses making instrumentals for this and kind of getting a nice cohesive feel together before we even went out to the cabin to work on these songs.
Alisa: I would have assumed you put down the lyrics first.
Lazerbeak: It’s usually always the music first. We wanted to keep it as almost a band feel. All the producers get together and we all play each instrument, but we write all the songs together. Then we think about every MC the whole time we make it, like Mike would be great here, so let’s strip this part and keep it 16, but have it moving constantly. We want to try to make real songs. I think it worked out and everyone adapted pretty quickly.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtAn06yLbQ]
