Making music "incorrectly": ealing & the antidote to club-fatigue

In a part of the world non-stop talking about the rise of ‘dance’ music, producers and musicians making electronic music not always reserved for the club can often be overlooked.

When America seems to “own” EDM and Trap, and many of its offshoots, do artists with an affinity for these genres have to move overseas or simply move on?

For ealing (they/them), the answer is simply, neither.

They, along with a series of other underground voices, rappers and producers, are part of a new movement of artists entirely satisfied with the bounds of their own community. Historically, that kind of attitude towards your craft is something that changes culture, and sure enough, it has.

ealing has seen extensive love from places like NTS Radio, Rinse FM, FBi Radio, and 4ZZZ, has been nominated for FBi Radio’s Next Big Thing in 2023, and since supported the likes of Vegyn, Cakes da Killa, MC Yallah, Danielle, and Pangea, as well as played at Cockatoo Island’s Mode Festival 2024.

‘kisseswhipthevision’ is ealing’s latest project.

Across 8 tracks, the artist explores their sound with an overarching narrative focused on its being decoded by digi-archaeologists. Sounds consistent with hyperpop, breakcore, trap and much more pepper the extended EP, clearly demonstrating their ability to align sounds from all different places.

To speak on the release, we got a moment of ealing’s time.

Q: You’re an artist who’s straddling the line between underground hip hop, hyper pop & underground dance. I’d love to know where you place yourself?

e: After a set at Seoul Community Radio, Richie said my style “was like corrosive hiphop, yeah?” and I wish I had thought of it first. So that's what I've been telling people. I think it provokes more thought than other things I've said such as "a CSGO team rescuing the Migos from Bowser's castle". I’ve been leaning more into grainier, noisier sounds of late – feedback loops and sampling from sampling from sampling. I think that started in earnest when I finally figured out how accidentally inventive Arturia’s Monosynth can be. The limitations are endless! I’ve used it for a lot of textures and abrasions on ‘kisseswhipthevision’ to fill out the ears.

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Q: You’ve worked with a number of rappers & vocalists who are steadily getting a huge following, but still exist very much below the surface. Lil Ket is a perfect example of someone like this, who features on one of the key singles from the EP ‘ekb. How have you found yourself around & working with these blossoming writers & vocalists?

e: I love linking with Ket. It's hard sometimes. He’ll be working the road in outback QLD for months, then doing something like a Vietnam tour. I guess the balloons are quite moreish.

Every time I get in the studio with friends I just want to push it and see where the sound ends up. At a recent session I recorded a synth waaayy too hot, and it turned into some beautiful tone through digital compression. Ruined but reborn. I’ve been having a lot of fun collaborating since finding a good studio space, but more importantly than the space, having hardware to fiddle with. If you want to love collaborative writing sessions use more than one screen and one mouse and one chair.

But saying that, we recorded ‘#stealthy #goth freestyle’ with one screen and mic and chair in one night at a studio. We never got invited back because apparently we left the studio messy but that’s a disputed charge on my end. At least everyone recorded their verses. Ket’s and Sevy’s were one-takes from memory. Twinlite’s original production was so slamming, like digi-dubstep. I told twinlite we had to finish it, and I changed it way more than originally expected. Much of that was down to neo-grime-drones. but i also wanted it to transcend 'beat', I needed it to be a rollercoaster, cinematic, like quicksilver.

That same session incidentally birthed the collab with Bayang ‘KANDINSKYY’, I just try to use all parts from a session like that. Extend one moment in time out like a ripple... saves going to back in the morning.

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Q: Much like ‘EDM’ feels like an American genre to many, I feel like you could argue trap is much the same. How would you feel about that idea?

e: Trap will be canonised on the level of blues, or jazz. Trap musik is a masterful, street-level story of art, money, race, class, and salvation - Soulja Boi was the first rapper with the iPhone! The nexus point when trap really went mainstream to EDM Trap stemmed from Travis Porter and Major Lazer’s sound crossing, I guess. I’m excited to see where underground and innanet trap goes from here. I believe it’s due time for Sicko Mobb or RahnRahn $plash and Chubb $plash to come back. Or someone to jack their sound wholesale. Call it $plashnb.

Q: Do we even need to talk in genres anymore?

e: Post-genre it is! Although I feel like using genres and sub-genres is great for music self-discovery and accessibility. Self-tagged music can stay, like devotional, and Lakemba.

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Q: The release features some lore, claiming that ‘kisseswhipthevision’ has been recovered many years into the future, and decoded by digi-archaeologists. What was it about this release that inspired you to manifest that kind of history?

e: I wrote the lore and the intro track in one night. I can’t remember why it came to me but it started when the Spillhaus Projection and counter-cartographic thoughts collided with a memory of seeing Adrián Villar Rojas’ fantastic sculpture work The End of Imagination on one million weed oil.

In the lore of ‘kisseswhipthevision’, the world gets reshaped in a liquid ersatz of what we know it as - due to mass flooding, certainly probable – and the Netherlands become the new underwater superpower, and everyone speaks Dutch. (I think I also just love how Dutch radio DJs sound.) So everyone lives underwater, because the dry continents are wasted. But smugglers run routes on the ocean’s surface, delivering expensive aquatic plants in boats to evade detection. You can read the passage at eal.ng. But back to the EP - we’re on one of these boats. The single ‘at night all blood is black’ is the before, during and after of a botanical heist; passing across the kamchatka line is where we’re on board within the smuggler’s circuit-bent speaker, Dutch radio DJ and all. The other songs are trying to be either epoch exemplars, or just incomprehensibly futuristic, glitching in to focus or snapping out of history.

‘passing across the kamchatka line in fanboat 6.57__’ is essentially a So Solid Crew – Haters bootleg. I found it on a 2002 Ministry of Sound mix-CD while doing research for our RECOMP:ost episode resoundtracking the Kath and Kim episode, “The Club”. The song is so icy, truly futuristic. Even the hook is out of key. That’s gutsy. It felt very malleable, like it knew what I wanted to do with it. The synths are in a Phrygian Spanish Major, which aren’t technically in key with the rest of the song but they work, don’t they? The drums are not drums, they’re fighting Satin Bowerbirds that Lawrence English recorded in the Bunya Mountains – I mean yes they are blasted through compressors running hot but I was just limiting myself with source material, using small pieces made available, emulating what making music and creating new sound would be like in 2387. Can’t imagine they’d be too bothered about multiband-compression phase issues.

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Q: You’ve released a series of garms with Sydney artist Roon, as well as patches for ‘ekb’ also. What is the importance of physical merchandise to you, particularly when the lore is all about recovering digital artefacts?

e: Beyond simply, as Novelist puts it, “making revenue in nine ways” it's fun to engage with the storytelling element in something tangible. Researching and developing the design with Roon alongside building the EP led me down so many different rabbit holes. Synapses buggin’ out. That’s half of why I do it, just developing new ideas and putting them to work.

I also am really fascinated by lost media and recovered knowledge centres, just scraping through time and space until someone finds it millennia into the future. Like the Nag Hammadi Codices, which is an entire Testament’s worth of text on an almost-lost form of Christianity, buried in rural Egypt by a forgotten monastic for safekeeping, against persecution. I cry for futures lost but am thrilled by the idea of more clay pots waiting in silence, in much the same way as an alien civilization probably (maybe) existing gives some people life.

Q: Sonically, the release covers a lot, from breaks on ‘Stuck In Third’ to almost ‘breakcore’ on ‘passing across the kamchatka smuggler line in fanboat’. Many producers feel like they need to stick into a lane, but that doesn’t appear to apply to you. Why is that?

e: You said no more genres Jack!

I guess having a guiding compass with the vision helped. The recovered data from this speaker the listener is placed within is playing playlist files and pirate radio, cutting in and out of sonic legibility… so why would any of those songs sound the same? What would a future be like where we listen to one genre or tune exclusively? I try to stay to one genre but I get bored. I think I also get bored when I try to make a particular/specific. One exception to that is the intro we were chatting about earlier – I went into that as a creative endeavour, asking myself how would the genre of Grime change after centuries of geological and social upheaval. These little creative challenges – the bridge remix at the end of the tape is another, made almost entirely on my sp-404 – they are rewarding and spontaneous and they can never ever be wrong… they are often ‘incorrect’ and imperfect but that’s the juice.

You gotta have those little twists and games to keep the magic of creating alive, otherwise you’ll breakdown crying in the middle of the street one day and not know why.

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Q: What are your hopes for ‘kissesthewhipvision’?

e: I would love to hear about people connecting with the world - that would be cool, as I don’t think the story is over and the EP doesn’t stop at the music. The extended world, not just the ‘kisseswhipthevision’ concept nor the work with Roon, the stories feel so complete and ready to be told. I’m excited to explore much more of it. But how can you tell the legend from the fact of these worlds that lie so many years away? That is at once similar and (literally) outlandish. Planets without names, called by their people simply, ‘the world’. Planets without history, where the past is a matter of myth. In trying to tell this one story, I felt like an archaeologist amid millennial ruin.

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Q: In the future, how do you see yourself fitting into that?

e: Perhaps I will be torn asunder, bifurcate myself, and make both experimental and accessible music. One can dream! But I would rather not limit myself to those two binaries.

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‘kisseswhipthevision’ is available to buy and stream via ealing’s Bandcamp.

Jack Colquhoun is Mixmag ANZ’s Managing Editor, find him on Instagram.