You mentioned "unconventional and often uncomfortable recording conditions," power failures and surges and a power transformer bursting into flames. Could you talk a bit about the challenges of field recording in Africa?
BH: Sure. First of all, you should know that I began it as an academic project. Although I had also been playing drums in bands and recording and touring, I had never been behind the board. I'd never recorded anything, really. I had a 4-track, and I had one of these lovely machines [pointing to the Radio Shack tape recorder recording our conversation], but besides that, I'd really never done any recording. Dan is my cousin, and I'd spent a lot of time in his studio. So I approached Dan, and I said, "I've got this idea. I really want to put together a portable recording rig." So he really helped me come up with that first rig. It was crazy for a lot of reasons. First of all, the power over there, they're running on 220 [volts]. I decided that it would be a good idea to set up in a community center. It's sort of a central spot, there's space and there's technically grounded electricity — or there was supposed to be. One of the first days, before Dan even got there, I plugged in some stuff to test the equipment, and we later found out it was running at something like 89 volts. It was supposed to be 220.
DC: It was the UPC. He had one of those APC Back-UPS Pros, and it literally exploded.
BH: It completely burst into flames. I was totally freaked out — I had no clue what the fuck was going on. I plug it in, it explodes, end of story. We ended up actually having to get a buddy of mine over there, whose older brother is sort of an electrician. He knows how to wire stuff and how to work with it. There was grounded current coming from one of the wires in the ceiling, so they actually re-routed the whole goddamned thing for us.
What was the initial rig that you brought with you?
BH: That was a Tascam 788, which was one of those little 8-track, 24-bit hard disk recorders. It kind of looks like a 4-track, but it's eight tracks of digital. We brought one of those...
DC: ...and his black G3 laptop.
BH: A little MIDI controller that didn't even have velocity. It was just basically like straight up at 127or whatever.
DC: It was a pre-USB Midiman keyboard controller, a MOTU Micro Express half-rack MIDI interface. For [the] sake of size we actually tried the MOTU FreeStyle but it wouldn't spit MTC out continuously; it would mess up. The MTC was inconsistent when synchronized, so we had to get the half-rack MIDI converter, which was solid.
BH: It was before this guy over here [pointing to an M- Audio Oxygen MIDI controller] was invented. It was 2001, so they hadn't come out with any of these cute little keyboard things, so we opted for sort of the middle ground. And then I bought one of those three-mics-for-$100 sets.
DC: I was worried about the humidity affecting condensers and we didn't really know how safe it would be. We knew there was a lot of crime and dubious shipping, so I didn't want to bring too much gear. In fact, we broke down every night, packed all the gear up into a lockable footlocker, then carried it back to the room where we slept every night. And it was good, because every night, even the fuses that we bought and put into the municipal center were stolen and replaced with chewing gum wrappers.
BH: We had to take them out every night, because the first night the fuses got ripped off.
What were the mics?
BH: They were cheap Sennheisers. They sounded like 58s, but a little brighter.
DC: But I did pack an extra mic, a stereo VP88 Shure, which actually is a pretty nice all around mic, even though for vocals it's stereo. We didn't have that many tracks going into the Tascam. You can only do four at once, and we had no isolation. We hung some blankets to kill reflections of this boxy little room at one point. But we actually spread people around the VP88 for some of the lead vocal tracks. There were a bunch of rappers improvising, like on the Slam Revolution/BMG 44 collaboration.
BH: Yeah, on that track there must have been about eight MCs. And I literally was in there holding a mic, and whoever was doing their shit, I'd put the mic up to them.
DC: Keep in mind that the room we're in is a hundred degrees.
BH: At least.
DC: And at different times of the day the amount of electricity would vary by 30 or 40 volts. And so we would keep an eye on the converter, which had a meter on it. And when it would get below a certain amount, we'd turn everything off, save and do a coffee break. Because it would go below and then everything would shut down, so we had to keep an eye on that.
BH: We would shut it down and save it before we lost it. We learned very early on, when the UPC backup blew up, not to trust the electricity.
Were you saving to the hard drive of your laptop?
BH: To the Tascam hard drive, and we'd burn CDs as well.
The hard disk recorder burns CDs?
DC: Yeah, that little guy is very convenient. It has mic pres, although we brought an extra pair of Symmetrix 202s, which are really good, inexpensive mic pres. But the hard disk recorder has mic pres, it has an external SCSI CD burner, it has a mixer with effects, and it's tiny.
How much do those Tascams cost?
BH: That rig? I got it used for $600 or $700 with the CD burner. So it was very inexpensive. I know they're selling for even cheaper now.
DC: It's also 24-bit.
BH: It's a great little unit. I sort of wish I didn't have to sell it. I got rid of it because I upgraded some things.
What software did you have on the laptop?
BH: We brought Logic specifically for the MIDI. We didn't record any of the audio into the laptop at all. It was just really for the MIDI tracks.
DC: Benny had made a bunch of grooves and sent them over [to rappers in Senegal]. He sent them and said, "Pick the ones you like, and then we'll work with the ones you like. Or, if you really don't like them, we'll write some new ones." So when we got there, there were a few people who were like, "We like this one, but can we speed it up, or can we change the flavor of it? I want a little flute thing going on here. Can you do this?"
When and why did you go to Senegal the first time?
BH: I went over there in '98 for my first time. A good friend of mine who lives in Boston, a Senegalese drummer, Abdullah Sall, I met him when I was like 15. And he became friends with the family, and Dan and I both studied [drumming] with him. He took me over my first time, in the summer of '98. I'm a drummer. I was really interested in studying sabar. He was a djembe player. Sabar is the national drum of Senegal. It's played a lot at the wrestling matches and stuff.
DC: It's played with one hand and one stick. It's kind of unusual.
BH: So I went over there then, and I was in the marketplace and I saw there was a bunch of local music and local hip-hop stuff. Being a fan of hip-hop, I thought, 'Where am I ever going to find something like this again?' I picked some of that up, brought it back with me, and that got my curiosity going. I was at Hampshire College at the time, getting ready to write my thesis, and I had this idea of doing something with Senegalese hip-hop. So I went over there for about three months, and I studied the [Wolof] language before I went. I got very lucky when across the street from where I was living was one of the old school MCs from Senegal. This was Shiffai, who's on the compilation — he rhymes in English. He introduced me to a lot of different people and the ball started rolling. I wrote the thesis, sent it back, said, "Okay, great, good luck, guys. Keep in touch." But then we kept e-mailing and calling back and forth, and the idea kind of got going. I thought, the thesis is an interesting way to show people about this and disseminate some of this stuff, but not everyone's going to sit down and read a fucking college thesis, it's just not going to happen.
What was the gist of the thesis?
BH: The thesis was really about how hip-hop in Senegal was used as a tool for political change. They had been working under a single party system since independence. So for about thirty years the PS [Le Partie Socialiste] party was in control, and in particular, this one guy, Abdou Diouf, who'd been in control for about fifteen years or so. And the country was getting poorer and poorer, he was building more villas in France — it was just a ridiculous situation.
Kind of typical post-colonial African situation.
BH: Very typical, but the one thing that is very atypical about Senegal is that they have very liberal media, and they have many, many radio stations and privately owned newspapers. The government doesn't control most of this. They have one government- controlled TV station, one government-controlled radio station, but the rest is all private. Because of that, they had a lot of music coming in from outside of Senegal, and they had a lot of free speech, free- thinking ideas going on. That, coupled with the angry young kids that were really into hip-hop, was a huge motivating factor to get a large population of kids that had never gone to the polls before to vote against this guy. The lyrics were very political, and it completely changed things over there. That's what inspired me to continue working with this, because they were really saying something unique. They were really saying something different, something I felt we could learn from, especially because we had just had an election here, which was pretty dismal, in my opinion. And so here you go across the world to Muslim West Africa, where we're trying to push our own political agenda, our own idea of democracy — which doesn't even work here — that works even better over there. That was certainly inspiring.
Slam Revolution in "Wax Degg" ["Speak Truth"] talks about the government's attempts to silence Senegalese hip- hop groups. Given what you've said about free speech and the media in Senegal, how does the government try to silence hip-hop artists?
BH: They walk a fine line, the Senegalese government. And to be quite honest, they have a very hard time finding ways to silence people because of these really open outlets. They know that if they come down too hard they're going to be criticized even more. They're trying to function as a democracy, and so the ways that they do it usually tend to be kind of police scare tactics. One thing [the police] do to intimidate people is they'll bring one of those Mercedes vans in filled with cops, and everybody goes running.
DC: When we were out for dinner one night with some of the rappers, we were walking down the street and one of the guys heard a police car coming, and our friend just grabbed me and we ran down this side street to get away from the police. I asked, "Why?" He said, "We don't even wait to see them. We just run."
BH: The military's got a code, a certain uniform, a sort of code of honor, a way you're supposed to act and dress, a certain kind of gun. The police, especially in certain areas of Africa, [are] a little more disorganized and they're dealing more specifically, not with mobs of people. They're really dealing sort of one-on-one with street gangs and stuff. I guess like here — the line gets blurred.
Are there venues for people to perform over there?
BH: Lot of clubs and a lot of makeshift happenings, street parties and stuff. Similar to what you might see in Jamaica. People with a bunch of big speakers and somebody rigs up something.
Eight guys on one stereo mic?
DC: Well, there were three guys on one stereo mic and then four guys trading off on two other mics. And they would literally run up to the mic. We couldn't bring mic stands. Someone had actually welded a mic stand at one height, with one clip. So we had one mic stand at one height. You couldn't move it up or down, you couldn't turn it. You kind of had to shove the metal of the mic right in there and then we had to put guys up on telephone books to get to the right height.
BH: We've got some hilarious pictures. I'm not going to say which artist it was, but one of the artists who's particularly short had to stand on a couple of different phonebooks.
Is there anything you would've done differently about the recordings you made in the field?
DC: More mic inputs simultaneously so more people could've done their thing all at once, 'cause there wasn't much in the way of overdubs. There were a few things, but we were limited to four things at once, 'cause this Tascam can only record four at once.
BH: I've been back to Senegal to record again and I ended up stripping it down. I basically just brought one mic. I brought a couple of mics but I mostly used an AT4050, one decent mic pre. I did bring a pop filter, had another mic stand welded for me.
