“I remember getting a call after work one day,” says founding member Adam Gauci, AKA MC Raceless. “I found out this band, Future Islands, had been interviewed on triple j that day and they’d asked the singer [Samuel T. Herring] about what Australian music he liked. My friend was like, ‘He mentioned you.’ Apparently he grew up listening to us in the ’90s. I messaged him on Facebook, thanking him for saying such nice stuff about us, and casually – almost as a joke – asked if he wanted to do a track. He was immediately up for it, and even did recording for it while he was touring overseas.”
The resulting track was Twisted Strangers, which ended up being the title track of Curse Ov Dialect’s eighth album. Though, as it turned out it wasn’t Samuel T. Herring performing on the track, but Hemlock Ernst; his rapping alter ego.
“I just figured the guy was a singer,” says Gauci. “I had heard that he’d done rapping in the past, but I had no idea what he was going to lay down. Turns out it was this wicked verse.”
The group’s newfound exposure sped-up the construction of Twisted Strangers, which was released this past March through independent Brisbane label Valve Records. The album is a further exploration of the darker, weirder corners of the hip hop spectrum, incorporating jazzy flows and strange, off-kilter sample work.
“For us, it’s all about trying out and implementing sounds that we’ve never used before,” says Gauci. “Have we used seals yet? Lions? Some obscure world music genre? We’re always looking at hip hop as a genre and as an artform. The subject matter is one of the few things that doesn’t really change. It’s always anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-materialism. That’s kind of what we’ve always been about.”
Curse Ov Dialect started out in 1994 – a time when Australian hip hop act could not have been any more obscure or any less cool. Over the years, they’ve seen plenty of artists within their realm come and go, and they’ve also seen the genre move from the margins into the mainstream. At a time where an Australian hip hop act can have a #1 album, sell out arenas and win ARIAs, the rise of the empire isn’t lost on Gauci and the rest of Curse Ov Dialect crew.
“We were the first Australian hip hop act to score an international deal,” he says. “That generally gets ignored by a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore us, because we’re strange. We’ve always had one foot in the ghetto and one in the gallery. It’s been great to see the rise of hip hop here, but I feel like it hasn’t really been properly diverse until now. People like Briggs are changing that. The Herd and the whole Elefant Traks crew have always been about that. There are countless sub-genres of rock’n’roll, and yet in Australian hip hop – for a long time – you were either the feel-good barbecue music or you were part of the minstrel of cultural appropriation. I think that if everyone stayed true to their own personality, there would be a huge change in hip hop in this country.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
