Eating Shrooms, Getting F*cked Up, No Trailer: An Interview with Alexander Spit

What kind of stuff do you usually sample?

I’m fortunate…obviously when I was collecting a lot of vinyl I was sampling from that. At Amoeba Records they have that red sticker section, the dollar bins…those are usually hit or miss. A lot of the time there will be ten of the same record in there which is usually a sign that it’s not the best record. Sometimes I’ll pick records based off of the album cover or the year it was made. It’s a very arbitrary process when it comes to sampling.

One thing hip-hop music has taught me is that there is no limit for me, in regards to what can become a musical thing in regards to the soundscape that I appreciate. That’s one of the first things getting into the hip-hop culture taught me…to respect every single genre. Even if it’s something as corny and lame to me as country there’s going to be something in there…maybe there will be a cool little drum break or cool, bluesy guitar lick that I could flip on down the line.

Nowadays I’m very fortunate that I have a lot of DJ homies that send me samples that they dig up all the time. I’m very stoked on that. I’m not digging records as much as I used to. It’s an expensive habit doing that. Now I’m more worried about paying rent, feeding myself and taking care of my bills and what not. So, I’m very lucky that I have these DJ homies to send me stuff. I all really look for anymore are textures more so than a melody.  I’m not too big on hearing a song and just sampling a little section, rather I’m looking for a little texture that I can apply on my own.

Any crazy stories?

I guess so yeah. When I was with my old group The Instant Messengers, I remember we were 16 or 17. Thanks to my homie Brick Stowell we were cool with the Living Legends. And, they were down with us PURELY based off of the word of Brick saying we were dope.

One time we had a show in Oakland, Calif. at this festival called Broke Ass Summer Jam, which is a little Bay Area music fest that happens every year…we had a set at 11 p.m. and that night we were told that we could open for the Living Legends at Boulder, Colo. at their sold out show if we could get to Boulder the next day before 7. So, we got off-stage at 11:30, we called our homegirl who had a two door Honda Civic, there’s four members in the group including Brick who was our manager at the time.

We sit five of us into a two-door Honda Civic, borrowed our homegirl’s car that had no AC, no CD player, no radio. We drove 20-something hours straight to Boulder, Colo. going through the desert during the summertime. We end up getting there five minutes before our set time after being in the car for 20 plus hours with no stops at all, a whole bunch of arguing and we went on stage to a sold out crowd. The first thing I did as soon as the beat dropped was stage dive.

I remember that as being one of my favorite moments in my career. If you work for hard you’re going to have a good ass time and you’re going to have really cool opportunities come your way.

You were recently at The Boiler Room with BADBADNOTGOOD, are there any future collaborations happening with them?

Yeah. In a couple week we have a really, really, really dope rendition of “A Breathtaking Trip” coming out that was performed by me, BADBADNOTGOOD and BAGO at Red Bull Studios. We filmed a really cool piece that’ll come out prior to my album dropping. It’s of a song that already exists of mine, but BADBADNOTGOOD was able to create an entirely new song and soundscape for me. We put a lot of money into the production, so we were able to create a really dope studio production. When people see it I think it’s going to be a lot of people’s favorite bit of music I’ve put out.