THUNDAMENTALLY SOUND
“Heaps of stuff is taboo in the Australian scene. There are still a lot of purists who say if it didn’t come straight from vinyl onto an MPC then you’re a hack“
“You’ve got to be really careful of hitting plug-ins too hard; they can sound bad, real fast“
“There’s no real formula for hip hop sonic arrangement, so getting the low end right is super-important.“
In the early 2000s I went to an MC battle at Melbourne’s Hi-Fi Bar and witnessed a kid get mauled for one simple, yet contentious, taboo. I remember cringing when the first words flowed out of his mouth and something was conspicuously missing… that Aussie twang. You couldn’t get more Metropolitan than a Swanston Street basement in the middle of Melbourne’s CBD, but because he didn’t sound like he’d walked onstage wearing a wife beater, stubby in hand, he was lyrically assaulted by his occa rival.
For most of the last decade, mainstream Aussie hip hop has been militantly self-referential. At first the manifesto simply read, ‘you speak in an Aussie accent, you should rhyme in one too.’ Then as the Skip Hop sound cemented into its own genre, branching out from the breakbeat-heavy, string-laden, party anthem sound to incorporate influences from overseas was largely frowned upon.
Thundamentals have been pushing back against those restrictions for their last two albums, to the point where their latest, Everyone We Know encapsulates trap and grime alongside breakbeats, and even indie rock. DJ Pon Cho, one of the two producers in the band, reckons it’s all a bit of a croc anyway. “Everyone in the scene definitely listens to American hip hop, but no one really wants to go there because of the backlash,” he said. “American hip hop is where it started and that’s where all the innovation is happening. That’s where trap came from.
“Heaps of stuff
