Tuesday Q&A: Hemlock Ernst
Words and wordplay are Samuel T. Herring's domain. Whether via the artful and evocative synth pop of his acclaimed group Future Islands or in lithe and lyrical rapper mode as Hemlock Ernst, he delivers oft introspective and profound poetics as a vocalist. The approach Herring takes on in the latter form might confuse those better acquainted with the former, yet his catalog as a hip-hop artist is anything but a side hustle.
"R.A.P. Ferrera [fka Milo] was really the guy that got me back into writing again in 2014 when he reached out," Herring says, a gesture that interrupted a seven year absence from rapping and led to their "Souvenir" collaboration. "He sent me the beat, which I got on reluctantly. It was slower than things that I usually rocked with."
Inspired by left-of-center greats like Antipop Consortium and Divine Styler, creatively aligned with producers like Madlib and Kenny Segal, he has forged a credible path as Hemlock Ernst that both adheres and appeals to underground sensibilities. His more recent output feels like a principled digging in of the heels, indulging in rap-rock subterfuge with Height Keech on last year's The Fall Collection for Alpha Pup and amplifying himself over Icky Reels' electronic music oddities on the recently released Studying Absence for Beans' Tygr Rawwk Rcrds. Though both projects were recorded in the same year, Herring admits it wasn't an altogether easy process given his tendency towards perfectionism.
"Icky and Height would both tell you that sometimes it's like pulling teeth with me," he says. "It took me forever to record the vocals for these songs because I just don't trust people to record Hemlock vocals and also to do it right. I don't even know if I did it right, but I did it to the best of my ability." Furthermore, some of the tracks predate these respective producers' involvement, with The Fall Collection largely comprised of rerecorded verses from abandoned sessions with other beatmakers.
"It was all these orphan verses on songs that the beats got taken away," Herring says, specifically citing one intended for an Action Bronson track as well as a planned Madlib project that never came to fruition. "I was sitting on all these demos, not wanting to write because I wrote all this stuff that's not coming out. I told [Height] and he wanted to check 'em out, and he was like, can I put beats under here?"
Herring's relationship with the songwriting process can be volatile. On Studying Absence, which also features Fatboi Sharif, ELUCID, and Egyptian Lover as guests, he had to maintain certain self-imposed rules when approaching Icky Reels' unconventional tracks. "I've written a lot of songs at this point in my life and I have tons of unused instrumentals," he says. "I try not to listen to things before I write now; I may give it a quick 30 seconds. But if I listen to a song five or ten times and I haven't written anything, then when I finally sit down to write, the song can be wasted. It's played out to me already. I try to save that inspiration."
CABBAGES: When did your work with Icky Reels begin?
Samuel T. Herring: I started a relationship with Beans through him hitting me about being on Venga, which is a tape he made with Icky, so that would've been the end of 2019, the beginning of 2020. Being on other people's records brings me so much joy. It's one thing if they want a hook, but if they want a verse, then it's like a co-sign.
Antipop Consortium was one of my all time heart groups. Tragic Epilogue is one of the most important records that I have in my life. The way that it hit me at the time it hit me, I was 16 or 17, and I was obsessed with the word and I was wanting to explore in these new ways. As a young emcee too, you sometimes rap or you write within the voices of the people you love because it helps you channel and then you learn your own voice through just the product of writing and free styling. But yeah, Beans reaching out, it blew my mind.
By the end of 2020. we're still in lockdown from the pandemic, but I had just gotten back to Sweden after six-and-a-half months away from my now-ex. The borders were closed for her to come to America. The borders were closed for me to go to Sweden. I was finally back in Sweden and I'm in this idyllic setting in the countryside with her family and Beans starts sending me these crazy Icky Reels beats.
What was the first song you completed for Studying Absence?
The first song I wrote is the first song on the album, "Raised in the South." My mother was born in the Philippines. My grandmother is Filipino, but she was born in Hawaii to Filipino immigrants. She's the youngest of 12 kids and her mother died right after she was born. Her father remarried and by the time she was five or six, her stepmother, basically shipped the three youngest kids back to the Philippines away from the family. My grandmother, she goes back to the Philippines and becomes a house girl for a British doctor. This is the story that I know, and this is what Studying Absence is about. The album as a whole to me is about these lost histories, the things that I don't know about the things that when I am a 10-year-old kid and I look at myself in the mirror and I'm like, why do kids say I look weird or I look different? That slight twist, that quarter Filipino twist just made me different. So it made me explore myself in a different way, and growing up it made me the artist who I am. Those are the things that I'm only dissecting on record–in this record–for the first time.
There was the internment of Americans by the Japanese in Philippines, so my grandmother lived in the jungle for a few years/ She has told stories about having to kill wild chickens in the woods and eat them. It's in that song. There's so much detail within that song. She married a naval man. They had babies and then he disassociated from his [American] family. He was so happy, he just stayed in the Philippines for nine years after the war ended, fixing Jeeps and drinking rice wine and just making babies and chilling. His family finally tracked him down through a private detective, to fly him home to South Carolina. He didn't tell them that he had a wife and three kids. So anyways, he makes the journey. He doesn't buy a plane ticket. He buys freight tickets on a freight ship, passing passenger tickets on a freight line and takes his family to San Francisco. They set up shop in San Francisco with some of my grandmother's relatives, and he takes the Greyhound across the country and saves up money until he can fly them to South Carolina. Upon returning, his mother kicked them out of the house and then they moved to North Carolina. So she was racist style, get the fuck out of my house.
My grandfather was a man of very few words. My grandmother was this very gregarious and sweet woman, but they both passed away when I was nine or ten. All of that's lost, and all I have are the little bits of stories that I've heard. So that song is really also about an imaginary trip of going back to Mindanao and Cebu, looking through the streets to see some piece of myself. That's the thing with that song, it opened up doors for me to explore in a new way. In that new beat landscape and talking about things that I've never talked about, I was actually like, oh, I can go even go into deeper spaces.
On "Hold The Wires On Ellis," you have that hook about Adderall and alcohol. It's a message about blame and accountability and ownership. That was such a striking passage. Was that a revelation or was it a thought that existed for you before the writing process?
It's definitely revelatory. Every time you hit on a line, you're like, oh, that's good. That's gold. I don't want to be clever when I'm writing in Future Islands; I want to be honest. With Hemlock, I want to be honest, but I also want to be clever. One of my favorite lines of that song is My bed is an office / but also a coffin. We're in the midst of the pandemic in writing that song. If you put the words backwards, it's Ellison Wires The Hold, and it's about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. And at the end of that book, he's like, I'm just going under the fucking ground. I'm not dealing with any of society and I live off the trash that people leave behind. I just live under here and everything's kind of peaceful. That idea of we pick up where his character is underground, that's where Egyptian Lover killed it at the end.
I was so happy we got him. He kind of sums up the song that I'm talking about that maybe people wouldn't understand first off, which is the deep underground and the forgotten space. He sums it up; there's the reasons we go underground, there's the reasons that we hide. As outgoing as I am on stage and usually in person, I'm actually a pretty shy and introverted person. I'm somewhat reclusive. The pandemic really pushed me deeper into that space, into a kind of disassociative space. I was also missing someone, trying to get back to someone, and I just shut down and waited for time to go.
Most of the time, a rap song, either it's three minutes or you're getting 16, 24 bars from somebody. On this album, at times you had all this space to work with, some tracks near the eight minute mark. Did it feel good to have that, to tell the stories you wanted to tell?
It was daunting. "Break Time / In The Factory" was the song that came after "Raised In The South" in the writing process. In one day, I did "Raised in the South," and then it took weeks for the second one. I didn't trust the second verse. I actually love a lot of parts of the second verse, but it's kind of a storm. It opens very calmly. I saw Open Mike Eagle out in LA with Kenny Segal. They came out to a show a little bit ago, and I was like, I kind of ripped your style, dog. I don't know if anybody else would think that or if he would even think that, but the way that song opens is very cool, very calm–Can't work, can't breath / Can't stay, can't leave. Open Mike would kill this shit.
That second verse, I started writing it and then I put it away, and moved to the end of the song. Really what came next was Open the door / the Künst Gallery of War–that's my old style. That's me at 17, 18 and obsessed with out-there hip hop and going into poetry. Then the ending outro is about American manufacturing and the downfall of using people as robots, taking away people's emotions to just be working cogs of an American system. Finally I went back and wrote the second verse, but it took me a long time to tackle it. It took me to find the ending to know what was a positive movement in that second thing. So in some ways, at times with those certain songs, it was definitely puzzle piecing.
You take this very purposeful approach on Studying Absence. You're not just laying down bars. Did you have dialogues with your guests about what you were aiming for? What were they privy to in this process?
My parts were written, so that existed and then I gave histories about what the songs were. ELUCID was given that ["Remains"] story, which on my side is kind of cool. My story is about a very particular night, a very particular memory in my life that is one of those where I quite literally say, did it happen? I'm still actually confused. I remember, and I don't, but remembering that night helps me piece the rest of a story together. Basically, I hit a bunny rabbit in the dead of winter [with my car] and my girlfriend at the time just looked at me like, you're a murderer. It was stuck on a construction on-ramp, so there was nowhere for it to go. Is that when she started looking at me differently, over a thing that I couldn't control? And how does that speak to so many relationships where things don't go the way we want them to go because of things that are out of our control? I give that to [ELUCID] and he expounds his own story that is much broader. It's a lot to pick apart as opposed to this hyper-focused story.
Of course I didn't inform anyone of what they needed to say or stick to. A lot of people, if you ask them to stick to a concept, sometimes you can get something really great out of that. And sometimes you just cut someone's legs off. Now me as a writer, if I felt that I wasn't hitting the concept correctly, I would just give up. I did a feature for NAHreally and The Expert and I approached it in a way that I felt I was really proud of hitting the concept. With Beans and Sharif [on "Old Dead Dogs"], I didn't even speak to Sharif about it. Beans knew the concepts and then he shared that. But Sharif, he's within his world. The way he finishes that song is so cool. I absolutely love it and I love the way that song morphs and changes. Of course Beans brought amazing energy in his own thing. They were just able to be free and be themselves and add to those songs in their own way. That song is about my first real relationship, and I was with a person who was physically abusive to me. I was also a drug addict, which I was hiding from them. There was a lot of badness on both sides.
I'm wondering, in putting these personal songs out there, is there some sense of release or catharsis? Is there something that you feel like you have either purged or processed this that you have resolved through this?
Yes. That's the thing with every record; that's what it is. Some artists are very comfortable creating art that doesn't ever get out there. I'm not comfortable with that. To me, I have to get it out, and that's probably more based on my own pride. I'm proud of the work. I want people to hear the work. I don't care if they like the work.
I really think this is a challenging record. That once again speaks to that whole thing where I don't feel like I need to promote Hemlock. Hemlock just gets to exist within the world and the people that need it will find it. When I was a 15-year-old kid in North Carolina with the Internet as a new thing, I went and I searched the things that I needed to find or the things that I needed to find found me. I don't need to come out and say this record is hugely important. You know what I mean? But the release of it, just out there in the world, I am now free to explore the next chapter of myself and where I am at this point in my life.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Hemlock Ernst & Icky Reels Tour Dates:
11/21: Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right (with Wave Generators & PremRock)
11/22: Baltimore, MD @ Mercury Theatre (with Wave Generators & Eze Jackson)
11/23: Richmond, VA @ Cobra Cabana (with Wave Generators & Lunch Special)
11/24: Raleigh, NC @ King’s (with Wave Generators & Emceein Eye)
Bishop Nehru, Nehruvia: Solace In Shadows
Amid the now-annual social media eulogizing around MF DOOM's Halloween 2020 passing, one may have missed the concurrent arrival of his erstwhile protégé Bishop Nehru's latest. Ten years removed from their NehruvianDOOM collab for Lex, the self-released and self-produced Nehruvia: Solace In Shadows finds the vaudeville villain's verbose acolyte on the defensive. Though hardly silent in the intervening years, the former hip-hop teen prodigy forges ahead in rather memorable fashion over these 14 tracks. On "All In The Plan," he quashes criticism that he ever fell off, expressing explicit gratitude for his departed mentor while scoffing at Reddit-level misinformation. A generational peer with the Odd Future movement, his blunted Adult Swim-inspired humor persists alongside a noticeably hardened exterior pricklier than found in earlier work, leaving lyrical lacerations on "Been So Cold" and the groovy "Good Thing I Know." A psychological dyad, "I Don't Know" and "I Don't Care" capture his New York state of mind, the former a superego summation of intent and the latter an aggressive outburst of id. Given the strength of this showing, as well as his impressive feature on Conductor Williams' new tape, nobody should be counting Bishop Nehru out.
Hester Valentine, Valenta
On last year's riveting mini-LP I Can't Cut Your Hair, rapper Hester Valentine gnashed his teeth over Belgian producer Outside House's noisy tumult. For his solo follow-up, the Bronx artist advances not only his aesthetic but his mic skills too. Though the term industrial hip-hop makes me sorta nauseous, for personal reasons, he's ostensibly part of a disjointed would-be movement of new-ish artists like Angry Blackmen that could carry on the legacy of the still-active Dälek or the status-agnostic Death Grips. And if not, he's still damn good at this leftfield thing, punching-in for the lo-fi sexy drill subversion "Corpse (The Band?)" and trauma-dumping into the vast void on "This Is Content." He shares anxious parables of ugly city life on over the dissonant "I Love Pink," name-checking Christina Tosi and SKECH185 within mere breaths of one another. "Grow The Fuck Up" and pre-released single "Folktales" sound as if they were recorded in a jazz club on fire, his correspondingly pointed poetics not dissimilar from what Backwoodz Studioz fans seem to dig. Still, there are relatively melodic moments like the swinging "Janet" and the woozy "Brinks Truck" that more clearly showcase his emcee niceness.
Three new tracks to snack on...
Recoechi, "Cake"
Oliver, "Elegant"
Pan Amsterdam, "White Ninja"