IN CONVERSATION: Kista
The next full-length ‘in conversation’ from HEADZ-zINe features Kista, label owner, producer, DJ, graffiti writer and visual artist. It gives me enormous pleasure to bring my conversation with interdisciplinary creative, Kista, to you. Also, it tied in perfectly with the release of Kista’s brilliantly composed new album, ‘Diggin in Outer Space’, this Friday 15th August...
(Adam) I know that we talked before in this context, but that was five years ago. So, it has been a while and I know things have progressed for you. So, taking it form the start, you mentioned ‘Subway Art’ to me a few days ago as your gateway into hip hop, do you remember when you first got your hands on that book?
(Kista) I do, because I was in Cardiff and there was a kid next who lived next door to my auntie, called Dominic, and his mum was an art teacher at university. Through her, he had the book, and that was the first time I ever set my eyes on it. I was just like, ‘Wow,’ you know, seeing all that crazy lettering and characters and stuff on these New York subway trains, just absolutely blew me away. I still feel that way today, I've still got my original ‘Subway Art’, which is tagged up by all my friends, it’s still, very nostalgic. It takes me back to that time when I first saw Skeme laying on the third rail in front of this piece; all those great photos that Martha and Henry took. Yeah, just great.
That’s fabulous, I love the fact that you've still got your original copy tagged up, I know that a lot of people do. I think mine went missing. I've still got my original ‘Spray Can Art’, but yeah. That’s dope.
Yeah, yeah, I've got that as well. I think there's the story of ‘Subway Art’ being the most stolen booking in the UK or something, it makes me laugh.
Yeah, it’s funny, I ‘m sure that's an urban myth, but you can definitely see how that could be a thing ...
… like when it was in WH Smith.
They were always battered because everyone had to go and look at them, right? So back to your story, this guy Dominic, they had a copy and you saw it. Was there a was there already a scene you were aware of, did you know people that were into hip hop or into graff, or was that something that you grew into after that point?
It was lucky for me because, obviously living in a in a town on the outskirts in Scarborough there wasn't really a lot. Weirdly enough, my mum worked in a fish and chip shop, and my job when I was about eleven or twelve was to walk the fish and chip shop owner’s dog. So basically, I used to walk it up to the place called Mr Marvel’s, which was an old amusement area with a roller-coaster and that, which is where I started seeing my first bits of graffiti. Then luckily for me, because my mum is from Cardiff, we used to spend a lot of our time, especially summer holidays and half term going down to Cardiff to see my granddad, my uncle and my auntie. So, I got to go on the train all the time when you could pull down the slide windows in the vestibule and people used to smoke in them.
Oh, nice.
That was when I first started travelling through cities like Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol and seeing things by the likes of Mist 1, Risk and writers like that. So obviously once I've started seeing that, I began taking photos out of the train windows, because that was the first time I'd ever seen real graffiti. I think if it wasn't for my family living in Cardiff, I don't think I'd have got into it to be honest, because that's what was there for me. The records too, I managed to get records in Cardiff first, so yeah.
Mad, that's a great story. I like the idea that you were able to link what you were seeing out of trains with what you were seeing in ‘Subway Art’.
Yeah. I mean, I think for me, and you'll know this yourself Adam, from the early days, that people just wrote things like ‘hip hop’ and things like that on the wall. So that's how it was sold to me, it happened so quickly in how it came over to this country. So, the people living on my estate in Scarborough, there was a couple of lads who were about two or three years older than me, they started getting things like UK Electro, one of the first things I listened to was the Electros, raw taped copies of them. Then to things like copies of Beat Street and things like that; all of a sudden you think, ‘Holy shit, what is this?’ you know, because I was only young. And for something like that to just come at me, it just hits me still. It was almost like an adrenaline rush. I didn't want to do anything else. Soon as I started seeing graffiti and the music and everything else that went with it, it was like, yeah, that's it. You sold? I'm sold.
Yeah, you're right I know what you mean about how everything felt like it happened really quickly. You previously mentioned Electro 6 as something having a particular memory too. Did the graff come first and then the music follow? Or did you have an understanding that it was all part of one thing?
It's hard to remember exactly everything but I did the first tape I got was Electro 6. I was going down to Cardiff and I had my Walkman, and I think the first track that really got me was ‘Cosmic Blast’ by Captain Rock, just that beginning and how it's mixed, and also ‘Beat Freak’ by Bobby Broom.
Yes, both phenomenal records!
I kept listening to it over and over again because it was the only tape I had, and I think in my head now I have a vision of going through all these cities and seeing all this crazy lettering on the walls done by, you know, early UK writers. And I just think it was almost like, *’Fuck, I've never heard anything quite like this,’ I was a little tiny kid, and I was listening to this crazy stuff made with drum machines. That to me was the time I realised I love graffiti just as much as I love the music. Yeah, it was Electro 6 that did it for me.
That's really interesting. I like that. I mean it's that thing, isn't it? Where there was nothing that we'd ever heard before and also nothing that we'd seen before like it. So like the graff and the music were these new things that, I don't know, just gave us such a mad shock. Like, ‘Wow, what is this?’
I mean, for me it was the whole thing where I just felt it was so futuristic at the time, you know, letters that were arrows, 3Ds, characters, you know, Vaughn Bode stuff in there. You’d be trying to find out about all these things; obviously now everything's a lot more disposable. That's, that's just the way society is.
True.
I probably spend every night just laid on my bed at home, looking through Subway Art, and then I started to copy the outlines and do my own colour versions, tracing them, trying to work out ways of doing it. And I think that was good because I felt like I didn't have a lot of stuff. I've maybe got a few mixed tapes I started getting as time went on, you start getting more and more stuff, but at the beginning the outlines were helping. Then hearing UK Electro, so much instrumental stuff and Broken Glass with ‘Style of The Street’, it blew my mind. You know, this was representing the UK, I’m this little kid, and there was a lot more people older than me that were breakdancing, but just seeing it happen was amazing. It was probably the late ‘80s, when it got me more.
Yeah, I was gonna say if you were, if you were sort of seeing Mist throw ups and writers like that, I guess that’s like, ’88 or ’89? Or am I a bit a bit late there?
Yeah, no, I'd say ’88 to ‘89 was my time, when hip hop really resonated with me. It was weird because by 1990, the people who were breaking had just stopped. Do you know what I mean? I'd felt like I was just getting into it.
I totally get it. There was a big sea change, I've always thought it was on the back of the acid house movement. You know that a lot of people got dragged out of hip hop. And I think it's taken us many years to realise that all of this stuff can coexist. It doesn't mean you have to abandon hip hop because house comes along, you know.
Yeah. Of course, that. Yeah, I fully agree with you there.
But when you're fifteen, you just want to do one thing or the other, you know?
Yeah, because as we were just saying, everything went so fast. That was the reason I said that, as by 1994, six or seven years on, there was stuff out on Kold Sweat; Son Of Noise, and in such a short span of time, there was UK hip hop as a thing. It happened also quick, you know.
I know what you mean. It’s mad when you think that there was only five years between acid house and Wu Tang’s first album.
Yeah, that’s what I'm getting at.
It feels like decades; millennia.
But it didn’t feel fast back then, you know. But in terms of dates, crazy; crazy.
So, in terms of you kind of beginning to do your own thing, I know you mentioned doing outlines that you were copying from Subway Art like a lot of people did when they were starting out, did the graff come before you got interested in making music or did they arrive symbiotically?
I think for me, the music’s always been there. My dad had good taste in music, and he had a decent record collection, so my first loves were Hendrix and Pink Floyd. I remember listening to Dark Side of The Moon for the first time. And he had records by Deep Purple, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, things like that. So that was my first schooling into music.
OK, cool.
Then, I'd say I've always been into art. I love like comic books, like Spider Man and The Beano from when I was a kid, and I liked copying that type of thing. But I think my first love was probably the graffiti, and I think the whole culture that came with it, tagging, the throw ups, the whole cars … when I was in my last few years at school, I think that was all I wanted to do was graffiti.
OK, so here’s a question. What came first, you painting a wall or you making a beat?
Painting a wall.
Cool, so did the did the beat production start to come a bit later?
To be honest with you, Adam, I was quite late with beat making in terms of how it was back then. I’d got a job, and I started saving up for my first turntables, because I wanted to get into DJing, so I managed to work a lot of jobs and work overtime and managed to get myself some Technics SL1200s. That felt like a lifetime, you know, to save up. So, I got them, and I was buying records. I used to go to a place in York called Red Rhino, which was a popular record shop in North Yorkshire. It then changed Depth Charge, and that was the place for me that I was lucky because you could go through there and there would be MTV and all those crews there, so there was a big sort of scene in North Yorkshire at that time, and the record shops came with it. So, I was starting to buy records and things like that, that was probably my first love musically before I made beats; I wanted to be a DJ.
That’s interesting, underground communities really do hang off independent record shops don't they, or they did back then.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Because I think another instance where I was lucky was going down to Cardiff, even when I was fully into hip hop, there was a shop called Spillers, which is I think is one of the oldest record shops in the UK. and I got things from there as well. They had a really good import section, so I got N.W.A.’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’ and things like that in there. It schooled me for a good few years from the late ‘80s to the mid-90s, then there were the market stalls where I used to find all crazy shit. That was where I got into things like John Carpenter because I went to Cardiff market. There was a record shop either upstairs or down, I can't really remember, but they had all the soundtracks to The Fog, The Thing, and I just bought them. I was like, I'm having some of this because I was into videos and stuff as well. So yeah, Cardiff was great because it was brilliant for me to go to a big city. Cardiff had a far bigger scene; I could get a lot of records that I couldn't get up here.
That is cool to have that connection. During those times, did you connect with anyone from Cardiff or was it really about digging?
There was a writer down there called Cest, who I looked out for. I was about seventeen, and I got to speak to this kid who was a skater who basically hung around with Matt Pritchard, you know, from the TV show ‘Dirty Sanchez’.
He just told me places where some of the graffiti was. So, I’d go and take photos. I got to know where things were, I knew where the record shops were, and I’d go around looking for graffiti. So yeah, it was great for me. I always felt like I was one step ahead because I’d come back up to Scarborough, and to the few of my other mates that were into hip hop, I’d have all these imports, you know? It was great and like I stated previously, I think if it wasn’t for going down there, I don’t think I’d have been into it so much because I felt like I have a warm connection to Cardiff. Like obviously my family are from there and my mum and everything and I spent a lot all my childhood down a lot down there, but I always feel nostalgia because if it wasn’t for Cardiff, I don't think I’d be doing all these things I'm doing now hip hop-wise.
That’s great; I want to come back to what you’re doing now because that’s a good signpost. But just quickly on the thing about nostalgia of travel, I remember going up to Newport in South Wales with my gran when I was fourteen on the train, and going into this sketchy record shop and I bought the 12” of @Please Love Me’ by Whistle, it wasn’t even ‘Just Buggin’’, but it had a nice Dutch mix of ‘Buggin’’ on the flip, Also I got the ‘Roxanne, Roxanne’ UTFO EP on Streetwave; whenever I see those in the racks, if I’m flicking through records at home, I’m straight back on that train. I remember it vividly. I bet it you have many memories of travel when you pull out records.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. That’s brilliant how you worded that, it was exactly like that. You know, there’s moments in my life like I said with ‘Subway Art’, it’s fantastic because you can pick a certain thing up and it’ll take you back to a time of when it was so significant. That’s how I see it as well.
Absolutely. Well, that leads us beautifully on to objects and artefacts and what you’re doing now, because what I see as an observer is you’ve been building up some amazing momentum with your record labels; it’s not just Soundweight, you’ve got another imprint too, right?
Yeah.
That’s starting to gel nicely with your visual work too, like those one-offs for slick covers and sleeves, it’s just beautiful work. What am I trying to ask? I suppose I’m trying to ask how working across practices feels. Does it feel more merged together? And are you happy with how the outputs you’re making that are coming out now?
Yeah, that's great that you asked because I’ve was brought up making beats and doing graffiti my whole life, yet I feel like I’m a little bit of an outsider in that graffiti. I feel like graffiti writers are a bit different to musicians in a way – it’s not a criticism at all – it’s just the way I was brought into it. I was looking at graffiti and how it worked with records, like on ‘Hip Hop 20’, the back of the Celluloid records that Futura did and things like that. And for me as a as an artist, I feel that the two work together and that’s something I try to do.
Yeah, I feel that.
When I first put out the ‘Funky Drummer’ edit by Jorun (Bombay), I like the way he was influenced by the break beats, and I thought, ‘I’ll have some fun here,’ I’ll do some test pressings, you know, and start designing sleeves for them. ‘Collecting Dust’ too; it’s something that I really like doing. It’s almost like a little niche thing. I love getting involved in all the creative aspects of things, I feel like a curator where I let the artist do what they want, and with good connections, like Darrell Krum, (Mr Krum), who does amazing work and then I do the test pressings; Jorun does the music … it works. I’ve got an album coming out in February, which is a strictly golden era sound, chilled out hip hop, but it’s based around graffiti, again, with the covers and the artwork. I feel like now I’m getting the opportunity to get it out there, people seem to want it.
Absolutely, for sure. It’s fantastic that you’re able to bring these praxes together in a product; an object that captures that idea of graff, music and the facets of hip hop which are which are really strong. So, this album is due in February?
Well, it should be set for February. It follows what first got me into making hip hop beats around the ’94, ’95 era, it started off as a beat tape. It’s funny because that’s what I was planning to do, and then all of a sudden, I was like, ‘I really like these tracks,’ then I wanted to add more to them and layer them up. I’ve rearranged it and scrapped it about two or three times, and now I’m finally at a place where I'm happy with it. I’ve used old graffiti videos and documentaries and things like that, and not make it sound like something that’s been done before. I’m just kind of finished doing the artwork; it’s a bit of a melting pot, a tapestry of different styles. It’s got a lot of straight up hip hop but it’s also melodic; it’s hard to describe. It’s different, it’s good.
That sounds so dope. So, anything else in the pipeline?
I’m doing the follow up to ‘Collecting Dust’, with Glad2mecha again. We are like 99% finished, we’ve got a couple of guest emcees on there, which are people I admire from when I was younger, who I’ve always wanted to work with, and coming from a small town, you think it’s never going to happen. This is one of the best things I’ve ever done personally. Glad writes about things which are so positive, but it still has that nice hip hop vibe to it.
Awesome. I’m sure readers will be looking forward to that too. That sounds great, dope work!
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Kista is a Chrome is an interdisciplinary DJ, graffiti writer, visual artist and producer, and has released a wide-ranging catalogue of collaborative and solo projects since 1998, working with transatlantic and UK-based artists. He runs the record labels Soundweight Records and Custom Matrix Records.
Follow Kista and Soundweight Records:
@k.i.s.t.a
@soundweightrecords
Preorders are now live here for Kista’s latest album ‘Diggin in Outer Space’.
Available on standard 12" Black vinyl and comes with a black and white photocopied zine style poster.
For those of you who dig the collectable s**t, there are some customized graffiti test pressings available. Each order comes with a promo ‘Computer Rock’ 45 (SOLD OUT).
The album will be released worldwide this Friday (15th) and will be available in selected independent record stores worldwide and all digital streaming platforms.