He splits his time between his hometown of Sydney and the remote tropical regions of the world, rehearses in secret jungle locations and cites his influences as the sun, ocean, trees, birds and universe. Elusive and indefinable beat maker Electric Egypt does things his own way, and the music world is paying attention. With a successful debut album under his belt and a second in the pipeline, this cosmic traveler is demonstrating the merit of traversing musical genres, insisting that it’s all down to interpretation – ‘who feels it, knows it’.
How did the development of your sound and interest in production play into your youth?
I was up for the late night radio, sitting with the D-90 cassette on pause. I’d make tapes for kids at school and they’d be like ‘Man, you’ve got all that crazy weird music I never even heard of’. I remember trading a NWA tape off a kid for a week’s worth of lunch box treats. I also got heavily into digging. I didn’t have much money, so I’d get a day pass and hit up all the charity shops, dragging home piles of dusty wax, keeping the stuff I liked and trading the rest. I’d listen to everything intently, and in going through those seemingly endless archives, you absorb such a huge volume of information. The first tune that really got me searching though would’ve been Kraftwerk’s Tour De France. I was trying to track that one down way back in primary school, after seeing the crucial scene in the movie Breakdance.
What was the creative process behind your most recent album, Impressions Of The Inexpressible Invisible?
Meditation and a process of simplification. Listening to the whisperings of the solar wind. Consulting the bird relatives.
Give us one record that we should be listening to right now…
Sun Araw – On Patrol. I’ve got Dibiase’s Machines Hate Me playing in the background right now, but then tomorrow I might wake up and listen to nothing but ethnic field recordings all day long.
Is there any record or genre out there that you don’t think you’d be able to sample?
Sometimes there’ll be a record that resonates on such a deep level that your intuition tells you not to mess with it. I’ve got that kind of reverence for Don Cherry. I probably wouldn’t mess with a Hendrix record either. If you can take a piece from an artist like Miles Davis, and filter it so it sounds like he’s playing a koto in a bubble bath, then that’s cool too. So really, I believe all should be made open to the extension of vibrational transmutation into other realms and frequencies.
Are there any other artists out of Australia that you think are doing interesting things that we should be checking for?
Look out for Sydney producer Jonti Danilewitz, AKA Danimals.
More from Electric Egypt on his Last.fm here.
This interview first appeared in #24 the FANTASY issue. You can purchase it here.