Killa Kela

Keeps On Killing It

Interview by: Prakash Surapaneni and Kalen Hayman
Photography: Che Kothari

As one of the world’s top beatboxers, Killa Kela’s contribution to the artform is immeasurable. Not only has he left crowds shocked all over the world with his incredible and inhuman skills on stage, but he has influenced a whole generation of beatboxers following his precedent. Whether it be performing massive raves on The World of Drum and Bass Tour or hip hop audiences when touring with the likes of Pharrell and Jurassic Five, a Kela show is sure to leave everyone gobsmacked by his ability to perform both completely unreal, industrial sounds and live, multi layer melodies. Earwaks met up with the beatbox maestro and collected some unique bits. Check it.

EW: When people think of Killa Kela what do you want to come to their mind?
KK: To my competitors, a good kick in the ass. To my crew and my people who check for me, I think as long as I remain funky and I come up with style, that’s what I want to be recognized for. Just taking the vocal as far as you can go, you know unlocking doors. It doesn’t matter, its beat boxing with intent, incorporating those other disciplines to make it something so whipped up and kind of meshed in and crazy, I think that’s the idea right; an artist in its own right but something a little bit different.

EW: Do you find beatboxing to be a community? And what about the level of competition between you and other established acts?
KK: I like to think there’s a community. Online, there’s a huge community with websites like beatbox.com and humanbeatbox.com, etc. But, the thing I’m most interested in is the people who go out and actually perform. As far as the competition goes with myself and other established artists, I think there always has to be a competitive element but at the same time its just kept sweet. The styles are different; what I put in to the mix is different than what Rahzel or Scratch does.

EW: You recently did a TV commercial in the UK for a candy called Fruit Pastels. Do you get anyone approaching you saying “Hey you’re the guy from that commercial?”
KK: Dude, I’m the new school milky bar kid man, everybody’s like “I saw you on that Pastel’s advert” all the time, but not in a bad way. It was really done cool and slickly so I don’t mind it, its cool.

EW: You’ve done other spots in the past for Absolut Vodka and EA Sports. How do you make decisions on who your going to work with and what jobs your going to take?
KK: You’ve just got to be careful man, cause you can always be perceived as too much of a gimmick. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hitting it up once every so often, just to reiterate to people that your still bouncing, still doing your thing. If anything it propelled me into a bigger limelight and to an even bigger crowd then may not have seen it before. The way it goes is it feeds the live show which in turn feeds the music. With the Fruit Pastels advert, they kind of took the cameras to my environment. If you’ve seen it on Killakela.com the whole scene was a sound check and that’s what I do.

EW: So your new album "Elocution" is coming out this year in North America. It’s been out for a little while in the UK.
KK: It came out in the UK and Europe. It came out on Sony BMG but we’ve recently parted ways. There was so much politics with merging and de-merging and in doing that, our project was passed from one A&R to another, one head of marketing to another. The project got diluted to the point where the last person with hands on it just didn’t grasp it. Which is fine by me, you know what I mean; I’ll destroy ‘em all.

EW: Who did you work with on the production of that album?
KK: The majority of it was produced by myself and Spider J from Spit Kingdom. Me and him worked very closely on half the album then a guy named Sweetie Irie who is one of the remix producers for the Gorillaz first album. Johnny Douglas, who’s produced for George Michaels and All Saints, I got in for two dope tracks with him. Martin Rushin, who produced a track called Supergrass, he was the original producer for the Human League and the Stranglers, a legend in production as far as the UK’s concerned. Him and a guy called Badlands, who’s another Spit Kingdom producer; he killed it on at least two or three tracks on the album. The whole idea of it was that I wanted adapt a bit more of a musical filter. Beatboxing being an integral thread of the album but ultimately your going to be hard pushed to make a beatbox album on a major label. So by taking other vocal disciplines incorporating the beatbox into it: on some tracks I sing and am doing the beat at the same time or I’m doing spoken word but adding the sound effects, or if I’m like rapping Ill be scratching or reversing the word or change my pitch up but then the beatbox’s will always be the thread. Then couple that with like a string quarter, a piano, backing vocals, instruments I can’t do with my mouth so people can tell the difference.

EW: You once said that “the most important thing with doing an album is trying to maintain the human element, don’t just try and record produce it. That’s what a lot of beatboxers miss out on”. Is instrumentation one element you relied on to make sure that it comes across as human?
KK: You know a lot of it was a lot about timing. Justin Timberlake had just done his album and Timbaland and the Neptunes were really messing with that whole vocal beat kind of sound (aka. Drop it Like its Hot). People had already kind of accepted that kind of sound, a really vocal human sound, especially when ‘Cry Me a River’ came out, its like fifty percent vocal and vocal percussion at least. Me going in, I already had it in my head to make it as real as possible, because when it comes to the live show its all about being as synthetic as you can, being as inhuman as possible, really industrial sounds and throwing those things at people. But I think there’s a lot to be said for focusing on the music. You can go one or two ways you know. The Beyonce's of the world want to wobble all over a track and lose what the magic is about in their singing, you know what I mean, it’s the same with a beatboxer on an album. You don’t want to fly away with what your doing: draw it back, be minimal, be human.

EW: We were listening to one the sets last night, a more melodic song you did to get the crowd singing along: “Cant Slow Down”. Can you tell us a bit about that?
KK: I made “Cant Slow Down” for the show. You know, with beatboxing nowadays, a lot of beatboxers are doing a lot of mimics and stuff. Audiences expect the mimics; that’s the kind of thing that draws people in, catches their attention of how cool you can make it. But when it comes to things like ‘Cant Slow Down’ or ‘Check’, those are my own routines that a fair amount of people go away remembering because they haven’t heard it before and it was coupled next to a mimic tune ya' know. They walk away thinking “Was that a mimic or was that his own?” and that's what works. It means that your making original material and your doing your thing and that’s proper composition.

EW: You’ve done a lot of collaboration, on and off stage, over the past two years, including touring with Pharrell. Do you think you two will record together at any point?
KK: I’ve been working with him since 2003, I’ve been getting up with him at shows for a while and he’s such a cool guy and he loves the music. I’d love to record with him. There was always that option with the first album but you know, I’m a new act essentially; not only in terms of budget but in terms of creating a sound on your own. I really want to develop my thing, at least try it out because if you don’t you’ll never know. Its still good to be in partnership and work with him, its been a great experience and an even greater experience to discover my sound. There’s a route to discovering your sound by working with all these people, working with Basement Jaxx, Super Furry Animals in the UK, touring with The World of Drum & Bass, Jurassic 5, all these artists from different genres. It gives you a feel of how to bridge and make music and do a live show that accommodates to all those different audiences that you’ve toured with, its dope

EW: Finally, we want to know what you love most about what you do?
KK: What I love most? I love performing; I get my kicks out of that really badly, I love performing to people man.

EW: What is it you love about performing?

KK: The control. It used to be a real hard time when I was younger cause you know I’ve been doing this since I was like nineteen. In those earlier days its was a real complex to have your confidence. Each time you go on stage as a beatboxer, you're under examination because everyone wants that exact thing “it needs to sound like that”. You're fighting in your head, the pressure can be pretty full on for a young guy you know. But as I’ve gotten older and the techniques have got easier to work with and do, it’s the best feeling ever because you feel slightly unleashed and you can say “fuck you” to every body who doesn’t like it and you have the opportunity to really get deep on what you do.