Here at Birthday Cake For Breakfast, we like to get to the heart of what an artist is all about. We feel that what influences them is just as important as the music they make. With that in mind, off the back of releasing his latest EP ‘Me No Sen You No Come‘, we’re delighted to have Algernon Cornelius talk us through a number of things that influenced him during its production.
“Rather than just give you a list of records I was bumping during the making of Me No Sen You No Come (I kind of already made a playlist for that) I thought I’d give you some gigs, a TV show, and yeah to be fair some records…“
Ka’s album Descendents of Cain
(2020)
“So admittedly I came to discover Ka quite late. I had seen him mentioned alongside the likes of Roc Marciano et al, however it wasn’t until he did a track with rapper/producer Navy Blue back in 2020, and then when I watched his Red Bull interview (which I highly recommend), that’s when I started to really look into his work.
Ka has this thing with his voice and delivery where the minimalism forces you to really focus in and listen to what he is saying. He’s like a sushi chef, it’s simple but complex. Give someone tuna and they’ll make you one of them sad sarnies you get in a meal-deal, that’s not what we’re dealing with here. He is a samurai with his turn of phrase, often I’ll hear a line and I’ll be dwelling on it for a minute and then realise what he actually meant, and then have to rewind to catch the other stuff I missed while I was unravelling it all. He’s also a professional fireman, which is crazy, like that’s his full time day-job. I’ve wondered if the serious focus you need for that line of work is partly what comes through in his music.
Part of what I wanted from this next album I’ve been working on was to create more space (that was literally the first thing I wrote on my whiteboard). I think a lot of kids when they start rapping (and obviously i’m talking about anyone over the age of 33 here), they hear someone like Big Daddy Kane, or a lot of the popular Southern/Mid-West artists from the early 00’s like Ludacris,Outkast, Twista, Eminem etc and try and cram as many syllables as possible in a line. That’s what I was like for so much of my life. You end up falling over yourself and the dreaded end point is becoming one of those “lyrical miracle” rappers. So with this EP it was like a dojo to find space with words, I think you can really hear that in the first two tracks, a lot of that came from understanding what Ka does (and to an extent people like Earl Sweatshirt, Navy Blue etc). How much can you say with one simple line? It’s about the power of brevity. Sushi. Simple-complex.“
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist’s album Haram
(2021)
“Obviously I’m a massive Armand Hammer fan and I could talk for days about their prowess as emcees. You can probably tell “Sonar” was heavily influenced by billy woods’ style of story-telling (but you know, given our age we’re probably both from the school of DOOM too). Even the influence of Elucid’s aerial swordsmanship can be heard on “Outlier’s Anthem”. How I think about rap comes from years of listening to people like DOOM and Ghostface and then these fuckers showed up and I was like “oh wow they out here doing it like this?” but like in their own lane, it felt fresh, free-form but well-studied with links to the past, and that’s when I stepped my game up.
I think as an artist (no matter how big or small), or even just as someone who listens to music, you should think of yourself not as a competitor or consumer, but as a part of the conversation of what’s going on in the world. To me that’s what all the great Jazz musicians we’re doing, having these conversations, sometimes across continents without even meeting or knowing each other. Vibrating quietly across the blackness of space (or some shit).
Production-wise though, The Alchemist was probably the biggest influence on MNSYNC. I think it’s obvious Madlib is my main guy, and then J Dilla, Rza and MF Doom, but Alchemist is definitely up there. From his 1st Infantry record he released back in 2004, to his globe-trotting mixtapes like Israeli Salad and Russian Roulette, he has a plethora of styles to choose from, which I guess makes him adaptable enough to be the go-to for those single-producer albums.
With him being so prolific, especially over the past few years, there’s a lot to study but I really went into the details to try and understand, and again it’s this simple-complex formula. It’s really about taking care of the loop. A loop is a simple thing, people think beat-making is just about finding the best loops, and while that’s a big part of it, it’s how you take care of that loop throughout the duration of the song that makes the difference.
Essentially you’re dealing with an illusion, you trick the brain into thinking you are listening to a different version of it each time it plays, that it’s not just jumping back in time to replay an event that has already happened in the past. The loop on “Song For You” isn’t just a 2-bar loop, it’s actually a round of 3, so there’s this hidden uneven pattern going on underneath which constantly shifts perception in a subtle way (listen to “Worst Comes To Worst” by Dilated Peoples for Alchemist’s most infamous 3 bar loop).
One of the other things he does is add extra instrumentation that’s hard to distinguish from the sampled material, like a little bassline or guitar lick. I did that here too on “Song for You” with what I call a singing snare. I took a snare drum (a lockdown purchase when I thought I’d have time to become a drummer), put it up to my face and sang into the skin with the other side mic’d up. I then processed it in Ableton (sped it up, ran it through a guitar amp VST, some auto-tune, reverse reverb and a load of echo). The result was this incredible other-worldly wailing sound, which sort of reminded me of the T-Rex roar in Jurassic Park or something ripped from My Bloody Valentine.
At the end of “Summit4ThaSumma” we added a cheeky little synth solo on the Korg MS20, which Joe, who engineered this record, just had knocking about. We wanted it to sound like it could have been lifted straight from 1974, something Junie Morrison or Bernie Worrel might’ve left on the cutting room floor. The beat for “Black Is Blues” is such a blatant Alchemist rip. So really a lot of this is moving towards building a world where you can’t tell what is and what isn’t a sample anymore.
I remember hearing when Joe Johnston was working on Jurassic Park 3 (not the best film tbf, and yeah I won’t stop talking about Jurassic Park) that his mission was to have the production 50% CGI and 50% animatronic to keep you rooted in this physical world. There was more tinkering with that kind of movie magic on this record, stuff that maybe goes under the radar to casual ears.“
KeiyaA – Live at Yes, Manchester
(16th Nov 2021)
“Forever, Ya Girl by KeiyaA is a straight up instant classic modern RnB/neo-soul record. It’s so warm and gorgeous. An absolute gift from the hellscape that was 2020. I was so happy that she came over to play Manchester last year. That very afternoon I had the idea of putting a few songs together for this EP. I wrote “Song For You” and “The Big Wave” and then went straight out to the gig. I could feel the energy I got from writing carrying me through the evening, I was just buzzing off her performance while simultaneously running through what I had written in my head. I think that really gave me momentum to follow through with more stuff, it was inspiring, like a positive feedback loop.
She also rounded off her set with a cover of Tony Williams “There Comes a Time”, which is such a significant song to me. The version I love is by Gil Evans, which I first heard sampled by Slauson Malone back in 2018. As soon as I heard the sample I looked up the lyrics and found the song and it broke me. That lyric “I’ll love you more when it’s over” crooned over this chaotic swelling jazz orchestra. It really took over me emotionally that afternoon, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, it felt like something was in the air. Like something was wrong.
Later that evening I got a call to say that Al, one of my best friends and musical partners, had passed away after a 6 week battle with cancer. That song is forever ingrained in my mind, that haunting lyric especially. So when KeiyaA played it at the gig it felt like a call-back, like a full-circle moment, and I was like “cool, the turntables are still moving, let’s dance”.
Pink Siifu & Negro 6’ – Live at The White Hotel, Salford
(17th Nov 2021)
“The writing continued the next night when I went to see Pink Siifu. I got into him through his 2018 album Ensley. There was this smokey ethereal laid back looseness to it that really chilled me out (plus the cover art is beautiful). He dropped the album Negro at the start of the pandemic and it’s a total gear shift. About a month before that landed I was booked in to record Miraculous Weapons (which had to be postponed 6 months due to covid). Half way through listening to Negro I was like “damn, he’s making the music I’ve been trying to make and absolutely nailing it”. It’s wildly expressive, like a fever dream, clutching at the frayed edges of HipHop, Jazz, Soul, Noise, Punk with your toes and weaving them together to make a patchwork blanket while you sleep.
So when he came to play The White Hotel it was one of those shows where you had to be there. You could feel it in the room, that everyone felt this was a monumental, unforgettable thing unfolding. I wanted to go back in time and bring my younger self to this show to be like “look what you can do!”, like don’t get boxed in, explode the box! I know touring the UK can sometimes be such a shitty experience for artists from abroad but I hope they know that they leave something behind and pass something on every time they play, and that will live on longer than they can possibly imagine. That’s culture, that’s priceless, we have to take care of that.“
Small Axe – TV Series
(2020)
“Steve McQueen’s landmark television series Small Axe consists of five films about the lives of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s. It basically covers the same time period my Mum’s family experienced living in England.
The first episode covers the case of the Mangrove 9 and is essential viewing, we don’t get enough black British political history in our media, it’s often completely Americentric. The second episode in particular (Lovers Rock) is set around a house party and uses its incredible soundtrack to drive the story. It was the use of The Revolutionaries “Kunta Kinte Dub” that really blew my head off, that scene was awe inspiring. I think I’d heard it sampled in a few 90s jungle tracks, the opening synth notes are pretty iconic.
Anyway, all of this made me dig a little deeper into reggae, rocksteady, dub and lovers rock records, which admittedly I have shied away from sampling in the past (I mean, black guy with dreads walking into a record shop and going straight to the reggae section is kind of cliche right? And I love being an annoying little shit and subverting cliches).
I think Small Axe made me more proud to reclaim that, because there’s all this knowledge and technology written into these records and I was just ignoring it. Now I’ve made trips down to Brixton and Bristol and spent a good amount of time looking for stuff like that and I’ve come up with a lot of interesting material (some of which you probably won’t hear for another 5 years). Madlib made these two mixtapes – “Blunted In The Bomb Shelter” and “420 Chalice All-Stars (AKA Son of Super Ape)” sampling a load of Jamaican stuff so the blueprint was already right in front of me.
In early 2021 legendary Jamaican vocalist U-Roy passed away. Within two days of his passing I dived into his discography and came out with “Your Version”, a beat-tape made with U-Roy samples. It was around the same time that I made the beat for “Guinnel Affairs”, which I then sent to Otis Mensah. Somehow I forgot that I did that and ended up writing to it and included it on the EP. He then saw me perform it at Fair Play festival earlier this year and then backstage we chatted about it and I was like “oh shit sorry, you should get on the 2nd verse though!”. I honestly think we came out with a banger that should be in the UK HipHop canon. Two Northern breeders over this beat, the g(u)innel is the backstreet inbetween what is presented to us. It’s the undertold story, the behind the scenes dutty reality. Small Axe made me think about how we log our own (un)forgotten history, we’re gonna do that with music.“
‘Me No Sen You No Come’ is out now – grab a copy here!
Like what you see? Why not stick around and check out the other articles and interviews!
Don’t forget to follow Birthday Cake For Breakfast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
Birthday Cake For Breakfast 