When The Guide interviewed Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard four years back, the young Scottish producer was thrilled – his glistening reimagining of hip-hop had been praised by Just Blaze, one of the rap producers he’d worshipped growing up. “I feel like I’m gradually stepping on the ladder,” was his cautious, happy response.
It’s fair to say that things have progressed since then.
In 2012 Ross was snapped up to become in-house producer for Kanye West’s GOOD Music. He found himself at the heart of a hydra-headed production unit bent on smashing convention, resetting pop culture with Kanye-led global hits such as Mercy and Blood On The Leaves: complex, multi-part songs that brought a conscious artfulness to mainstream hip-hop. Around the same time, Birchard linked up with Montreal producer Lunice to form TNGHT, and the duo set about creating behemoth instrumentals that followed a single imperative: making kids go bananas. Carried by the momentum of America’s love affair with stadium-sized dance, TNGHT headlined festivals and arenas worldwide. By the close of 2014, Apple had launched a year-long MacBook campaign soundtracked by Hudson Mohawke’s twinkling cyborg funk, and A-list MCs from Drake to Pusha T had queued up to spit fire over his skewed, euphoric soundscapes. Contrary to received wisdom, Birchard managed this without permanently relocating to the States. He kept on his London studio and, gradually, the world started coming to him.
Ross’s importance in the global pop machine was made clear when Kanye West flew over to perform at the Brit awards. After previously working in Hawaii, Mexico and Paris, West chose to finish mastering his feverishly anticipated new single, All Day, in The Healthfarm – Birchard’s relatively small east London studio. The rapper then caused a minor internet meltdown by tweeting his new album title and artwork from the studio. As the tweet spiralled across the internet, driven by 100,000 retweets, it seemed as though the whole world was revolving around that room.
“That was a moment,” Ross smiles. “Live tweeting the album title from my studio, like… we’re sending it out…. NOW! It did get surreal for a while. It’s not ever normal. It’s fun.”
We’re sitting in a private bar in the opulent London Edition hotel. Birchard looks tired. It’s two days after the Brit awards, and he’s only now emerging from the glitzy haze of shows, afterparties and hotel lobbies. He’s clad in an expensive beige bomber jacket complete with a hefty gold chain dangling from the zip. It’s incongruous with his reticent manner; his clothes clamouring for attention while he appears to want anything but.
“Ahhhhh,” he exclaims when asked about his work with Kanye on All Day. “I don’t like to talk about studio work, ever. The thing is, normally I would have been like, ‘Yeah, we do this and then this,’ and the amount of times I got into shit from various people for saying something, now I just don’t say anything. I’ve learned the hard way. The amount of times I’ve said to the interviewer, ‘That’s not recording, make sure that’s not recording,’ then all of a sudden the headline is whatever I’ve said, ‘Under no circumstances can you say this.’ So now I say as little as possible. It’s a very private situation. Certain things are meant to stay within four walls.”
Inevitably, providing beats for the biggest brands in the world has made the Glaswegian learn a few new rules – not least of which is keeping his cheeky sense of humour in check.
“There are certain levels of decorum for particular environments…” he affirms. “If I’m with a bunch of major label executive people, I have to be aware of the fact that when I hear something that I’d probably piss myself at, I’ve got to maintain a cool exterior. They’ll be like…” he adopts a pompous executive tone, “‘We’ll do this, and this and this,’ and inside I’m like, ‘Pffffhhh…’ But I know that I’ve got to be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, great idea.’ I mean, it is fucking comical, but you can’t express that.”
One project he will discuss is Lantern, his second full-length solo album, set for a June release on Warp Records. In contrast to so much of his production work, Lantern is a surprisingly gentle listen, made up of sweeping, sweet-toothed instrumentals and emotive, off-kilter pop songs. With no hip-hop vocals or moments of made-for-the-rave build’n’drop, the album appears to be a wilful refutation of everything that has made Ross famous in the last two years.
“No disrespect to anyone who only likes the TNGHT stuff, but as we were getting bigger and bigger shows, we were playing bigger and bigger festival stages, but to a slightly more narrow-minded crowd. In my own sets I’d play a load of ambient in the middle, or just try and fuck with people a bit, whereas people who come to see a TNGHT show came to see one thing. I didn’t want to get pigeonholed into that.”
Although the fans who discovered Hud Mo through his skull-crushing TNGHT project may be surprised by the direction on Lantern, for Birchard it’s a return to his roots, a way of reaffirming his identity as a producer.
“The first records I made were R&B bootlegs. It was before I was working with Warp, in the MySpace days, making very small presses of 500 copies. People don’t necessarily know me for working with vocals, but that was my background and I’m having a little return to that. The idea was never to make a rap record, it was to make my record – a record that I’d want to listen to in 10 years’ time.”
So Lantern features not hip-hop but the R&B heartbreak of rising stars Miguel and Jhené Aiko, candy-coloured power ballads featuring relative unknowns Irfane and Ruckazoid and, on Indian Steps, an appearance from Antony Hegarty. Unfurling languorously over a jittering rhythm, Hegarty’s impassioned vocals sit well amongst the distorted electronic shimmer of the Hud Mo sound.
“I’d wanted to work with Anthony for a long time,” Birchard enthuses, “and he randomly called me one day, talking about me producing his new record. I was like, ‘Well, if we’re going to work on your project then it would be great if you could do something on my album.’”
This variety of collaborators isn’t constrained to vocal cameos – Birchard’s time in the GOOD Music stable has introduced him to a whole new approach to songwriting. Famously, the Kanye West album Yeezus had multiple producers for each track – with maybe a bassline coming from one, a hi-hat pattern from another and a vocal hook from a third. It’s a technique that has been criticised as production by committee, but Ross feels that it gives a wider perspective, and it has inspired him to switch up his entire approach to his own work.
“On Yeezus, someone would have an initial idea, then three, four, five other people would do their interpretations of that idea. Then it’s all bought together, and we’ll be like, ‘We’ll take one part from this one, one part from that one.’ It’s a group effort. It’s sort of what I tried to do with this record: I wanted to take more of an executive producer role, so I’ll have someone come play a piano, or someone come and play guitar. It’s moving from being a bedroom computer producer to try and accomplish more of a conductor’s role. I don’t wanna make an album of just me sitting in front of a screen, cos it’d feel emotionless – it was a conscious step away from that to a more expansive sound.”
Despite this new enthusiasm for grand production techniques, Ross still names Ryderz, the album’s simplest track, as his favourite – built around a looping soul sample and a series of chest-rattling snare drums, it’s his “homage to the sample-based hip-hop I love, where you pair the right sample with the right sounds”. It turns out that he still (unlike, say, Dr Dre) takes a pleasure in finding all his own samples. When we talk about crate-digging, or our shared love of British rave (Darren Styles from hardcore legends Force & Styles gets a production credit on the album), a change comes over him, and the enthusiastic, jokey Ross Birchard comes out. As someone who’s opened mixtapes with samples from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and prefaced his recent Boiler Room set with a weird, piss-taking prologue from comedian Eric Wareheim, he’s never at risk of being labelled po-faced. So it still feels strange when he clams up at the inevitable questions about his famous collaborators: “I can be fairly quiet.” He explains, then, wryly referring to Kanye’s Brit performance, “Like, it’s not gonna be me on stage with a fucking flamethrower!”
The fact that people might even expect him to be onstage at the Brits remains bemusing to Ross but this is the high-flying world he inhabits now, one that he barely imagined four years ago. And as he is easier to access than a Drake or a Kanye figure, he is constantly fielding questions that he can’t and won’t answer. Perhaps it’s this regular reminder of his position in the hierarchy of fame that keeps him so grounded.
“I still don’t think of myself as a huge deal,” he notes. “It’s quite surreal. I’m just trying to keep progressing. Just to have so many of the US artists looking to the UK, particularly in the hip-hop world, is like, ‘Fuck! How are these worlds even connected?’”
“I used to have to fly to the States to record artists – but now they’ll fly to my studio. When I used to send off folders of beats to people, around 2011, I’d send 10 beats out and I’d get feedback saying, ‘It’s all too weird.’” He thinks about this, and smiles.
“Now people come to me and are like, ‘Gimme what YOU do.’”
Hudson Mohawke plays Bloc Weekend at Butlins, Minehead this weekend; Lantern is released on Warp Records on 15 June
