When Mike Perry and Austin Keultjes, aka Supreme Cuts, show up to talk to me at Joy Yee in Chinatown, they’re visibly exhausted from spending the day moving into a new practice space just north of Pilsen. They haven’t eaten since they woke up, and when our meal arrives the interview is derailed temporarily as Perry and Keultjes concentrate intensely on wolfing down a staggering amount of Chinese food.
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The two of them, both producers, make hazy, hip-hop-inflected experimental electronic music, and they go at it the way they’re attacking their dinners—lately Supreme Cuts have been living, breathing, and eating music, working with an intensity that rivals Rollins-era Black Flag. They got together in late 2010, and at first they weren’t terribly prolific—but the seeds they sowed back then are now bearing fruit. They produced two tracks on last month’s Oxyconteen EP by Haleek Maul, a teenage Brooklyn rapper from Barbados. On July 10 they’ll drop their first full-length album, an instrumental follow-up to last year’s Trouble EP called Whispers in the Dark (Dovecote). In August they’ll release a mix tape for the increasingly legitimate-looking in-house label of streetwear line Mishka, featuring Maul and a diverse cast of guest rappers that includes Main Attrakionz, Das Racist’s Kool A.D., and Chicago phenom ShowYouSuck. That’s all on top of the remixes they’ve been doing (Holy Other’s “Touch,” Wise Blood’s “Loud Mouths“) and their beats-for-hire work (for clients including Main Attrakionz). They’re about to travel to New York to play a show as Maul’s backing band, and in August they’ll tour for a couple weeks opening for Polica. This fall they’ll start work on another LP, this one with vocals.
“You notice,” Keultjes explains, “that underground music and radio music are getting so—like, by the day—closer and closer. And I don’t see the reason that just because of who I am there needs to be a divider there.” (By “who I am” he apparently means “someone who dresses like a stoner art student.”) If you need evidence that Keultjes is onto something, consider the songs (aside from “Call Me Maybe”) that have defined 2012 so far: Kanye’s “Mercy” and Nicki Minaj’s “Beez in the Trap” both use radically strange beats and rhythms that would have been considered avant-garde even a few years ago but are now blasting out of car stereos around the world, and they’re not alone. “When I’m making songs and then hearing similar ideas come out on the radio,” Keultjes says, “it just feels like it’s up to me to step up and kind of help push the radio forward a little bit.”
Supreme Cuts are about to get a chance to see how well their music plays with the biggest, most mainstream crowd that’s been exposed to it yet. Maroon 5’s label e-mailed Dovecote about having Supreme Cuts provide a remix for the “deluxe” edition of Maroon 5’s new album, Overexposed (a Target exclusive in the States), which will be out by press time; when Keultjes saw the message, he was on his way to a dishwashing job, and he turned around and never went back. He and Perry ended up doing one of two remixes of the record’s lead single, “Payphone” (with Wiz Khalifa), and they’re admirably unembarrassed about it. “If you want to hate us just because it’s Maroon 5, go for it,” says Keultjes. “I like the track.”
Wed 7/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, $12.
Also:
Supreme Cuts, Shaun Wright, Teen Witch Fan Club, Baby Bamboo
Thu 6/28, 10 PM, Berlin, 11 PM with an RSVP and $7 after.
