Potatohead People: Producers in the Pocket

How does a pair of hip-hop producers evolve from being crate-digging sample hounds into a jazz-funk band beloved by certified rap legends? For Canadian duo Potatohead People it happens on a very long, circuitous path of pursuing their influences and slowly gaining the admiration of the artists they admired.

Potatohead People are Nick Wisdom and AstroLogical, based in Vancouver. They formed during a period where the two were trading places between there and Montreal and their initial releases as a duo were written while the pair were split across the two cities.

AstroLogical explains, “Potatohead People started very much for fun. I was in another band, and moved to Montreal with that band. At that point, it wasn't like Potatohead People was a big thing for us, we were just making beats. We put out a few EPs just on Bandcamp and stuff, and then the label Bastard Jazz heard something and then signed us."

The first EPs led to an album, 2015’s Big Luxury, also made while the pair was spread between Vancouver and Montreal, but became the impetus for the two to unite back in Vancouver and take the project more seriously.

While the album initiated a new focus, it wasn’t the pair’s first collaboration. They met playing baseball as kids, and eventually they started a group while in high school with other school friends called Elekwent Folk.

“Nate was the producer for that, and there were two main rappers, and I had one or two verses, but I hadn't found my voice yet. I just knew I wanted to be involved. Eventually, that crew went off and grew in their own way. Nate and I decided to just do our own thing.”

They knew that they wanted to be different from the ultra-serious groups at the time, and chose the name Potatohead People with the express intention to avoid being caught up in feigned intensity and focus instead on fun and good energy. That didn’t mean they weren’t driven – the pair was making beats with an ear towards exploring the influences that meant the most to them. One of those was the work of Detroit’s legendary J Dilla and the myriad projects and artists he associated and collaborated with.

The thread of Dilla’s influence on Potatohead People expanded to become a source of collaborations and relationships that has shaped their expansion into a definitive force of their own. A pivotal moment for the duo was seeing Dilla associates Frank n Dank were looking for beats.

“Frank Nitt, from Frank n Dank was on Facebook soliciting work or something like that. We were huge Dilla and Slum Village heads. Seeing Frank Nitt's profile on Facebook was like, Holy shit. We sent him the beat, and he was like, This is dope. I'll do the whole song, if you're down. Then flash forward a year later Nate and I were organizing a Dilla Day show in Vancouver. We said, ‘Hey, Frank, do you want to come for this?’ He's like, ‘Yeah, man, I'll bring Illa J.’”

The introduction to Illa J, member of Slum Village and brother to the late J Dilla became another pivotal step for Potatohead People. Their Dilla Day endeavor led to a collaboration that drew attention to the pair’s beatmaking and opened doors to a host of new partners.

“After the show, Frank went to bed, but Illa came out with us back to our friend's house and like, freestyled in the living room and just hung out with us and had a really fun night. Later I moved to Montreal and I found out that Illa J was also living in Montreal. So he came to my house and we made a song, Nate played chords or something over top of it, new chords, and we made a new beat under his rap. That same night, I sent it to him asking What do you think? He said “This is the music I wanna make.” He just started coming over four or five days a week, just working on music for a year and a half.”

The collaboration would become a major part of Potatohead People’s album Big Luxury - putting the duo on the map among beatmakers and hip hop heads. It would also lead to introductions to Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. Other collaborations with Kaytranada, Pomo and more would come from their growing reputation for quirky knowing jazzy grooves and innovative soulful styling. Their latest album Eat Your Heart Out even features an appearance by Redman, who sings the praises of the duo, and was eager to follow up on a verse he laid down on a Illa J song they had produced.

While they’d be entitled to congratulate themselves on these laurels, they humbly give more credit to chance and the environment in which they were immersed. “That whole period in Montreal was just really exciting. It was the beginning of almost like hip hop, house, jazz, RnB, neo-soul, all merging together and then forming the new movement that's happened over the last 10 years.”

That alchemy is in fact an apt method of describing the Potatohead People sound. If one were to list ingredients, these would be among them, while the resulting effect is more of an anchored groove that lilts and floats - as if their beats describe a strut grounded enough to be impossible to push over, but somehow gliding over the sidewalk without effort. These anachronistic contradictions come from a passionate drive without a focused technical mien. Potatohead People manage to embody a vibe of classic 70s RnB or funk without attempting parody or obsessive recreation. Rather than rehashing an old sound, they’re revisiting a classic feeling outside a specific time.

“When it comes to replicating an era of music, I feel like you have to know exactly what you're doing to get the record onto tape, go in the studio, etc. Our limitations help us because we don't really know how to do any of that. So we're just taking the pieces we can and then doing what we can as good as we can. We don't have the technical skill to record a drum set to sound like Steve Gadd in 1976. We are programming our drums in our own way. We've never really felt the need to keep up with the modern plugins and things like that. So that's what's kept our music humble in a way, and also not too derivative of other things.

If you understand music theory, you are able to pull from any era of music because it all follows theory. That allows you to pull from an early 70s jazz or late '80s RnB, just understanding the chord structures and things in those music. I can apply that to any beat I'm making, and then infuse something from any era.”

The project has continually evolved stylistically, technically and philosophically. By making all their own sounds, not attempting to recreate some other era and searching for ideas off the paths of trends, they’ve developed something fully their own.

“We don't use samples anymore, which is part of why we have the sound we do. A lot of people still use samples because they can afford it. We’re in this in-between thing where it's like, we can't afford to clear samples, but we can't put out records that are sample-based either. It's definitely been a goal of mine to make things that sound like we're sampling some obscure late '70s jazz fusion album, just because we’re coming from that mentality of hip hop beats.”

It’s this approach that allows them to draw in collaborators beyond just elite rappers. They regularly enlist local Vancouver musicians to help flesh out an idea. Rather than working on one track at a time, the duo will multi-task, running multiple ideas in parallel, tinkering to see which clicks into place first. Incorporating these live players helps them progress a group of ideas simultaneously. They liken it to “preparing a hundred meals for a hundred people.”

“You start something, you start another thing, you start another thing… Then you come back to it again, you add another, you put the potatoes down and you come back, you put the bacon down. We're not just starting a song and then seeing it all the way through and finishing it. We create a bunch of ideas, and then we go to musicians and we say, ‘Hey, let's try all these different songs out.’”

Download Potatohead People’s free Chord Pack*

Requires Live 12 Suite

Working out multiple ideas in real time with trained live musicians gives the ideas a chance to pivot or reinvent themselves rather than going cold. “As soon as something feels stale in our minds, we just switch to another song. So many of the songs that we have are things that died years before and then suddenly woke up again. If you just take one note, you're not grounded to a key signature. You can switch between any key that has that note in it - so you have a lot of options – rather than putting in a sample that has a chord in it, because then that's limiting whatever you want to put on top of that. That’s why pretty much every single Potatohead track has modal mixture going on. It's part of our sound.”

Potatohead People have perfected a way of sitting in the pocket, making grooves that feel slinky and earthed, reminiscent yet out of any particular time, and tightly unrehearsed. This delicate equilibrium of elements is what has endeared a pair of scruffy Canadians to a pantheon of hip-hop royalty, and moved a lot of necks to start nodding heads with them.

Follow Potatohead People on Instagram, Bandcamp and Facebook

Text and Interview: Kevin McHugh
Photo: Thomas Maxey