The Infomatics

"We get up in the morning, hear the news and see what’s going on and it boils your piss some days."

Dublin hip-hop collective The Infomatics have just released their debut album, ‘Kill or Create’, already having supported Soul II Soul, Ice T, Nas and more. Rapper Konchus Lingo (or Steo to his mates), tells us how it all started and what influenced their brand of socially conscious, funky hip-hop.

How did you all get together?
We started off in college. BOC, the beatmaker, started doing stuff with Ado [aka Mr Dero], the other MC. I started talking to him about hip-hop one day and just took it from there really. We hooked up in his shed and started making music.

How long ago was this?
2003 or thereabouts.

How did it progress from there to where you are at the minute?
Well obviously we weren’t straight into it, banging out hits or whatever, but BOC used to have unlimited amounts of beats that he’d made and Ado would just freestyle over them, spit stuff that we’d written ourselves, and it started taking more shape as we got further into it. Members joined and left and that’s pretty much how it went.

Ado’s brother is the bass player – did you basically have the band and a name by the time he joined?
Yeah, the first ever time that I did music with Ado and BOC, Graham was there, just hanging out in the shed. We’d been gigging around for a while and we wanted to expand it. He engineered the whole album.

He’s worked with some other people and indie bands too, is that right?
Yeah, as far as bass playing goes, he’s untouchable. He’s amazing, but as an engineer as well, he’s top dog. It was on the cards that it was gonna happen – he’s the George Martin of The Infomatics! It was basically always going to happen.

As far as the album is concerned, how would you describe it for people that haven’t heard the band?
I guess it’s pretty dark, there’s sort of a sinister undertone throughout the album. It’s atmospheric, but also quite melodic and beautiful, and sinister as well, I suppose. It’s ‘socio-conscious’, you know what I mean? [laughs] No, but somebody else wrote once that they thought that the album sounded like Dublin in the dark. And I thought, ‘yeah, it does that’. I thought that was a nice description of it.

How long did it take to make? Was it quite a long gestation?
Yeah, I guess so. We started out making it in, say, 2005, but that was when we sat down and decided to do it. Again, it was the same deal as when we started making music, it wasn’t straight away, ‘oh, an album track, an album track’, we worked up to get to this. So I guess we’re talking about a year and a half, maybe two years. From starting off like, ‘right, we’re gonna do an album’ to finishing one, you know? So there or thereabouts, really.

Where was it recorded? Was it made in studios in Dublin?
It was all done at home. It’s not very glamorous, but BOC’s got a shed out in his back garden. BOC’s dad was a teacher, and he used to give extra tuition in the shed. So it was a good, solid structure in BOC’s back garden and he always had a studio out there so it was the natural place. We’d always made music there together. We figured we’d record there; it’s nice and comfortable.

And you can always go into the house…
This is it, water on tap, the whole lot, you know! All the comforts are there.

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