Q&A with an avant-garde Swiss army knife

IS: I can't imagine what your life is like now. You've got so much going on that it's gotta be hard to keep up. But yeah, this Independent Study is about the X-Ecutioners record.

MP: Gotcha. Ok, thanks. (laughs) I was fakin' it before.

IS: So after working with Dan the Automator and with turntablism and all the dread and playfulness of death metal... How have these influences come into your compositional space over the last few years?

MP: Well, speaking about the X-Men in general, I had wanted to make a turntable record for probably six or seven years and just really didn't know who the hell to do it with. Over that span of time I played with a lot of different guys and that was my way of getting my feet wet. I was like, OK, I'm fascinated with the instrument and I know there are some guys that are masters of it. I've gotta go out there and learn a little bit about what's possible, what people do what people's comfort zones are and really whether or not I could write for it at all.

IS: Have you learned any turntable technique?

MP: God no! Myself? No no. I know better (laughs). I watch these guys do this s--- and I just back off and bow my head. So I played with a couple of different guys and I played with the X-Men individually and I really enjoyed their attitudes. A lot of guys were really great and really technical and really super proficient and really had a language, but were they open to necessarily trying, open to going outside of doing what they normally do? Not a lot of guys were. And there was really no reason for me to make a straight up turntable record. I couldn't do that.

IS: Well you don't want to force someone who isn't into the idea at all...

MP: These guys had that appetite. I could see it in their eyes. They were not necessarily sick of what they were doing but were really really ready to go somewhere, really open. Basically what I told them to do, I said, “Here's a crate of records.” I basically gave them a crate of records and said “Here's your palette. I want you to use this as your paintbrush and do your thing, but do it with a bunch of different sounds.” I think that first and foremost a lot of turntable artists end up using really the same sounds over and over and they really get recycled. There's a heavy turnover rate. So that was kind of my first instinct. It was “well I don't wanna hear any of that” or if so, very little. I want it to be mixed in with a bunch of stuff that you're not normally used to hearing them scratch and juggle.

IS: The record comes off as sort of a love letter to all of your influences, and handing them that crate, you're pretty much pre-selecting what they're going to be able to play with.

MP: Yeah, well, they were ... suggestions. They ended up obviously using a lot of their own stuff. But, as opposed to writing pieces for them, this is kind of like an improv record with a selected tone palette, really. I just said, “Do whatever you want. Give me a bunch of really short cut-up pieces, give me some groove pieces with song structure, give me some ambient pieces, give me a bunch of sound effects and I'll do the rest.” They sent me back a bunch of blocks of sound, basically, and they adhered to most of the requests that I put in and from there I sliced it and diced it, chopped it up, added a bunch of instruments and vocals and kind of did it really as something in my spare time.

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