Though Bliss N Eso released their first EP back in 2000, they had already been working on their hip hop talents for years. Having met in high school, the trio – MC Bliss (Jonathan Notley), MC Eso (Max MacKinnon) and DJ Izm (Tarik Ejjamai) – have since won ARIA Awards, toured the world, and pulled off what was the highest-selling Australian hip hop tour to date back in 2009.
Their sixth studio album, Off The Grid, has just landed, and with a title like that it’s easy to imagine the guys living in some bunker up in the woods, all wearing feral cats for clothes, eating sticks, and convinced that helicopters are trying to read their minds. If the world did go sideways, I ask Notley, and they had to live off the grid, how would Bliss N Eso fare?
“Not too shabby!” he says with a chuckle. “I’m good at the old hunting and gathering. I haven’t exactly been stockpiling food and all of the essentials like some people – I’m not quite ready for the nuclear winter. But I think I’d be alright. I’d just have to stay away from civilisation, because I think things would go pretty nuts pretty quick.
“But that title really came from, well, there was some level of wanting to go off the grid and get away from everyone for it, but mainly it was trying to get to a certain mental state. You don’t need to run off into the woods exactly, but you find yourself doing the same old same old really easy, and going off the grid to us meant thinking a little bit outside of the box.”
To that end, it has long been a staple of Bliss N Eso’s career – and hip hop in general – to enlist other talents to help take songs in fresh directions. Of the three singles that Off The Grid has so far produced, we’ve seen guest artists Gavin James, Thief and Lee Fields. Each brings something unique to their respective songs, and I wonder how far into the recording process the band decided which direction to follow.
“You know, it happened at different times,” Notley says. “We never sat down at the beginning of the recording process and said, ‘Yeah, we want X, X, and maybe X.’ It was much more organic. First of all, when you’re first recording a song, sonically you don’t know where it’s going, so as we recorded, we’d be singing along ourselves and start to think, ‘Now, whose voice would just sound amazing on this?’ We stumbled across Lee Fields back in Chicago, and thought he was just amazing. It was really just like connecting the dots.
“Some of the things also just fell in our lap. We originally had Thief singing the hook on ‘Moments’, but that got into Gavin James’ hands, and he loved it. We’d never heard of him at that point, but he has an amazing voice. In the end he literally landed in Sydney and within two hours we met him in the studio and recorded it.”
In recent years, Bliss N Eso have struggled with – and surmounted – certain demons. MacKinnon found himself on a particularly slippery slope with alcohol, and Notley himself faced struggles with that staple of the music scene, the ol’ jazz cigarette. It’s something they have referenced in their songs before – listen to the first few lines of ‘Choof Choof Train’ and you’ll see what I mean – but these days, that landscape of excess is very different.
“For years, years, I resisted,” Notley says. “But now I’m completely off it. It’s weird. It mixes with some personalities well. Eso is a little bit ADD, he’s such a creative guy who’s always thinking. And if you’re like that, well, I think you’re a little bit hyper anyway and it can put you on a good plain. But if you’re more reserved, which is more me, it just bums you out. I got pretty unproductive and pretty lazy. It was just getting in the way of having fun, to be honest, so I stopped it.
“It was more of a social thing, especially when you’re on tour and it’s just everywhere. But the boys certainly still partake, DJ and Eso, that’s their thing. Eso has moved on from the alcohol now, which is a great thing, and I’ve moved on from the weed. As you grow up, you do face a bit of a change of pace.”
We get nothing but love and appreciation from the fact that we have battled certain demons, especially Eso.
You also face a changing audience, but such is the strength of Bliss N Eso’s relationship to their fans that when their image began to change – as they recognised and moved away from their particular demons – the fans never drifted.
“I think the fans are proud of us because of that, and if they’re not, well, they’re not real fans. We get nothing but love and appreciation from the fact that we have battled certain demons, especially Eso. He went through a massive sea change, and that was not easy. He talks about it on the new record, and I don’t want to talk about it too much since it’s his story. But he goes into it on the record, and I like sharing that stuff about our lives with our fans.
“We get emails from people every week from people who battled their own demons, and we certainly can’t claim to have solved anything, but we have helped people. If you can help through sharing stories, well, that’s what it’s all about.”
Off The Grid is out now through Illusive/Flight Deck. Bliss N Eso play the Enmore Theatre on Wednesday June 28.
