Sydney-based rapper Dialectrix says his new longplayer, The Cold Light Of The Day, is different from anything else he has made.
"I've been making records for a while now," says Ryan Leaf, aka Dialectrix. "This time around, given the fact that Plutonic Lab has done more music than I've done, he was instilling into my head that we should be trying to do something that people aren't doing. If we started to feel like we had done a sound, personally between us two, we would stop and start again. It was an effort to find a uniqueness amongst our sounds and that became a heavier aspect of the record."
Ryan says the title of the record summarises the dark time period he experienced while writing most of the lyrics for this collection of songs.
"It was a time where everyone who was involved in it were going through some drastic life changes. I lost a family member at the exact same time as the birth of my first son. The title set the tone for how a lot of the songs turned out. The album is a snapshot of that person going through that stuff. I guess it was a venting record in many regards."
Ryan tries to keep any public input as far away from the creative process as possible, to avoid it impacting his approach to music.
"I try to detach myself from any particular followers that I may have. I don't want to know who listens to my music. I don't want to go in with an objective to make a party song, a live song, or a song for radio. I heard this quote from [the creators of] South Park that they have no idea who watches South Park. I would like to approach music the same way, just doing it to my own standards."
Ryan has concerns about the local scene moving towards an "Australiana-pop" genre that isn’t related to old-school rap.
"A lot of the commercial artists are becoming less hip hop and are incorporating more pop. I would consider it to be Australiana-pop with a rhyme potentially on it. I'm going to try to make records to birth a reaction in people potentially going, 'hey, that guy is doing something slightly different, I'd like to be different myself'."
The Cold Light Of Day is available now.
