Interview: Slab City Talk About Their New Single "S.T.A.B (Sicker Than Ali Baba)"
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“When it comes to creating new music, we try to link it up with the story, so we take inspiration from the locations...”
What are some things that inspire your creativity when developing new music and story lines for Slab City?
When it comes to creating new music, we try to link it up with the story, so we take inspiration from the locations, in the next part of the story S3X-CESS in Abu Dhabi, so we worked on incorporating Arabic sounds in to the music and lyric wise it focuses on S3X-CESS’s adventures in the middle east.
The concept for the story was originally based off our love for rebellion and standing up for your rights that we discovered through Hip Hop and Punk. We then mixed that with real life global issues and Marco’s love for 80’s action films, think Van Dame, Schwarzenegger and Star Wars with backdrop of Trap and Dubstep.
Congratulations on the release of your new single "S.T.A.B (Sicker Than Ali Baba)"; it's a great track. Tell us about your creative process when developing the song and was it self-produced?
Ryan: Thank you, we’re glad you like you it. With ‘Sicker Than Ali Baba’ it started with Marco sending me a rough production Trap Rap idea along with some ideas he’d come up with for a rap. I then worked the production around the rap and focused on an Arabic Trap style, to fit with S3X-CESS’s adventures in Abu Dhabi in our Instagram Web series.
Marco: we both have a background in production and songwriting which comes in useful as we can support each other with both sides of the creative process, which is really helpful in enhancing our music further.
How did you two initially come together to form Slab City, and how long did it take to create the backstory of the world encompassing S3X-CESS & Rydon in Koda City?
Ryan: Myself and Marco met at the end of 2018 as part of Musicians Cell Group (a platform, where musicians are placed in to small groups and meet once a week online to share and discuss issues and achievements in their professional music lives. At that time I’d also just started a new project with another producer and we were looking for a rapper to feature on one of our songs and Marco saw our post on Facebook and asked if he could lay something down for it. We instantly loved what he’d done. Not long after the other producer dropped out of the project and myself and Marco decided to work on more songs together.
Originally was going to fly out to Turkey to meet with Marco and work on a music video for one of the songs and create content for our social media together, then Marco had this great idea of creating a fictional story presented as series. We ended up travelling round different areas of Turkey with our smart phones in hand and filming the first parts of the web series and developing the story as we went.
The concept for the story was originally based off our love for rebellion and standing up for your rights that we discovered through Hip Hop and Punk. We then mixed that with real life global issues and Marco’s love for 80’s action films, think Van Dame, Schwarzenegger and Star Wars with backdrop of Trap and Dubstep.
Tell us about DJ Emperor and what we can expect from the interviews and guest performances.
DJ Emperor plays a key role in the Slab City Universe, he connects the revolution to outside world with his radio show and supports S3X-CESS and Rydon in their adventures to take down El Don and bring music back to Koda City. He’s super professional when it comes to the radio show, doing in-depth research in to the guests, which always makes our guests feel welcome and creates a more entertaining show, you can always expect banter, games and lots of laughs along the way.
In terms of our guest performances we always stay in our lane of Trap, EDM and Hip Hop. The DJ sets are compact to 30 minutes, which always allows for our guests to smash out their greatest hits mixes, with one of the sets charting in the top 80 global EDM mixes on Mix Cloud last month.
Will "S.T.A.B" and your previous two releases “I Want More” and "You Got Jeep’d" be appearing on an upcoming Slab City EP or album? If so, what can you tell us about it?
We’re still in the thought process stage of releasing an album, but our initial ideas are that after Saga one has finished of the Web series we’ll release a 10 track album, that will be an official soundtrack to the web series, with the 5 singles that will have been released and then 5 unreleased songs.