Finally, after nearly 2 years we’re finishing our overview of the Needlework label, by catching up with the elusive producer and DJ, Waxfactor, the second signing to the label after 2tall.
Deep in the British heartlands of South Yorkshire is where you’ll find Waxfactor - beatmaker, DJ and sometimes scratch fiend. Slowly but surely, over the last few years Wax has been making his way up the ladder, starting with appearances on labels like Lex, working with people around Sheffield and then moving on to London based small independent label Needlework, where he released his EP, ‘Game Face’, back in 04. This is now followed with his first album, ‘Sci Fu’ – a real work of love that took a long time to finish, and nearly as much to release due to some unfortunate distribution issues. With ‘Sci Fu’, Waxfactor has combined a love of B movies and the such with a love of beat making, instrumental hip hop and mixtapes. The whole thing being wrapped up in a stand out package, that has also been a labour of love and was expertly designed by Griff, from Up The Resolution, to match the album’s theme and moods.
While the album was being finished and released, Waxfactor has continued to up his production work, and also found the time to become co-host to the Rhythm Incursions radio show, on London’s Resonance FM and the worldwide web, alongside Mr Trick, the co-founder of the Needlework label. With Rhythm Incursions, the guys play an hour and a half of music every week that picks up where hip hop stops. They’ve now just released a mix CD, ‘Up The Anti’ (also on Needlework), which exemplifies the ethos behind the show, and their love of music and production, perfectly. The mix also took a long time to put together and release, but with both CDs finally in shops, ready for consumption by those that know, and those that don’t yet, as well as upcoming projects with Zilla, Buddy Peace, Sacred Hoop and more in the pipeline, it was only right we updated and tidied up an interview that took place about 8 months ago, back when the album was first bound to drop. So read on for a bit of history about who Waxfactor is, where he came from, the new album and the future. And then get yourself over to the Needlework site to find out where to find to bag a copy of the LP and mix CD.

So what have you been up to recently?

Waxfactor: Just locking down the album, finishing it mainly. We did a mastering job on it recently, and then both Trick and I have listened to it and thought it was missing something at the front end. I listened to the whole thing myself a few times and really felt it was lacking something. I know this album by heart now, having been working on it for a while, I’ve tweaked it so much, down to the last hi hat, that when I listened to it as a whole I saw where it could benefit from some changes. The thing is I never set out to make an ‘album’ as such. As in an album being a collection of tracks, which is why the concept behind it helped me. Making a concept album is different to a straight-forward album and I wanted it to flow like a mixtape more then anything. I like mixtapes and how they flow together, and that’s what I wanted to get across with this, so I’ve gone back and tried to fix some parts. It takes a while to pick up the pace in a sense, so I guess I’m trying to change that a bit. And apart from that just been busy with the radio shows, and the recent gig we did at Herbal in London. I haven’t played out in ages so that was good. I don’t really like playing out anymore, mainly because I don’t really want to be playing other people’s music for 2 hours! So using things like the MPC (which I’ve just added to my setup) is great as it allows me to showcase the stuff I’m working on and just see if people are feeling it, get a bit of reaction from the public.

Cool. And well I guess we should get a bit of background info on you too, for the people who may not know a lot, or anything, about you. So how did you get started with production etc…?

W: Well it all started when I moved to Southampton to go to university around 1997. Once there I hooked up with this guy who was on one of my courses. I’d seen him around and he looked like someone I’d get on with but we never spoke to each other. When we eventually happened to get talking, it turned out that – whilst I thought he looked like an atypical drum & bass DJ, and he thought I was a jiggy thug wannabe - we actually both liked a lot of the same music. When I finally went down to his I found out he was a scratch DJ. Personally I’d been into hip hop since I was 10, but I lived in the middle of nowhere. Which doesn’t help! So when I saw him cutting and whatever it made me want to get involved. At the end of the first year we all went away for the summer, and when we got back he had just done this album with a friend of his. It had all been done on an old Amiga using some magazine cover disk. And that really blew me away, because I was like ‘what you’ve done an album!?’ And I just wanted to learn about it, find out how they’d done it, learn for myself in a way. We did this radio show while at university and my mate would bring his tables down each time, but this one time he couldn’t be arsed to bring them back so he left them behind. He left one for me to use and took one back for himself and that’s when I really caught the bug for scratching. Then when he came to take it back I knew I had to get my own decks. So I saved some money and got one Technics and one of the official Technics mixers… which was a big mistake as it probably cost me £200 in faders within 6 months! (laughs) I would just cut over CD beats and things like that. Then I saved enough to get another turntable and just kept at it. I didn’t really bother with mixing or anything like that for a while. Just focused on cutting. By this point my friends had got some of their stuff signed to the Marble Bar label, which is now over. So they got some releases on there, and that’s also where I actually got my first credit… kind of anyway they misspelled my name. It was just a guest scratching credit, as I was the only one who could crab at the time. That particular track came out on Apeman and is called “Bedroom Twiddling”. We were meant to do a tour of Australia all together, but it fell through in light of what happened with 9/11 and I left university and moved back up here (South Yorkshire).
After that the next thing I put out officially was on a Sheffield based label, which was run by a guy I got in touch with through a record shop in town (big up Mark and all at Store Records - R.I.P). All the while I’d been playing around with stuff, making bits and pieces, but not really looking to get signed, just giving stuff to people to listen to and getting on with it really. I think that the next major thing after that, and the one for which most people probably know me, was the release on Lex Records. It happened around the same time, and came about through my having done some writing in the past for online magazines – interviews and that kind of thing. Tom - the guy who set up Lex –- was a friend and whilst he was still working for Warp and setting up the Lex label, he sent me all the stuff to be released for review and to write about. So I got a copy of Prefuse’s first release for the label, and that really blew my mind. That and the Ko-Wreck Technique EP I got in the same parcel. This was the type of thing I really wanted to hear at the time, what I’d been looking for. And while the label started I kept sending him bits, stuff I was working on and then he started putting together the first compilation, for which he picked one of the tracks I’d sent him. Over the course of the compilation (Lexoleum) coming together I would just send him anything I made and eventually, after going through a couple of different tracks at various stages, Tom decided that “Haunted Hairpiece” would work better in the compilation, and went with that in the end.
Now at the same time as all this was happening, Snatchcon (an online forum centered on scratching) was also going on. And through that I’d become good mates with 2tall and Trick. The ‘Posse Cuts’ track, by 2tall, happened and because of that and other things Needlework records was set up by Trick and Monk-A. They released 2tall’s EP, ‘The Rise’, and by that point I basically sent all the stuff I had done by this point to Trick, and from that we put together the ‘Game Face’ EP, which was the second release on the label. After that we started speaking about an album, which slowly started taking shape. Thing is I probably spent 18 months on this album, for 45 minutes of end result! But it’s a first album, and sometimes it’s best to do it that way. There were times where I’d write 3 tracks for one slot, because they needed to have something in particular to work at a certain point in the LP and I just didn’t have anything right amongst what was lying around. So it was hard work in parts… I think at this stage there’s probably 5 tracks at the most that were written before official work on the LP started. I trashed a lot of tracks in the past 18 months!

A labour of love?

W: Yeah definitely. To me if I do an album it’s got to be done proper. Like I said I don’t want to do a collection of tracks, or something which isn’t going to be 100%. So I took my time, but I think it’s come out good in the end, and it’s a progression from the ‘Game Face’ EP.

Well actually, how different would you say the album is from the EP?

W: I don’t know really. It’s got more of a B movie feel, which actually ‘Game Face’ also had. But that’s just me as well, I think things like this would just creep into a lot of what I do. I wanted to weave in a story into this album, in a way that I couldn’t with the EP. So the story is there and towards the end it kind of starts flowing. And that’s also made me do things I don’t normally do. I’ve also had more time to think about it and about what I wanted it to be.
While ‘Game Face’ works quite well on its own, we put a lot on there - this one really works best as a continued listen, from beginning to end. It’s very much one of those albums where you don’t have to sit down and listen to the whole thing – you can pick out different tracks that you like more than others and put them on compilation tapes and whatever - but then if you go back and listen to it as a whole, you’ll hopefully get more from it. ‘Wavetwisters’ was like that for me. It’s a great album to listen to beginning to end, yet everyone still has their favourite tracks. But as a whole listen it works better than any individual track. That’s what I wanted to do, take people on a ride in a way.
And it’s funny because I’ve sent you the remix of ‘SRB’, to show where I’m at now, compared to ‘Game Face’ (the SRB original appears on ‘Game Face’). It’s like the kick on that track is just right now. I would have loved to have it like that first time round, but it wouldn’t have been possible and it’s meant that now I can do it too. I’ve progressed enough to better know what I want musically, when I produce stuff. And the same goes with my scratching as well I think. Which should make those parts with scratching in it even more enjoyable to people. But they’re actually quite small for the moment though, there’s only about one minute of my own scratching!

It’s like you’ve taken everything you’ve learnt until this point and applied it to the album?

W: Yeah and also just learning stuff since finishing ‘Game Face’, stuff that I’ve been wondering about for ages. Like when I came down to get 2tall to master the album it was great to be able to sit with him in the studio and see him work. Chilling with him and watching him do his thing was a massive bonus. Things like working EQs, learning how to use them in a way that I never knew before but always wondered about.

It’s like you learn from someone how they do something like EQing but then you take that and put your own twist on it? Like with scratching, you start by imitating to a certain extent and use that as a basis to develop your own way to do things?

W: Totally. For example I’ve been using ACID a lot to make tracks. But when I first saw it used, I was totally against the idea that you use it for loops. It’s like ‘I want to make my own music, not use loops’, but now I’ve actually learnt to use ACID in a way which is very different to what it’s kinda advertised as. So I’ve taken it but made it do what I wanted it to, in a way. I can bounce stuff in it, use it to arrange etc… But I am getting tired of using it a bit, which is why getting an MPC has been great. It’s such a good thing to have at hand, to be able to just punch into it and feel what you’re doing. It’s very direct, when you use it to make a beat for example it reminds me of how you might go about making a scratch track. Ultimately though it’s very much not about what you use but really how you use it! Total cliché but that’s the main point.

Yeah a lot of producers say that. You could be using a shitty sequencer and 5 plug-ins and still come out with an amazing track.

W: Yeah, for example I can make ACID do things in a way most people don’t, but I can’t really do anything on Cubase the way I do in ACID. I can use Cubase for making melodies and then bouncing them to wav, but then someone like 2tall can knock out a lovely something in Cubase real quick. So it’s really just how you make use of it. And again that’s why I like using the MPC, because it’s so easy to get down with.

So then how did the production happen on the album?

W: Essentially all the production was done on computers, and everything – at some stage or other – passed through ACID. Mostly the LP is all samples, but for a while now I’ve been working almost totally with single hits of instruments and then mapping them out across a few notes and making melodic lines with those. The only “sample” used (in so much as its used as people might expect it to be) is on the remix of “Reggaenomics” – which comes from the turntables anyway, so it’s hard for it not to be a sample without using Serato (which, alas, I don’t have!). I like to create melody lines - 4 bar patterns. Well, drums too… and then I mix them down as a little chunk, effect them and drop them back in and chop them up some more. By the time I’ve finished with stuff it doesn’t tend to sound much like it originally did – not because I’m trying to flip things harder than everybody else or anything like that, just because I want to make it sound like it does in my head. Like – I hear something in a sample that I know is there, but I just have to figure out how to get it out. For example, a track I did lately has a melody that was made using the word “rhythm” which I put through a ring modulator and a vocoder and all kinds of other stuff. I’d be upset if I was pulled up for sampling the word “rhythm” when there is no possible way that people could know that’s what the sound is.

Do you find yourself more at ease with samples, loops and things like that or making up your own samples and loops and then chopping them up, and generally messing about with them?

W: The second, definitely. I always have really. I started off using drum taps and stuff, but I never liked the choppy sound that gives the beats, so I would always mix down my own loops and re-chop them after I’d effected them. Don’t get me wrong, I have used larger samples here and there, but it’s not so often these days. It’s a case of having more control if I just take that one note, rather than taking a loop, which has whatever feeling and melody the original songwriter wanted to convey. Essentially I’ve just created a library of instruments and I programme and effect them the same way a musician would, I suppose. Like a guitarist – he might only have one guitar and therefore one particular sound, but he’ll use amps and stomp boxes and whatever else in order to tailor that sound for the particular track he’s doing. It’s no different really.

You mentioned to me that there isn't a lot of scratching from your part on there this time round. Where as 'Game Face' did have one track that was 'turntable' produced in a way and a fair bit of scratching. Was that a deliberate choice on your part or did it just end up that way?

W: Well I’m addressing that a little now – 2 of the tunes I’m adding the final touches to are getting cuts on them. Essentially, I wasn’t happy with my cuts up until now. I just felt I was sloppy and if I didn’t want to hear my cuts on the LP, why would anyone else? In the past month or so I seemed to have rediscovered my flow a bit and I’ve started growing to like how I cut again, so I’m putting some on now.

And what was it that made you want to do a 'turntable' track on 'Game Face'?

W: I felt like I had something to say I suppose. It wasn’t a planned thing like “today I’ll make one for the purist types”, just that I’d done it prior to us deciding we were doing ‘Game Face’ and we all felt (Trick, Monk-A & I) that it should go on there. It came from just messing around with records I had lying around the decks. I just happened to grab hold of the record whilst I was playing and transformed it a bit. It sounded kind of nice, so I changed the pitch a bit, flipped it onto 45 and just experimented for a few minutes. When I found something I liked I just recorded it and then recorded some drums onto it. For the LP I’ve actually done the opposite, in a way. I took the original transformed melody that I made “Reggaenomics” with and remixed it using sequencers and non-turntable techniques. It’s getting cuts on it, but that’s the only turntablised element on the remix. Seems to be going down well too – it’s one of the tracks people really seem to like from the LP.

Ok going back to the new album, I hear you’ve been arranging some animation for it as well as some special artwork. Can you give us some info about exactly what the deal is, who the guy behind it is and how it came to happen?

W: Yeah, I’m massively excited about the album art. It’s being done by a mate of mine called Griff, who I met through his Minipips project (which is something everyone should own!). He did a trio of little of figures – along the lines of the Kubrick characters from Japan – each of which had a track (produced by Deckwrecka) with an animated video to accompany it. Griff asked if I’d be interested in doing a remix for the project - which I agreed to instantly – and said that although there was no budget, if I ever needed art for anything, to give him a shout… After seeing some sketches and ideas he’d had for various bits and pieces, when it came to getting art together for the album, it was absolutely nailed on that I’d go to him. In the end I did 2 remixes for him – both of which can be found on the DVD which accompanies the box set of figures. Definitely something I was really proud to be involved in. I appreciate how lucky I am to have him working on the artwork – he’s part of Up The Resolution, who seem to be so ridiculously busy these days, it’s only a matter of time before he’s way too big time to even take my calls. The artwork itself includes a pull out which represents the tracks off the LP in comic book form. I gave him a few pointers about what I fancied, but essentially, I just wanted him to go off and do his thing, which is exactly what has been happening.

That sounds amazing. Can you divulge a bit more about the comic book then, because that sounds like a sick little idea. What can we expect etc…?

W: It was something I wanted to do from the early stages of the LP. I was thinking about how I could make an LP that would work for me as a proper coherent album, rather than just a compilation of tracks - if you get me. It just seemed natural. I didn’t imagine Griff would offer to do it at that point, so I was thinking of how to do it myself, but once Griff was involved, it just grew from there. The CD booklet folds out to a 2 panels x 2 panels square, which contains cells that aim to represent the album. There genuinely is a story to it, though I appreciate it might not come across through the music as lucidly as I might have liked it to, so the comic strip approach also helps to cement that. Obviously, people will decide whether they care about the story or not (admittedly it’s not exactly classic literature material!) and I’m sure most couldn’t care less, but for anyone who does… well - it’s there & I hope they like it.

You’ve also been co-presenting the Rhythm Incursions radio show with Mr Trick for the last 2 years. How has that been?

W: Doing Rhythm Incursions has been great. It’s been a learning process, no question about it. To have the opportunity to take artists and labels you really believe in and give them airplay in whatever form you can is incredible. Especially when you consider the amount of people who seem to tune in every week. It’s incredible. Also, it’s helped give me a different focus other than purely the LP in terms of my musical output – aside from doing the show itself, every fortnight I try to make sure that the intro beat is something I’ve made in the time since the previous show. Often they don’t go on to be used for anything other than that, but lately some really interesting stuff has come out of it.

The show is put forward as ‘picking up where hip hop stops’. Do you think that in a sense over the last 5 or so years, there’s been a definite growth in the number of people making music which has this hip hop base/root to it but then just goes off on one and does what it wants?

W: Definitely. I can’t remotely define what most of the stuff we play is, other than it falls under that very loose remit. It’s funny, I’ve been asked to explain that by various people, but ultimately I don’t think I can! For me, it stems from things like the New York Illbient scene – labels like Liquid Sky & Wordsound – as well as the Bay Area movements that started generally coming together around things like the Audio Alchemy compilation Ubiquity put out; through some of the things Om were doing (Deep Concentration, for example). Altered Beats, Bomb Hip-Hop, Future Primitive, Mush – there are so many little areas that gradually seemed to pull together and form something that largely wasn’t accepted as hip-hop (which I realised early on, when I tried to tell heads about some of the artists or releases I was picking up on). I think these days that broad loose “collective” spilled over into everything and forms the basis which makes so many apparently different genres fit tightly together. It’s like – I can do a show which starts with some pure turntablised stuff - D-Styles for instance - goes into Crooklyn Dub Consortium, then Team Shadetek, then maybe The Bug, something off the Axelrod LP on Mo’Wax, Squarepusher, some spoken word, into Busdriver, some Hive DnB… and all those things – to me at least – belong together.

Personally which artists/albums have you felt most since doing R-I?

W: That’s such an incredibly difficult question to answer without taking up pages and pages. To be 100% truthful, I’ve been able to play nothing but things I liked a lot – if not loved – every single show. It’s hard to pick out favourites or ones that stand above others… but that said, those types of responses are always annoying, so I’ll give it as good a go as I can. Mr Dibbs & the whole of the 1200 Hobos - I find it difficult if not impossible to go a full show without playing something by one of the Hobos. They embody exactly what I love about hip-hop. If I were picking out some releases I guess Dibbs’ ‘30th Song’, Sixtoo ‘Chewing on Glass…’, Signify ‘Sleep No More’ – all of those are big favourites. From a turntable angle - D-Styles & the Ned Hoddings crew are really impressing me as artists who are bringing something different to the arena. Vocally, people like Edan get a lot of props – his ‘Beauty and the Beat’ album is absolutely incredible and cements his credentials for me. Busdriver & the whole Project Blowed/Good Life collective are others I love – Aceyalone, P.E.A.C.E & Freestyle Fellowship especially. Def Jux constantly put out incredible music – anything El-P touches usually gets a warm reception. Other producers – people like: Diplo, edIT, Hive, Prefuse73, Dabrye, Daddy Kev, Madlib, Machine Drum, Nautilis, Omid, Daedelus, Hive, DJ Vadim, Push Button Objects, Team Shadetek, King Honey, Heat Sensor, Danny Breaks, DJ/Rupture, Nobody, Supersoul, Scotty Hard, The Bug, Mumbles, Express Rising, Sketchie – they’re all bringing something new and interesting. You know the daft thing? The people I find it hardest to get hold of, get material from and even get to know about are people from the UK.

Has it been hard putting the album together while at the same time constantly receiving new music and having to showcase it? Were there times when you felt you needed to ignore the music sent in or played to avoid being influenced?

W: That’s a really good question. I think it’s impossible to avoid the latest music when you’re as obsessed with it all as I’ve kind of become over the years. I tend to be dying to hear things as soon as I hear about them – even though releases often take forever to go from rumour to reality. In that sense, I find it impossible to ignore new releases because I simply need to hear them. In terms of how that affects what I’ve done on the LP, I don’t think it’s much of an issue with new material, more old material in all honesty. For example, whilst making the album I’ve listened to a lot of old dancehall stuff and whilst I don’t think that’s come through as overtly as it could have, there’s actually very few tracks on the LP that haven’t got some sort of dancehall element to them. I tend to go through phases of listening to certain things, which I think inevitably has an effect on the music I end up making. That said, I don’t think it comes through in ways other people find as obvious as I do. For example, I might listen to a prog-rock record and try and emulate a particular effect on a bassline, or maybe a certain type of delay or echo – to me, every time I hear it I hear where I got the idea from, but I’m sure most people won’t really notice. I think that’s something you start to realise after you’ve been making music a while. I mean, I’m a real anorak when it comes to making beats. I always slice up drums and programme original patterns, I use single notes instead of loops, I layer up sounds to make everything fit right… but when people hear it, they either like it, or they don’t. It’s that simple. Whilst I’m not likely to change how I make music any time soon, I do appreciate that I’m probably the only person who cares about that sort of stuff. If I were an emcee, would anyone care what my handwriting was like as long my lyrics were tight?

Ultimately, what would you like to come out of this album? Popularity, stardom, money?

W: I just hope people like it and that I get an opportunity to release more music with more different people in the future. That said, even if everyone hated it and I had to shake people down to sell a handful of units, I’d still make more music. I don’t really think I could stop, to tell you the truth, but it’d be nice to get the chance to release more things more often in the future. I’ve got a couple of things coming up – Ambulance Chasers (an instrumental not-really-hip-hop project with my mate Andy which we’ve almost done ), a vocal hip-hop project with Luke and Vrse of Sacred Hoop, which I’m MASSIVELY excited about. We’ve done 2 tracks together so far though I only have the vocals back from one – ‘Ten Gallon Hat’. I’ve been a massive fan of The Hoop for years now, so to be in the position where I’m working with them is incredible! I’ve got another vocal project coming up with my Battlecake bredren. It’s with an emcee called Cornelius Flake, who some people may have heard on a track called ‘Working on My Mullet’ and will feature guests spots from Chill William, Zooface, Long Distance Dan, Wrong Tom and Long Lungs MC. Having spent so long working on instrumental or more DJ-focused tracks, putting down some production for emcees is a really nice change. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for ages but didn’t feel like I could concentrate on it until I’d say what I wanted to say with my own album. The ‘Up the Anti’ mixtape with Trick will hit people any time now – feedback on it has been excellent so far, so who knows where that might leads us & Rhythm Incursions? There’s more mix madness to come with Trick and my mellows Buddy Peace (2 collabs on the way with Nick) & Zilla… there’s loads coming (whether people want it or not) but it’d be nice to make some kind of impact with ‘Sci-Fu’ so that it was easier getting all that stuff & more out in the near future. Getting some remix work would be nice too – maybe get asked to do a mix – or an un-mix, I guess - for a label. I mean, like the way I’ve approached the ‘Up the Anti’ mix. I’ve taken bits of tracks and instead of making a mix tape I’ve done a production job with them, so everything has been dismantled and rebuilt from scratch (no pun intended!). I’d love for a label to say “we like that and we’d like you to do that to our back catalogue.” It’d be nice to be amongst the group of people labels like Thirsty Ear approach to do remix work. You know what else though? This is daft and I don’t even know that I should say it, but I’d really like it if some of the people whose music I love, liked my music too. I know that probably sounds silly, but it’d be nice to see, say, Prince Paul or, I dunno, whoever, to get asked in an interview “so who are you feeling right now?” and have them say: “you know what? That Waxfactor kid is hella fresh with his.” (I’m paraphrasing, of course). Oh yeah, and I wanna win alllllllll the money.

Allll the money. Well to win all the money you can try and answer the following quick fire round of questions, and we’ll let the public decide!

3 comics everyone should own?

W: s long as everyone owns at least 3 I'm happy

3 records you wished you owned?

W: How about 3 records I wished existed?
1. Kwest the Madd lads 2nd LP (with Waxfactor production).
2. Oatie Kato LP with Prince Paul & Scotty Hard splitting production with Dibbs & Jel. Guest spots from Mike Ladd, Jelo Biafra, Justin Warfield & Henry Rollins.
3. Ras Kass LP with Axelrod arranging. Guest spots from Aceyalone, PEACE & Busdriver.

What record did you think you’d never sample but ended up using?

W: Did I ought to tell you this? Jean-Jacques Perrey. Never ever thought I'd sample it but I did. I've done a really abrasive flip of it which I've not used for anything yet, but I like it. Of course, I won't be able to clear it now so maybe I shouldn't have fessed to it! Hehe

Favourite movie

W: Star wars. Obvious, but true.

Favourite food to eat during a movie

W: M&M peanut each & every time.

Funniest thread you’ve ever read on a forum?

W: Topic: I'm slowly coming round
Message: To your house on my C5

Best record cover art?

W: Shit that's tough. I always loved the "Stress: Extinction Agenda" cover. The pieces Doze did for Presage & DeepCon 2 & 3 are incredible though. I don't know man. Lex covers are always incredible? Bottom line is, I love my own that Griff has done!

Which track on the new album took longest to record/put together?

W: Getting "Down for the count" to fit together properly took a long while. The main musical elements of the track took a while, but getting the structure right so that all the spoken word bits worked properly - probably that one.

3 reasons why living outside of London sucks?

W: 1. Too far away from too many friends
2. I miss being able to go into record shops and always find things I want
3. I just like London, at the end of the day. I'd like to be able to take my wife and kids to London more often and let them maybe understand why I like it so much.

3 reasons why living outside of London doesn’t suck?

W: 1. I can afford a house. It's that simple.
2. The thing I've always loved about London is that I've never had to live there. Living outside London means you get to enjoy the good aspects of it, but not the stresses (commuting to work, insane house/rent prices etc.)
3. I like the boogie down. I like South Yorks. It's a beautiful place. I like knowing that I can drive a few miles and be in Sheffield city centre in the thick of things, or I can drive a few miles and be in the Pennines with amazing countryside all around. There's no metal detectors at my kids' school.

Favourite TV show?

W: I tend to watch TV very little so it's more short attention span type stuff like Viva la Bam or something like that. I switch it on and watch whatever though - discovery channel type stuff is some interesting shit. I watch sports when I get a chance – football mainly, but golf, NBA, NFL - whatever's on. I end up watching poker a bit too. Texas Hold 'em. Everyone should play Texas Hold 'em.

Piece of kit you’d never part with?

W: MPC (especially since I fitted the card reader!)

Toast or Crumpets?

W: Toasted teacakes? Ok ? between those two it'd have to be crumpets.

Massive thanks to Wax for his time. ‘Sci Fu’ and ‘Up the Anti’ are both out now on Needlework records, and available from all good record shops and stores. You can check more on Waxfactor at his own site.
Listen to a promo megamix of ‘Sci Fu’ by Buddy Peace right here (click on link and download will start), and you can hear a sampler from ‘Up The Anti’ here (same again, click and download will start). Don’t forget to also check the first 2 parts of our Needlework Overview if you haven’t already – part1 with label heads Mr Trick and Monk-A and part2 with 2tall. Look out for more Needlework releases later on this year, including the joint release with Real Tablist of the Lamont and 2tall ‘Senses Overloaded’ EP, and a second solo LP from 2tall in 07.