Wild Experimentation in Hip Hop

It's 2005, and hip-hop has graduated from dropping science to applying science. Apsci-the name derived from "applied science"-is taking hip-hop to a new place, and they are doing it the way hip-hop has always been done: by blending styles. The NYC-based duo of Raphael LaMotta and Dana Diaz-Tutaan is finding inspiration and common ground in places where people previously saw only differences.
Known as Ra and Dana, respectively, both were interested in hip-hop at an early age, and other genres that simply did not mesh. "I was always into hip-hop, like old breakbeat, Rocksteady Crew, that kind of thing. But in the late '80s, I got into more electronica, and I could never marry the two styles," Dana says. "Then, I heard some of Ra's material, and I really liked his ideas. I feel like he really blended a lot of creative thought in his work." Interestingly enough, Ra's music came from rock influences, with which Dana was not familiar.
"I was into hip-hop as well as rock music, you know, whatever was on the pop stations. As I got more into music, I formed a rock band that was influenced by the rock at the time and also by the rap music I heard. I felt like the two genres were really talking about similar things, even though they had different listeners," Ra says. Both performers ran into trouble trying to blend fundamentally different kinds of music early in their careers. Eventually, this attempt brought the two together.
"We wound up being in the same creative circles, and I kept bumping into Dana," says Ra. "We did some sort of experimental recordings, with like 10 or 15 musicians. That's where I felt like, OK, I can really work with this person." More than just working well together, Ra and Dana each brought different skills to the table. "We try to balance each other out in that way," Ra says. "I've got a lot of hands-on, do-it-yourself experience. Dana's got a lot of technical experience. I think it's that integration of both is what makes something profound and lasting."
That's the concept behind the name Apsci: to create art, you need both creative input and talented execution. "Applied Science is sort of a metaphor for that," Ra says. "It's the application of the ideas. You can spend your whole life having ideas, but at the end of the day, what have you done? Or you can be a person who just executes things, but isn't very inspired. Apsci is about taking the best from both."
Apsci blends new and seemingly incompatible styles in their music. This goal has become more and more attainable in recent times because of the ease with which someone can conceptualize and record a musical idea. "The mobile technology wasn't there before," Ra says. "Six, seven, eight years ago, you had to go to a recording studio to get an album out. Now, that's not the case. We did our album out of our laptop, on the plane, in hotel rooms, just everywhere."
This fact is changing the way hip-hop is done. "It's changing everything. I think a certain level of quality has gone out the window, and you hear it," Dana says. "A lot of music that comes out now, if you aren't careful, it can sound very two-dimensional, because of the use of computers."
Still, Apsci hopes their sound will continue to be innovative. "We're not really straight up hip-hop. I'm fine with that. There are lots of ideas that were around in '99, but if you put that same record out in 2005, it's kinda sad," Ra says. "For me, I think of the origin of hip-hop, and I remember those DJs in the Bronx. There was no book of hip-hop then. They were completely inventing styles out of nothing. That's where we want to take music today."