The cult of personality as a marketing tool is one of the music industry’s oldest tricks, but it is not one that impresses Cut Chemist. “Using a biography to sell something is ridiculous. I keep telling my people to take mine off MySpace,” he laughs.

In the past the DJ and producer’s own personality has blended in with the whole of his group, alternative rap heroes Jurassic 5. But now he has taken a break from the LA outfit to concentrate on his first solo album, ‘The Audience Is Listening’. Having signed a solo deal with major label Warners four years ago, he felt it was now time to produce the goods, even if that meant not featuring on the new Jurassic 5 record, also out this summer.

“I really had to buckle down on this album. They’ve been expecting a record for almost four years and I’ve never felt pressure like that before in my life.” Unusually most of this stress was self-enforced and didn’t come from the label. With a ready-made audience of Jurassic 5 fans he was never rushed or pressured into sounding a certain way. Besides, the digital age and the ease of illegal downloading means record companies have had to lower their expectations. ‘The Audience Is Listening’ isn’t expected to go triple platinum and instead the label will look to recoup their investment from legal downloads and licensing. However there was a time when Cut Chemist himself considered a more commercial sound. On Jurassic 5’s last album ‘Power In Numbers’ he produced a slick pop number ‘Thin Line’ that featured Canadian star Nelly Furtado, while later he produced tracks for a Welsh pop singer named Jem.

“After I did ‘Thin Line’ I became enamoured with that kind of structure and sound. I definitely wanted to do another female vocal, which is what pulled me into the Jem idea. We’re talking about working again.” It is typical of Cut Chemist that it was never the potential financial reward that interested him, just a different and interesting way of making music. He has an obsessive, acetic attitude towards it and hunting down records in shops and from private collectors is still his favourite part of the whole process. It allows him to temporarily shut out the artist in him and indulge the self-proclaimed “collector neurotic” side of his character. Yet the artist is never far away and his ever-expanding record collection is the source of his ideas, so it’s no surprise to hear he had written over 100 songs for ‘The Audience Is Listening’. Whittling them down to the 15 that appear on the album was made more difficult by the fact that he was working on his own for the first time.

“It was hard. There’s nobody to bounce ideas off, no one to do checks and balances with, so I have to make a decision on everything all the time. That’s the downside. The good side is I don’t have to compromise. The record is 100% me and if I like something and somebody else doesn’t, I don’t have to throw it away.”

The resulting album bears much of Cut Chemist’s trademark breakbeats and samples but also pulls away from the established Jurassic 5 old school hip-hop template. ‘Storm’, featuring the vocal talents of rock ‘n’ rapper Edan and The Perceptionists’ Mr Lif, is a buzzing electronic number, while ‘Metrorail Thru Space’ sounds like the psychedelic lounge of Stereolab beefed up with some big breaks.

“I wanted to do something different so it would be a little bit more progressive and challenging for me. I wanted to destroy everything I had done and create something new.”

One of the highlights is ‘The Garden’, a song 10 years in the making that flits from a smoky, cinematic atmosphere through some taut funk guitars, before heading to Brazil, where Cut Chemist travelled to record the percussion with a samba band. As the first single people are already assuming that ‘The Garden’ is representative of the whole record and ‘The Audience Is Listening’ has been referred to as Cut Chemist’s “world music hip-hop album”. He is slightly exasperated about this.

“If ‘The Garden’ is the spokesperson for the campaign that’s fine, but it will definitely mislead people when they hear the record. ‘The Garden’ is obviously the biggest single; it’s pretty and not really offensive. Whereas every other song is offensive and tries to be abrasive and jagged.”

Rubbing people up the wrong way is something he is used to, having once been a member of Latin political-funk band Ozomatli, while Jurassic 5 have frequently tackled social issues in their rhymes.

“I believe in strong beliefs. I definitely supported everything Ozomatli stood for. We all met on this political stage in downtown LA, the Peace and Justice Centre, which was a refuge for young kids with political ideals. I felt it was what made the group interesting. Ozomatli was a fun party group, but one with something to say. A lot of people say that about J5 as well. Even on this record there are certain subtexts of politics and ideals stitched in. It’s not so overt, but it’s there.”

But ultimately he believes that music is about fun. “I want to create a fantasy world for people to go and live in for 45 minutes,” he states, adding that reality TV has blurred our notions of what is real and what is fiction. The slew of programmes that purport to portray reality using contrived situations actually present a distorted version of life and he draws comparisons with hip-hop’s own wannabes with their lurid tales of gangs, girls and guns that claim to represent a ghetto life they are now far removed from. For him it is important that ‘The Audience Is Listening’ is honest, yet still thrilling. “It’s like an amusement park of music,” he says. You can tell that Cut Chemist himself is enjoying the ride.

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