Exploration By Creation: Armand Hammer Interviewed

billy woods hasn’t had the morning he’d hoped for. He details his eventful school run to Elucid, his partner in rap duo Armand Hammer. “Oh y’all were those people on the bus today,” laughs Elucid. “Y’all were a sight!” “That’s OK,” says woods. “It happens with kids. On the bright side, it was beautiful today. It’s super nice out.”

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Both have learned to juggle parenting with their artistic endeavours over recent years. “I think maybe in some way it slowed me down,” considers Elucid. “And I don’t mean that in a way that’s lowered the ceiling or anything, but just the pace of things. When woods was talking about the school [run] – when that happens it’s like, ‘Well, I’m going to be late.’ And being ok with that. Just giving space to get things done, and not trying to be so particular about how I feel and being so precious with it. I think that works its way into the way I create now.”

As such, he needs to set aside intentional studio time that fits around the rest of his life, whereas prior to being a parent he would write when the feeling came to him. woods wonders whether the end result – in terms of released music – is any different, despite alterations in his process. “You might have had a time in life where it’s like, ‘I just do laundry when it all builds up’, and then another time when you’re like, ‘I’m doing laundry on this day, because that’s the only convenient day for me to do it.’ But you’re still ending up doing laundry twice a month or something like that,” he says. “Your output has not significantly slowed. You were never someone who was just putting out tonnes of stuff at a time. Maybe you were making it though and it just wasn’t becoming public at the time?”

Accomplished artists in their own right, the pair have been building their respective careers since the mid-2000s, and united a decade ago releasing their first Armand Hammer projects, ‘Half Measures’ and ‘Race Music’ in 2013. They’ve since risen to prominence amongst underground rap connoisseurs including Earl Sweatshirt, who put The Alchemist onto their music leading to 2021’s ‘Haram’, a collaborative album with the prolific producer. “That was our first time just locking in with a single producer,” says Elucid. “And for it to be Alchemist was also a big experience.”

Despite being well established to their core fanbase, ‘Haram’ felt like an arrival of sorts – exposing their music to a broader audience than ever before. Since then, the pair have individually released acclaimed albums: Elucid’s tribute to his late grandmother ‘I Told Bessie’ was released last year, and woods’ Kenny Segal-produced thesis on touring, ‘Maps’, released in May, has cemented his place in discussions about the year’s best albums. But following ‘Haram’ was always going to be a challenge.

Never ones to stagnate, their latest LP ‘We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’ sees Armand Hammer taking an ambitious new approach to music-making, resulting in their most expansive, mind-bending record yet. “There’s a direct contrast to ‘Haram’,” explains Elucid. “Produced by The Alchemist, a singular hand, it’s like one of those t-shirts with one seam that cost $1000. And then here we are with ‘We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’, and this patchwork of sounds and ears and hands all over this album.”

The process began with beats from JPEGMAFIA, a reunion of sorts. Elucid had toured with Peggy in 2017 and collaborated with him on a track called ‘Oblivion Reflex’, before a falling out lead to the exchange of veiled jabs which were speculated about by fans. (“It was nothing that serious,” says Elucid. “There was a disagreement, we now agree. And here we are. It’s in the past.”) Thankfully the reconciliation opened the possibility of collaboration between Peggy and Armand Hammer, and two instrumentals ‘Landlines’ and ‘Woke Up And Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die’ (the latter unsurprisingly came pre-named by Peggy) became the initial spark that set things off.

The next part of the puzzle presented itself while woods was in the process of mixing his album ‘Aethiopes’ alongside its producer Preservation and his longtime collaborator, engineer Willie Green.“I was like, ‘Where are you guys going to go after the last one?’” Preservation recalls asking, when the topic of new Armand Hammer came up. “I think at the time he was doing a couple of things with Shabaka Hutchings and it just came to me. I was like, you should maybe bring some musicians in and elevate the sound, make it a little bigger. With musicians you have a little more space to play with and experiment. But I think in the same breath I mentioned, bring in producers because you want to keep that gritty feel to it.”

Green had prior experience with recording bands, but has established himself with his work in hip-hop, particularly with woods’ Backwoodz Studioz label, for which he has mixed and mastered every release. “It was nice to be able to bring this tool set to this kind of project,” he says. While woods was away on tour, Elucid and Green assembled a band of musicians – Shabaka Hutchings on flute, Adi Myerson on bass, Max Heath (of Child Actor) on keys and Hisham Bharocha on drums – who had not worked together previously for a day-long jam session, which would form the raw material that would be chopped up and offered to producers as a starting point from which to make an instrumental for the record. “When I went about making the list [of musicians], I was just thinking about who was around, who was available and who I trusted,” recalls Elucid. “Then one of them was just a Hail Mary: Shabaka Hutchings. He already said he was down, but he’s a busy person, travelling all over the world playing flutes! We asked him, he came by.” 

Hutchings remembers stumbling across Armand Hammer’s ‘Rome’ album a few years prior and being blown away. “[billy woods] reminded me of an aspect of the RZA that I always liked when I was a teenager, there’s an aspect of how he uses his cadence and how he uses his voice in articulating stuff. And I thought that was interesting.” Next he found his way to woods’ 2019 album ‘Hiding Places’ and soon enough was down the rabbit hole of Backwoodz Studioz back catalogue. “I realised there was a whole bunch of albums that I had completely missed out on. And I haven’t felt like that in a while where there’s a whole musical thing happening, that’s established, and I had no idea.” After immersing himself in the music he reached out to the label’s Instagram page via direct message asking to be connected with woods. It took no convincing when Hutchings was asked to be involved in ‘We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’. “I liked that idea of having a live group of musicians improvising to get sample-able material,” he says. “There’s something about having Elucid in the session, Willie Green there, and developing what the ideas are going to be used for in terms of the sound of the album. It means that there is a bigger kind of loop cycle in terms of the creativity just really embedding itself.”

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The session commenced with Elucid setting the tone by playing ‘Woke Up And Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die’. As the band elaborated on what was playing, Green faded it out, allowing the musicians to elaborate and branch off. “They just started playing and they were weaving in and out of each other’s styles,” says Elucid. “If you were in that room you definitely knew when they all started to hear each other, and things began to gel and mesh. It’s a really obvious moment when things start to groove that way. It’s a beautiful thing; to witness that sort of creation.” 

For Green the focus was on setting things up in a way that would allow for the broadest range of sonic possibilities. He recorded every instrument individually, as well as creating a live mix, in order to allow the producers to work in a way that made sense to them. “There is a beautiful limitation in sampling a record, and that forces you into a certain way of creating,” he explains. “It’s also a really expansive thing to say, here is 24 tracks of instruments that create this and you can just take the flute, or just one snippet of the bass here and put that with a snippet of keyboard from five minutes before.”

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To ensure that producers wouldn’t be overwhelmed, Green went through seven hours of recorded material, cutting it up into sections that would be distributed to producers based on what woods, Elucid and himself wanted to draw out of them. “It’s a little bit of chess moves to set people up to create their best work,” he says. Pertinent to the collage-like approach to the album’s creation, they did not limit themselves to only one approach. “There were one or two musicians that collaborated with us outside of the jam session context,” explains woods. “Like the beat Preservation made, parts of it were taken from work by this multi-instrumentalist Jane Boxall, who I knew from being on tour with this guy Ceschi, who had her in a band and we became friendly. And she couldn’t make it down to be in the band but she was like, ‘I’ll play some stuff and I’ll send stuff I have.’” 

That would become ‘I Keep a Mirror in My Pocket’ which uses Boxall’s marimba and vibraphone recordings. “We know, especially based off what happened with ‘Aethiopes’, those kinds of tones, Pres could get very busy with that,” says Green. “I know how ‘Wharves’ sounds; I know what Preservation did over there, so give him this because it might draw out a certain other chamber out of him.”

It took several attempts for Preservation to come up with a beat he was happy with. “It was not easy,” he admits. “It was hard to find something that really stuck. Sometimes when you’re dealing with instruments – as far as hip-hop is concerned – you don’t want it to feel too flowy, you want it to have a stop-and-go kind of rigidness to it. But I was able to catch something.” Preservation didn’t hear anything else from the album until it was complete, but when he did, he was impressed by the balance of live instrumentation and beat-making. “It’s a natural succession, it flows out of what they’ve been doing,” he says. “It’s easy to go in the studio and rhyme over a band, but keeping that producer mindset through it, you can tell that it’s thought out. It’s tighter.”

“I love the album,” agrees Hutchings. “I’m doing a lot of beat-making at the moment, and it’s interesting as an instrumentalist you tend to over-emphasise yourself. And as a producer – someone who is using the product of an instrumentalist – you want to get the essentials, you want to get the most potent element of any given performance. So it was really interesting hearing what they thought were the most potent aspects of what we played, and seeing how they used that creatively.”

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Armand Hammer explore by making; immersing themselves in the work and allowing connections between songs to emerge. They are comfortable allowing an idea to lead them,  even if this means ending up in unexpected territory. Despite their tendency to write and record their lyrics separately, it’s not surprising – given the process began with ‘Landlines’ and ‘Woke Up And Asked Siri How I’m Gonna Die’ –  that themes of phones and communication appear throughout ‘We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’. 

This phenomenon isn’t new to them. While recording their 2017 album, ‘Rome’, woods started to notice reoccuring lyrics about cyborgs, pyramids and technology as he listened back to songs. “I didn’t have that in my mind when we started out,” he notes. “Sometimes after you do something you look back and start to see connections growing,” he adds. “You know like 70 percent of the way through, you start to see certain things. The same way I could say, at a certain point of working on ‘Shrines’, almost to the end, I could say ‘Oh, there’s a lot in here about nature and rebirth.’ It’s sort of like sometimes after you do it I feel like you see things that you didn’t necessarily see when you were making it.”

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Elucid suggests that it’s to do with what is being digested and regurgitated during the period they’re at work. “Maybe look at it this way, it’s just what we’re into at the time: what we’re reading, what we’re watching, what we’re eating, our relationships, what’s happening in those relationships. All these things get filtered back. You take it in, you shoot it back out, you take it back in, and these songs happen in between,” he says. “These songs reflect that process.”

They also draw a lot of influence from each other and their collaborators. “I’m not working in a vacuum,” woods acknowledges. When he starts to identify links and themes within the work, that encourages him to consider his own viewpoint. “One person sometimes sets the operation off on a course, and anyone can take over the wheel. We’re driving down the road about whatever or in this way, and I’m taking over the wheel and I’m like ‘I’m going to keep driving somewhere in this direction, or find my own path through this wood.’ So we’re also greatly affected by what the other person is doing.”

Elucid brings up listening to the poet and activist Amiri Baraka discussing “unity without uniformity.” “I think that applies to what you’ve just said, giving each other songwriting space to just pivot. It’s still unified but it’s pivoting. It’s presenting under a new lens and that keeps shit interesting to me.” woods echoes that sentiment: “Even with intention there is always an element of surprise and the fact that creating, whether you’re creating art or a child, you can’t always predict and control what happens.” 

Right now, the pair find themselves at opposite sides of their creative cycles: “We had a very different last year,” explains woods. “Because I’ve been on the road a lot and [Elucid] had family things happen that allowed him to step back for a minute.”

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Having released two acclaimed records this year, both of which included busy touring schedules, woods is ready to slow things down. “There’s kind of an urgency to everything that’s been happening,” he adds. “Which is good, and that paid off. And I’m looking forward to the time with a little less urgency around creativity and in my life, it’ll probably come next year.” “I’m the complete opposite,” says Elucid. “I’m drumming up this urgency. I’m working on music now. I’ve been in a creative space and I’m excited about the new phase that’s coming. Of course that’s started with ‘We Buy Diabetic Test Strips.’”

As our conversation draws to a close, I enquire about the pride in what they have achieved with this record. There is a sense that this cannot be known until the record (which is a few days from release as we speak) is received by listeners. Not because there is a need for validation or any particular expectation, but because curiosity about its reception feels like the completion of a gestalt. “I’m not so sure [what I’m proud of about the album] yet,” says Elucid. “Maybe that will change once I see it out in the world. Wait for it to grow some legs and walk, see what it does. I’m definitely into the next thing. I think that goes back to what I’m saying about the immersiveness of actually creating a record. Just giving it a lot of focus, and for me I’m able to do that; sustain a focus for a year on a project and then when it’s done it’s done.”

Off the back of Elucid’s analogy, woods comes full circle. “We started this conversation off about children and there is an aspect to the music that’s like – what are you most proud of about your [newborn] kid? It’s kinda like, ‘Just that we made it to today.’ They haven’t done all of the things yet, but you’re glad that they’re there and they’re safe, and you guys made it through, when it’s a pretty intense process just to be a parent. So that I am proud of, and I’m proud that we set out to do some ambitious things. Always trying to challenge ourselves. I’m proud of us for sticking to that. I really don’t want to be stuck. I just wanna always feel like we tried to do something different, or something challenging. We tried to push it forward.”

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‘We Buy Diabetic Test Strips’ is out now.

Words: Grant Brydon
Photography: Alexander Richter