Anonymouz interview (2012)

Anonymouz - Working Hard to Remain Anonymouz

By Martyn Pepperell (photography by Bear Print) NZ Musician, June/July 2012 (Vol:17, No:1)

His adopted artist identity points to him a behind the scenes kind of operator and, as Martyn Pepperell reveals, that does provide a neatly accurate assessment of Matthew Faiumu Salapu, a.k.aAnonymouz.


With his own music production company, called Anonymouz Workz, Matt is credited as associate producer of DJCXL’s recently released ‘Represent’ album, is currently busy completing post production on Ermehn’s next, as well as promoting his own Hypnotics music collective’s newly released debut album ‘Give It Time’. At the end of NZ Music Month he was a key central co-ordinator of the APO’s ‘full orchestra meets hip hop’ Auckland Town Hall concert performance coined Remix The Orchestra.

One of the comments on YouTube summed it up,” reflects Mangere, South Auckland’s very own Matthew Faiumu Salapu, known within the local music industry as Anonymouz. “They were like, ‘F^*k, Ermehn! This is the last person you would ever expect to put on stage with an orchestra.’ To me, that is a highlight for me musically. That is the kind of thing I am in this music industry for, trying to transcend a whole lot of barriers through sound. So to have the oldest form of music, oldest form of pop music, a full orchestra alongside a real gangster-as old school rapper, you couldn’t dream that up – and it is coming to fruition. These are the sort of challenges and achievements that I’m really in the whole game for.”

Staring at me through a flickering Skype screen, dressed entirely in black, Salapu is pretty excited. After all, as he puts it, “At the moment I am heading into the biggest three weeks of my life. So many huge things are on.”

He is himself a classical musician, longtime pianist, rapper, beat maker, record producer, studio engineer, session player and music educator. Since his 1999 appointment as a piano tutor and recording studio operator at the Otara Music & Arts Centre, Salapu has been an instrumental background figure in a dizzying range of musical projects within the greater Auckland region.

We’ll get back to his extensive scroll of successes later on, but right now, Salapu is taking me through his crowning achievement, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra’s REMIX concert, scheduled for the Auckland Town Hall on May 31st, and still a few weeks off at the time we talk.

An outgrowth of four year’s worth of work handling music education programs for the NZ Music Industry Commission, the APO and Corbans Art Estate & Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, the concert will be “a historic moment”, as Salapu puts it.

“We’re going to be putting DJ CXL, Ermehn, Tyree (of Smashproof) and Frisko (The Deceptikonz’ Alphrisk) on stage with a full orchestra, as well as eight students who have been through the program. So, you know, from these education programs which had humble beginnings here, some of the results are turning out quite huge right now.”

In an era where our regional and national orchestras have performed with the likes of Shapeshifter, Warren Maxwell and Che Fu, to the educated musical listener, Salapu’s project isn’t perhaps as mind blowing as he describes it. Where things do get really cool however, as he highlights soon enough, is with the interaction between hip hop kids and orchestral musicians.
“Young dudes in South Auckland, the furthest thing in their mind, from their reality, is an orchestra. That is as far away from their reality as possible. So for the last four years we have done this program where we got young kids from the hood to make beats with APO musicians. When they successfully complete that, they’ve stepped so far outside of their comfort zone that that can be applied to anything in their life... If they can step that far outside of their comfort zone in music, whatever suppresses them in their real life, be that the gang environment or whatever, they can stretch themselves beyond those parameters.”

Similarly, he sees a unique value in the experience for the orchestra members.

“They spend their whole life sitting there, being told what to do. When they are playing the instrument, you play that note, with that finger on that hand and hold it for this duration, at this volume, every time the conductor says – and if you play out of time, out of turn, you get kicked out of the orchestra. That is completely opposite to hip hop. Hip hop is non-conformity.”

Viewing both sides as having relevant lessons to teach each other, Salapu has been successful in integrating these two cultures due to a distinct background formed back when he was a young kid.

Raised in Mangere, Salapu received formal training as a classical pianist through private Royal Schools of Music tuition, completing up to grade 7 in Classical Piano and Theory, in 1998. Along the way he competed in classical competitions, achieved well at Auckland Grammar School and even played bass for a Smokefree Rockquest regional final winning metal band named Late Harvest.

While all this was going on though, Salapu was quickly falling into a love affair with the urban black musical forms he discovered on the radio and through friends.

“I was raised, like many artists, to play in the church, specifically for the church, but playing the piano for church was an enabler which allowed me to get into production. I studied classical and all that, but as a kid, the second I started hearing music on the radio, whereas most of my friends were just listeners, being able to play the piano put me in a category where I could not just listen, but play it back and emulate it. Most of my mates were reciting NWA lyrics and that, but because I had that foundation I could really emulate those melodies. I just caught the bug from there.”

Diving into beat making and production within the worlds of hip hop and R’n’B, Salapu started off making tape loops using two cassette players, eventually moving onto move conventional production platforms. Folding his classically-trained musicianship into the record sampling- and drum programming-oriented aesthetic of these forms, his work stood out from the go. As a consequence over the last decade he has worked on production for DJ CXL, Adeaze, 4 Da Grind, Ermehn and J Williams amongst others, as well as writing his own solo material and singles under the pseudonym Anonymouz.

Departmentalising his music into personal love projects and money making operations, while he personally prefers the creative freedoms found in painstakingly labouring over as he puts it, “… the music that my heart wants to do,” he’s equally happy to tackle the inherent challenges of building recorded material to commercial broadcast specifications.

“I’ve had to do co-production work for Move The Crowd [Records], Dawn Raid [Entertainment], Illegal [Muzik], and I see within all these different people I work with, there is a certain pressure to conform for radio. Personally, I’m not really one for that. However, I love a challenge and it is interesting to go about production where you have to spin things different ways. There is this tendency to push things a certain way and make it sound a certain way. Or use a certain synth because they know that that would get that kind of appeal. So I find it a great challenge on that side, but it’s not really my main thing.”

Under the love category, four or so years ago, Salapu pulled together a handful of Mangere musicians to form a cross genre quartet named The Hypnotics.

“I had a couple of friends who were all doing music on their own, they were all trying to crack the industry, working in isolation, so when I saw how the whole Otara scene got along [through working at OMAC], (which is probably the same way the whole Dunedin, Flying Nun scene got along, which was with a real communal relationship to the music), I identified three mates, who were all doing music.

“I brought them all together and said, rather than everyone trying to do it on their own in the industry, we should all get together and form a group and work together. Everybody can still do their own thing, but let’s get a body of work together.”

Forged over the course of a month of studio work, The Hypnotics kicked off their career with a performance at Auckland’s Vector Arena as part of Style Pasifika and haven’t looked back. Recently selling out their first Australian show in Sydney at an 800-capacity venue, they were also finalists for Best Pacific Group at the 2012 Pacific Music Awards.

Keeping this many balls in the air is hard going, and during the hour we spend talking, Salapu looks pretty tired at points. Assisted by his fiancé Noma Sio, who handles his diary and scheduling for him, he’s keeping it all together and is at the same time, extremely appreciative of the opportunities placed before him.

“I try to make a living with the music, and I know that is very difficult these days as a musician in New Zealand. You know, with the shear numbers and the audience base and that, I’ve really had to diversify what I do. So as you know now, these days I draw an income from my own productions, producing for other people, playing live, doing arrangements for different events like the Silver Scrolls and also doing education programs. It’s all part of that grind. You don’t really feel validated as a musician if you are sitting around doing nothing.”

www.anonymouz.co.nz