Intergalactic duo sets its sights on the cosmos with ‘New Jack Star Base’

The latest project from longtime musical collaborators Miles Curtiss (Marvin the Robot) and Matt Forney (Spruce Campbells) emerged in the early days of the pandemic and echoes of those shut-in months can be heard in songs like “Recluse,” on which Curtiss, reborn here as the masked emcee Trayvon Barksdale, raps about being sequestered to his couch.

Elsewhere on New Jack Star Base, out digitally on Friday, April 24, Curtiss and Forney (aka Realistic Tears, also masked) venture into more galactic boom-bap realms, the two positioning themselves among the inhabitants of a once-luxurious space resort that has been recast as the orbiting home for a cult-like group that treats a cache of rediscovered cassette tapes as mythical artifacts. Forney crafts the beats throughout, utilizing drum machines, crackling samples, and, in a nod to native Ohioan Roger Troutman of Zapp, a home-built talk box that the producer and multi-instrumentalist then rigged to a synthesizer. 

As a means of describing the level to which Forney dedicated himself to the construction of this instrument, which involved looking up Troutman’s original patents, Curtiss recalled an earlier stretch when the producer became enamored with making the perfect cup of coffee.

“One of the first years we started hanging out, I remember every two weeks you were experimenting with a different way of making coffee, and there were points where there were these wild, Rube Goldberg coffee machines,” Curtiss said, and laughed. “And the talk box, he approached it with that same [mindset], like, ‘We can build it!’ And then he was like, ‘Well, we can add a step here and take this away there,’ and he went through every way of not only playing it but the whole engineering philosophy behind it.”

If aspects of Forney’s contributions were built on rigor, Curtiss lent the project his more on-the-fly sense of imagination, the rapper’s mildly buzzed intergalactic lyrics nodding to the likes of Deltron 3030 and informed by a lifelong obsession with comic books. As a writer and artist, Curtiss previously published The Editors, a series of time-hopping revenge fantasy comics informed in part by the violence routinely enacted on Black people throughout US history. 

In the earliest days of the duo, Curtiss said his verses were often similarly dark, shaped by pandemic anxieties and the unshakeable sense that a greater fracture appeared inevitable. But while this instinct proved to be correct, the rapper gradually leaned into the project as a space in which he could perhaps begin to visualize something better. 

“I would say it’s more utopian than escapist,” said Curtiss, who will join Forney in celebrating the release of New Jack Star Base at Rehab Tavern on Friday, April 24, supported by Delorean Tape Deck and Troy Kunkler. “I’m trying to pitch a vision of what life could be rather than complaining about what it is or just throwing my hands up, like, ‘Oh well, it’s never going to get any better.’ We’re going to get pan-galactically better.”

And forget just the gravity of the moment, Curtiss as Barksdale has a tendency to ignore the physics of gravity altogether, boasting on the album’s title track about how he remains unbound by the earthly pull that keeps the rest of humanity tethered to this rock. “And Barksdale is always talking about how Earth isn’t cool enough, and how he needs to go to other planets to find other emcees worth hanging with,” Curtiss said.

In concert, the pair’s adoption of masks enhances the music’s more surrealist qualities, though Forney acknowledged his face covering initially had a more practical purpose, giving him something to which he could affix the talk box tubing. “I didn’t know much about talk boxing at first, and the tube I had was way too heavy, so I needed something I could attach it to,” he said. “And when I realized I was using the wrong kind of tubing, the mask stayed.”

“There’s a hip-hop as pro wrestling aspect to it,” Curtiss said. “And I like wearing masks, which is why I’m not married to a particular one. Part of my character is that he wears a mask, but it’s never the same mask. And that way I don’t feel like I’m copying MF Doom, and at the same time I get this joy that I can be an entirely different person each time we play a show. … In rap music, especially, some people take themselves too seriously. And I didn’t think it would be any fun to be self-righteous. Barksdale is like the more animated version of my pretty much already animated personality.”