Interview: Software’s Napolian on G-Funk, Dystopia and A$AP Ferg

Calling in from his native LA, Ian Evans casually mentions a recent screening of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which he snuck in between a busy stretch of incoming press requests. It’s hard not to draw parallels between Marvel’s mutant creatures and the sci-fi inflected beat hybrids that Evans produces under his Napolian moniker. Out now on Daniel Lopatin and Joel Ford’s Software label, Napolian’s debut album, Incursio, is filled with hypermodern soundscapes that blur the lines between vaporwave, trap and electronica.

Napolian is an indisputable, unapologetic product of the information age. At 21 years of age, and a handful of calendar cycles deep in the production game, his hard drive abounds with sketches and near-complete tracks that seem to touch on most recent developments in hip hop and electronic music. He met his future label boss Daniel Lopatin over Soundcloud, and future collaborator ASAP Ferg over Tumblr. Most strikingly, Napolian’s music is underscored by a complex web of concepts and references.

The cryptic song titles on Incursio (the Latin word for “attack”) are heavily coded indices, alluding to Ancient Greece, Biblical passages, Colombian drug cartels, and government agencies. The music itself meanwhile shifts vigorously from abrasive post-drill onslaughts to carefree, synthetic funk and hypnagogic pop interpretations. In its entirety, the Napolian maze is impossible to navigate. We touched on a few of the cornerstones of his musical and intellectual philosophy in our conversation with him.

Tell me about your work on the ASAP Ferg album. Your name appears in the mixing credits quite a lot.

I met Ferg on Tumblr actually. I sent him some fan mail and was like, “Hey Ferg, where can I send you some beats?” He gave me his e-mail and liked the beats I sent, so when I went to New York to do initial recording for Incursio, we met up in Harlem. He was working on a song and when he was done recording his vocals, I asked him, “Hey, so are you going to get the stems? Who’s going to mix this thing?” He didn’t know what stems were, so he said, “Yo, you can do it. Can you do it? Go ahead if you want to.” I mixed one song and he liked it.

Trap Lord initially was planned as a mixtape. I told him, “Sure. I’ll mix your mixtape. All I ask is that you put my logo on the back with the tracklisting.” After the recording was done, I think we spent about a solid six months working on the mixdown. I would do stuff at home or at my friend’s studio and then he would fly me out occasionally to New York to work on it in person together. Once all that work was done, the label turned it into an album. They wanted to commercialize it.

So it was also due to your efforts with the mixdown that Trap Lord was turned from a mixtape into an album?

I want to say that I definitely helped. I think the musicality and the concept behind it were already there, and were already highly original and standing in a league of their own. But I definitely brought some kind of commercial appeal to it. Also a bit more originality, because even if they had gone to get this mixed, usually the engineers that they go with are either Hollywood engineers or New York engineers, and they tend to keep things true to the source material. I knew I needed to give this a tone and a specific character across the board, so yeah. I think I definitely helped.

You went to the same high school as Ice Cube and Eazy-E. That in itself doesn’t necessarily imply a hip hop background, but factoring in your work on the Ferg album, I’m interested in hearing about your connection to hip hop.

Coming up as a kid, I only listened to hip hop. The first album I ever had, was when my mom bought me Busta Rhymes’ Genesis album on CD. I forget how old I was exactly, but I was too young to be listening to it. She bought it because she knew that Busta Rhymes raps so fast that I wouldn’t be able to catch every little idea and concept that he rapped about – and she was right. I understood parts of it, but I was mostly listening to the production. I think that’s what started it. I would really try to break down beats that I’d hear on the radio or that my father would play, and my moms of course. Yeah, I was drawn towards hip hop. I was drawn towards the production style. I guess the sampling and the drums. I listened to only hip hop for years, and then I was introduced to electronic music and totally ignored hip hop for years.

Dr. Dre did a bunch of production on Genesis. I hear you’re a fan of his work. How does his production inspire you for what you’re doing now?

Now that I think about it, I think it’s a combination of his mixing style and how he always … His tracks are minimal. There’s maybe seven sounds in his beats, tops, but he manages to create such a triumphant sound, sonically and musically. I think that’s what got me. As a kid, it was easy to calculate. It was easy to analyze. Particularly on the 2001 album, his sound is almost dystopian. It was like his attempt at using synthesis, like some crazy forms of synthesis for backgrounds and effects. I wanted to take those motifs or those cues and just build on them even more, take them further, take them more experimental.

Do you think there’s a lineage that connects G-Funk and what Dre was doing on 2001 to what a lot of producers are doing on the West Coast right now on more of an electronic tip? You being one of them but also the whole Fade To Mind crew? I feel like that’s almost like a hyper modern version or continuation of G-Funk to an extent.

Yeah, it has to be. With the heavy synth-use and all… I wanted to go more into the funk-specific sound on Incursio, but there were these other sounds that I wanted to explore as well. There’s one track on there, “W (Dub),” which really did that. But yeah, I mean the West Coast is in us. It’s the music we like to listen to. It’s the music we study when we’re in the car or at home. At least I love to study the beats. Dre’s beats, Jelly Roll, DJ Quik… these are the sounds. It’s because of their musicality that we hold them in such high regard.

1. q: You mentioned dystopia in the context of 2001, and your album also has dystopian elements to it. It’s probably a hard thing to pinpoint, but I’m curious about where your fascination with dystopia stems from.

I study and research current events, and I research other researchers who talk about different aspects of society. I definitely use those concepts as themes in my music. On “DARPA” specifically, I wanted to definitely go into the concept of how there’s a branch of government that has free rights to basically do whatever they want, and that’s not really a good thing. I don’t see it as like, “Oh, these are our heroes here. These are our American patriot heroes. They’re working for us and protect us.” I see it as like, these guys, there’s no telling what these guys know and we should be cautious about it. That’s why the track is … it doesn’t sound like a walk in the park. It sounds like there’s aggression in there, drama, suspense.

It’s a comment on the dangers of limitless, or ever-expanding power?

Exactly. In the hands of man, that’s definitely dangerous. I mean, concepts like that come up time and time again in history. There’s a class that holds all the money and all the resources and the secret knowledge, and then there’s the people that support and uphold their class. That’s what we see today.

Do you ever talk about that kind of stuff also with Daniel [Lopatin]? He kind of plays with dystopian concepts of hyper-technology too in his music.

He does, but no, we don’t really discuss it as much. I find myself more just texting him random stuff I find or random thoughts. We haven’t really thoroughly discussed topics like that. We’re more on a musical connection. We’ll talk about music or even art, but I think he definitely knows. He’s an incredibly smart man, he knows. I'm sure he knows the things that I know and much more.

The press release describes your album as a kind of Incursducing… with “no break record samples, no dust, no crates, no jazz rust, no deconstruction.” What does that mean in concrete terms?

I didn’t create this album in a classical hip hop fashion. I didn’t sample jazz records. I generally didn’t use breakbeats. There’s a couple of breaks here and there. “Lobby” has a really big drum break but for the most part it’s just not your average, sample-based hip hop album.

Was that a conscious decision of yours, to stay away from that kind of stuff, or is that just not really your style of producing?

No, no. It’s just for what I wanted to do with this album. It stems from listening to Mr. Oizo, or Siriusmo, or other electronic artists like that. They tend to design their own sounds and mix their own way, and there’s normally no vocal. I wanted to go for that electronic music sensibility but in the format of three-minute hip hop instrumentals. I knew I needed to compose most of the sounds myself to really stand apart. I don’t want to sound like anyone else that’s out today.