Feeling jaded? A) Listen to Dazed Digital’s exclusive: Mario C’s remix of N.A.S.A.’s “Electric Flowers” below and b) consider the advice of the inestimable funk legend George Clinton to N.A.S.A. producer Sam Spiegel during the recording of “Spirit Of Apollo”. “What’s the secret to keeping excited and young?” asks Spiegel. “Pussy,” asserts Clinton hoarsely, “pussy and prune juice.” Who knew? That unpredictability of experience is the fruit of a cultural sound clash on an album that improbably bridges the musical spectrum with artists from seventies samba to psychedelic funk, electro to hardcore hip hop. Dazed Digital caught up with Spiegel at home in Los Angeles resting up after the outfit’s recent European tour, to talk about the adventures in creating an album six years in the making: including but not limited to Rasta cooking tabernacles, evolution vs creation and recording in a log cabin with Tom Waits.   

Dazed Digital: First off, the whole album sounds like it was a riot to make…
Sam Spiegel: Definitely, it was an adventure. It was a dream record, and film too. Let’s try and gather all our favorite musicians and artists together and make one big art project; meet everyone who we look up to and travel all round the world recording people.

DD: It sounds like the kind of concept you’d come up late night and drunk…
SS: You know the concept… it wasn’t like we came up with it, it kinda grew. We came up with the name one night smoking a joint on the patio behind my studio. But then we did the song with Karen O and Ol’ Dirty Bastard and KRS One and Fatlip; that was really a milestone in the idea coming together. We were like, 'This is really crazy and you’d never expect to hear them together, but it makes sense and works in the most fucked up way.' From then on we thought that’s cool, this is what we need to do for every song. [Zegon and I] came together through music from two different worlds, so we tried that with every song ¬– to bring people together from very different worlds together.

DD: What’s the South American slant to all this and where did that come from?
SS: When I met Zegon something that we really connected on was our love of Brazilian music, he’s from there, and that’s one of the first thing we talked about when we met. I was just learning about all this music from the 60s and 70s and falling in love with it: Caetano Veloso, soul, samba and samba rock from that era. Zegon has an amazing collection he’s been collecting for years and that was one of the things that sparked our friendship was the love of that music. A lot of making the record was going down to Brazil and sampling tunes from that era. We didn’t always end up using the whole sample. We’d start with the sample, build up the track around it and take the sample out, use it for inspiration. But almost all the songs started there with an old Brazilian record.

DD: It feels like there’s a South American joie de vivre to the record?
SS: I think that’s definitely on the record and speaks to me and Ze’s taste and speaks to all those records we were sampling and that Brazilian spirit of just partying and positive vibrations.

DD: It’s an insane who’s who of music talent on the record. How did you get everyone together?
SS: We have a lot of dirt on record executives and we held them hostage. So we would blackmail them into getting their artists. It worked pretty well. We still have our information, so we can do whatever we want.

DD: How do you decide the pairings?
SS: It was about who this song would speak to. Whose aesthetic can we feel, and then who else’s aesthetic who’s completely unexpected from the first.

DD: What was your favourite pairing and why?
SS: I think for me, the Kool Keith/Tom Waites song “Spacious Thoughts”. Those two guys are so unique and they feel the music and they have their own kind of sub genre. Bringing them together was so fucking weird but sort of made sense because they live on their own planets that it was just this strange chemistry.

DD: How do you bridge that difference in musical styles as a producer?
SS: That one was interesting. That was one of the few pairings where we didn’t want to get them in the same room because I don’t know whether they’re going to vibe because they’re so unique and so weird. So we did Keith first in New York and then we went to a log cabin in northern California that Tom Waits uses as his recording studio and recorded with Tom up there. He was playing piano on it and he sang his part but then after it was done, it had this much more, kind of like, drunken New Orleans club sing to it, and we got these drippy, droopy horns on it and it fit and suited Tom much better. 

DD: Tell me about other collaborations for the record that were particularly memorable…
SS: Going to Judgment Yard, the Rasta compound in Kingston, was an amazing experience. We brought Amanda Plank down there with us and Sizzla’s engineer showed us round Kingston for a couple of days. We went to Stone Love which is the biggest sound system out there, where we met Sizzla actually. Then we went to Judgment Yard recording. Sizzla was recording another track in the front house and there were all these random dudes, like this Japanese guy just hanging out, high as hell. Then Sizzla finished recording that track and bought up down into the compound and we just hung out there, and there were 50 Rasta dudes just hanging out cooking. We just hung out there and Sizzla would come in and record part of the track then go back out to the Rasta tabernacle. It was a really unique, special, authentic way to see Kingston.

DD: You said that Tom Waits and Kool Keith you worked with separately, but for the most part was it better to bring the artists together?
SS: Yeah, definitely. As much as possible we did that. That was the exception. Like Method Man and E40 in the studio, pushing each other in the studio to come better, come stronger. Another good one was Gift Of Gab and Charlie 2na on “People Tree” with David Byrne. David was one of two people who we didn’t record in the studio. But he was very collaborative, sending us stuff. First he sent us a wordless vocal, a melody, and we were like, okay, this is cool, maybe on the chorus part you could change this, so then he’d resend a new one with a melody, then he sent vocals and they were really abstract. Then we had this chorus, it was talking about Adam and Eve and about creation and the Bible and it was very abstract, For me, I was reading about Charles Darwin at the time and it was connecting with me there, and I thought, maybe this song is about evolution vs creation. So we were vibing and talking and said, 'Maybe this is a conversation between God and man, and that would be really cool. They could be arguing about evolution vs creation. Lets get Charlie 2na, he sounds like God, he has this voice, and we’ll get Gab, he fits.' The last verse they trade off every line. Man would ask God, why is there hate in the world? Why does pain exist? And Charlie would be like, 'How the fuck am I supposed to answer that?' He’d be stumped, but then he’d come up with something and ask a question back to Gab, and gab would like be 'Fuck dude, how am I supposed to answer this one?' They were stumping and challenging and pushing each other, there was real chemistry, something that wouldn’t have happened if they were just phoning in their vocals.

DD: How was hanging out with George Clinton?
SS: Let’s just say the session was rather consciousness altered. He just had so much mental strength and positivity and I was amazed by now open he was to collaborating. I would think a legend like that would be like, 'I’m George Clinton, you just sit back and watch.' He was very much a collaborator. He’d write something, I’d piece it together and make suggestions… he wanted that. It was very much a collaboration in the writing and the recording. That was cool to see someone who’s that accomplished and that much of a legend is totally open minded and still a collaborator.

DD: I hear there’s a film in the works of the six year process of this coming together?
SS: Yeah, we filmed all the stuff, Jamaica, George Clinton going to Brazil hunting for records, all the sessions and the film is a combination of that and the animated music videos and also other animated bits which aren’t music videos. We have over a hundred hours. We’re editing, we’re pretty close, in December I spent two weeks editing and we got to the stage where we can say okay we can see the whole thing now. We’re just taking our time, it’s done every indie, it was like hey, want to come to Jamaica and film us? We’re not trying to rush it, it’ll probably be out this year.

DD: So after this, what’s next?
SS: We’re doing a remix record done by friends in the uptempo scene. We also have a half finished Cee Lo song, a half finished De La Soul song, one song that didn’t make it onto the record with Del The Funky Homosapien and Lovefoxxx (CSS). I’m going to figure out a way to put out the B-sides.
We just got of the European tour, we’re going to start the US one in a week. The record wasn’t out yet in Europe but there’d be kids at the front of every show going ape shit and knowing every word. It was very gratifying.

Read interviews with N.A.S.A. video collaborators Splunny and Syd Garron.
NASA’s “Spirit of Apollo” out now.