By Helen Chen

The Tortoise and the Crow Tour is the promotional tour of Northern Californian underground / indie hip hop rapper The Grouch and long time partner hip hop producer Eligh. The duo shines on this new track from their album, ed click note the smooth and melancholic instrumental of Eligh with the classically clean and lyrical mastery of The Grouch.

Support on the tour comes from Pigeon John, physician DJ Fresh and Eliot Lipp. The tour comes to Boston on March 18th at The Middle East downstairs – tickets here.

Brooklyn based hip hop to electronic music producer Eliot Lipp spoke to us about the diverse array of artistic influences that come together to inspire his electronic work – some of which may surprise you:

AP: So why are you touring with The Grouch & Eligh? Do you plan on doing a collaboration with them, cure like Pretty Lights did?

E: No, we’re not collaborating or anything but I’ve been fans of their music for a long time.

AP: So what are your upcoming projects?

E: I’m putting out another album, well I haven’t released it yet but I’m working on a new album now.

AP: What’s the theme?

E: It’s funkier I guess, it’s more there’s a lot more guitar and some live percussion and stuff.

AP: We’ve been listening to the new stuff you’ve released, we’ve been getting more of a hip hop vibe than what was on previous albums. I know you began as a hip hop producer so are you trying to kind of go back?

E: No, not consciously I’m not making any real efforts to go any direction, whenever I make a new track I usually try to see with what I’m dealing with that day. You know what I mean? There are so many genres that I like – I like techno, electro, hiphop and all kinds of stuff.

AP: What inspired you to get into electronic music?

E: Well originally when I started out I was just making beats for rappers and stuff, and then I started playing live more and playing clubs and trying to get people to dance, and it just got me more into club music in general.

AP: So when you’re recording or making new beats is there a process that you do or anything, is it that you find samples that you’re interested in and it gets you going?

E: It usually starts with a sample, once I find a cool loop I try adding to it, you know adding drums and guitar and a baseline.

AP: What are some of the cooler more eccentric samples that you’ve used before or have inspired you?

E: Well lately it’s been all classical music and classical records, I look for parts with open strings and piano and I just take little pieces pieces here and there. And then I’m working in depending on what key the song is in or what the vibe is that I want, I’ll go find a sample that works. There’s a lot of classical samples, lots of strings and pianos.

AP: That’s really cool, what kind of composers and what time period exactly?

E: Late 1800s, early 1800s. I like Reiner, Bartok, Dvorak, I’m really into Dovrak and Tchaikovsky. I think there’s something so cool about the composer Dvorak because he came out to the US and was here for a while, he was inspired by the spirituals of early blues and he’s a composer, so it’s really neat to hear the stuff that he made after being inspired by music from the US, to me at least.

AP: So have you had any classical music training before, did you take any theory or piano training or stuff like that?

E: I took a few piano lessons in September and October, but I haven’t found a teacher – I’ve pretty much taught myself, looking things up on Wikipedia and stuff [laughs]

AP: Are there any new genres of electronic music that you’re into at the moment, I know this is kind of faraway from classically influenced stuff but I know the trap music scene is getting a lot bigger.

E: I think what’s really cool right now is what’s happening with hip hop, the way that hip hop has emerged with EDM, but also the underground hip hop stuff is really opening up, like what Aesop Rock and Pigeon John and Eligh are up to – they are doing really folksy stuff, like acoustic guitars. It’s really interesting to see…I felt for a long time that underground hip hop got very homogeonized and predictable, but lately people have been really experimenting and I think that’s awesome.

AP: Being on tour do you collaborate with them or what drew you to work with them or tour together?

E: I think they were thinking the same way I was, I wanted to get some crossover going I didn’t just want to tour with another DJ or another electronic producer and they are looking to broaden their horizons as well and not just tour with other hip hop acts. I love doing that, I love touring with bands and singers and other types of artists in the past. It’s not the first time I’ve toured with a hip hop act too, I like that, I like that crossover to happen.

AP: So what inspired you to put out the album of ‘Shark Wolf Rabbit and Snake?’ I think that animal theme is interesting…I feel like ‘The Shark’ is like the electronic take of a shark.

E: [laughs] First I saw the artwork for the cover and I had a bunch of songs that I was working on and I was at a friend of mine’s (Daniel St. George) house and he had a stack of drawings and I saw that drawing and I was like oh my god that’s my album cover, it clicked when I saw it, that’s exactly what I want my album to look like. I had these four interludes that I decided to name shark, wolf, rabbit and snake and each of them were a minute long, maybe a little less than that, they were just short segways between the song and I brought it to Derrick (Pretty Lights), he’s the one who put the record on his label and when I showed him the album he said you should make those into full songs or just little interludes. So that gave me an opportunity to really focus in on the shark and the wolf, to give those songs characteristics.

AP: Do you follow art as well, like do you look for other illustrations and drawings in your spare time?

E: Yeah, I’m a painter and I went to school to study painting and that’s what I thought I was going to do before I started taking music so seriously, I was just about art. I go to museums all the time and I go to a lot of art openings and galleries and most of my friends are artists.

AP: So I know you’re from Brooklyn, are you excited to be back on the east coast?

E: I love touring on the east coast, all the cities are so close together and every city that I go to is so amazing and so rich, and there’s so much to see and so much to do.

AP: Yeah, they’re considerably closer than the cities on the west coast.

E: Yeah touring the west coast sucks because you have to drive like a lot of hours between every town.

AP: Any exciting Saint Patrick’s day plans?

E: No, on Saint Patrick’s Day I’ll be on a red eye flight to Boston so I’ll be missing it all together.

AP: Well it’s Boston, so we’ll try to keep it going one more day – I think we can manage.