It's always great to see real hip-hop heads come together. Brooklyn's own Talib Kweli and Cincinatti's favorite producer Hi-Tek are back to business as Reflection Eternal for a true meeting of the minds. We had a chance to chat with the pair and discuss the significance of their partnership, and their upcoming album 'Revolutions Per Minute.' "It's really important that you have an album that displays one producer and maybe a group, at least one sound, and get that to the people, like those CDs that I used to buy.....to be able to listen to the whole CD," Hi-Tek told the BoomBox.
It doesn't hurt that Tek and Kweli have history and "chemistry." The duo are seamlessly touring and recording together ... no e-mail exchanged tracks and verses or separate studio sessions.
"A lot of people do songs by sending the e-mail and everything. But with us we have to actually get in the lab and make it happen. We been in Jamaica, we been in Cincinnati, Hi-Tek went to Phoenix, I didn't get to go to Phoenix but you know, like...wherever we need to travel to get it in is important. We're perfectionists, we nitpick at every little thing and we never feel like we actually finished the record," Kweli said.
Admitted purists, the pair are laboring over their upcoming project, which has yet to receive a hard release date, but at least they've settled on a title. It wasn't easy and Kweli and Tek spent a few radio interviews and press junkets bouncing tentative titles off people before settling on something as acute as their music.
"Revolution [per] minute is how you measure the speed of a record and how long it goes around. It's the idea of how many thoughts, how many ideas can you get by, or get across in one minute? How many revolutions can you start in one minute? And that's like our music, what we like to encourage," Kweli explained. "It's like that Tupac interview in jail when he was accused of shooting up cops and they asked Pac, 'Is your intention to promote something? Are you trying to get people to do something with your music?" And he said, "Yeah, to think." And that's something that very inspirational to us."
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