My Rig

MY RIG: Joelistics

There’s not many artists who’ve pushed the boundaries of hip-hop within Australia quite like Joelistics has. In addition to founding Melbourne hip-hop collective TZU, he’s worked with everyone from Birdz and 360 through to Haiku Hands and Mo’Ju, the latter of whom he produced the breakout single ‘Native Tongue’ for in 2018.

On his latest project Film School, Joelistics once again shows off why he’s considered hot property in studios around the country. It’s a concept album recorded over the span of five years with a host of female collaborators from Asian descent, fusing dusty samples of ’70s pop with colourful psychedelic jams and spontaneous studio improvisations for an immersive release that explores Asia’s diverse musical diaspora. With the recent release of the project, we linked up with Joel for a look at some of the pieces of gear that popped up throughout the recording of Film School.

Yamaha CS-50 (AKA The Beast)

This is the first synth I ever bought in 2001 around the time I started TZU… AND IT STILL SURPRISES ME! It’s a scaled down version of the mighty CS-80 made famous by Vangelis on the Blade Runner soundtrack. It’s a polyphonic fourvoice beast with a gnarly low pass/ high pass filter, ring modulator and a sine wave that can be mixed in to provide extra bottom. It’s capable of weird pads, lush pads, horrific pads, basically it’s a pad machine but equally cool at leads and sound effects. The CS-50 is truly a thing of awe and beauty from the sound of the oscillators to the old school design. It weighs a ton and sounds fantastic and I think it made an appearance on every track on the Film School album in some form.

KNAS Ekdahl Moisteurizer

How to explain the Moisteurizer? It’s a reverb unit. It’s a filter bank. It’s an overdrive unit. I bought it in a shop called Schniedersladen in Berlin in 2005 not really knowing what it did other than go ‘booiiiing’ but it was love at first sight. The Moisteurizer is less of a reverb unit and more of a mangler. It has exposed reverb springs which can be played like an instrument. You can bang them, scrape them or run signals through it, which it routes through to a filter and LFO. Then, with some tweaking, it’s capable of doom or high squeal madness. I often crank the Moisteurizer and let it create weird soundscapes underneath the drums.

MPC Live

This thing has traveled with me all over the world. It’s got a battery life of at least six hours which means you can break it out on a long haul flight and make beats whilst annoying the person sitting next to you (have done). I traveled with the Live to Malaysia in 2017 and made the very first beat sketches that would become the Film School record whilst staying in KL. I bought a heap of old Canto Pop records and CDs from the ’70s and sampled the shit out of them.

Delta Lab Effectron

Such a dope delay rack unit. It has a crazy bright red infinite repeat button that works like a one second sampler, you punch it in and it loops out and you can play with the time and pitch. I used the Effectron extensively on the drums on ‘Samsara’ on the Film School record. My unit is actually broken, the delay mix knob is kaput so all I can do is extreme settings. That works for me though!

Roland SH5

The SH5 is a monophonic masterpiece, built like a tank from the year 1976, this thing has magic juice running in its circuitry. To be honest I never thought I’d own one, but I found one on Gumtree from a guy in Geelong who used it as a furniture piece – he called it his dinner party ‘conversation starter’ because it looks so Sci-Fi. The sound of the SH5 is thick and warm; the oscillators are beautiful and the routing of the signal is quite advanced for its age. The SH5 was used for basslines and leads all over the Film School record.

Roland Chorus Echo 501

I’ve collected delays since my earliest days of getting into music, and the queen of all delays would have to be the Roland Space Echo range. Not as dirty as the 201, the 501 has its own set of tricks including a sweet chorus, balanced ins and a super long delay time called sound on sound. This thing will nice up the sound on everything – synths, vocals, drums, bass. Plus, the spring reverb is gorgeous.

Korg Mono/Poly

The Mono/Poly is weirdo synth that’s capable of huge bass and crazy leads, but the real feature of joy is being able to split the voices, volumes, waveforms and octaves on an ARP pattern. You get these really strange and funky arps that have so much character. I bought this Mono/Poly in Tokyo, Japan at a synth shop called 5G. They packaged it up all nice and snug and I carried it on as hand luggage when I flew back to Melbourne. A bona-fide synth classic!

Joelistics Presents Film School is out now.