Having worked so hard to ensure that his label found its feet, Ciecmate has finally got around to releasing his debut solo album, Game Over. While many may be familiar with his work as part of the Hospice Crew, he is proud that he has not approached the music industry in a similar vein to many of his contemporaries. “I have never issued an official solo album before. I have been doing this whole music thing for a fair long time now, so out of every artist I know in Australia, usually there will be a solo album first then some crew stuff. But I did it the other way around. I have just always been into doing more crew stuff, I don’t know why.”
“Doing crew albums is a good one as it is always easier to vibe off what other people are thinking. Also, it is a lot harder to be as self-conscious about your performance.” Though it is not fear which has held him back, he reveals that there is a vulnerability to stepping out of the shadows. “When you are doing something 100 percent solo, you might get sick of the sound of your own voice. You are hearing it over and over again.”
But the desire to have his own voice eventually won over, with Ciecmate realizing he had to find a way to balance his many roles. “I was chipping away at it for a while, but I have a few things to deal with. I am running a label, the label which is putting it out, Broken Teeth Entertainment, so there are always other artists who we have to deal with who have releases coming up. So it just ended up being one of those things where I was working on my album for a while and I decided to take my time with the tracks until I was happy with it. All the other stuff, artists on the label would bring stuff to me and they would set a date, then we would focus on getting their stuff out. Whereas this, I just let it sit there till I could give it a final push so it was done.”
In the end, Ciecmate called upon his childhood passion, chess, to help him put everything into its right place. “It helps you strategize and look towards your goal and focus on it. Admittedly I haven’t been playing too much chess these past few years. Most of my friends and my crew don’t have an interest. People are more into computers games these days, but I do still play a few games.” While he may have grown out of the game, he openly admits that the strategy game has helped him out in many respects both personal and professional. “When I was younger I used to play heaps of chess and that definitely helped structure the way I think about lots of shit. In general, understanding that game has helped me to get a grasp on the way I do things in the industry.”
Though he struggled to find the time to focus solely on his own output, he reveals that working on your own material is in many ways far more complicated than helping another artist out. “Because I produce too, most of my album, I have heard everything from the first high hat to the last kick drum, as well as writing every lyric. I have done all the recording, mixing and mastering, so by the time it is ready, I hear it and it is not fresh to me. That is the thing with the album, I had to get it done and have it sitting there almost long enough for me to forget about it, so that when I put it out, it feels fresh to me again.”
