EVIAN CHRIST

During the final days of 2011, trainee teacher and football fanatic Joshua Leary uploaded a couple of tracks he’d recently made from his home in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire. Fusing elements of contemporary hip-hop with boundary pushing ambience, his Evian Christ project immediately caught the attention of various record labels and publications. His new Waterfall EP is out in March, and since his debut Kings and Them mixtape just two pieces of his work have been released: an abstract mix inspired by a derelict Soviet signal transmitter called the Duga-3, and I’m In It, a track from Kanye West’s platinum-selling, era-defining album Yeezus. Speaking to us via Skype from an apartment in New York, the 24-year-old producer broke down five specific moments in his brief but intense career so far.

December 2011: Uploading the First Tracks
“I initially uploaded them to send to a couple of friends of mine who were also producers, and they were the first proper tracks I’d made. It wasn’t even perceivable to me at the time that it could blow up, or that it’d be a thing that people outside that circle would listen to. I just started getting messages like ‘this magazine has posted this’. In hindsight, I didn’t really get what was going on, I didn’t get the whole online cycle of magazines and stuff. A bunch of people hit me up, but Robin (Carolan, Tri Angle Records owner) seemed the most genuine.”

February 2012: Tri Angle Records Showcase
“It was an incredibly quick process from making and uploading my first finished tracks to playing them in a fucking big trendy warehouse club in London. I’d only been to London once before that, and at that point, at least, I wasn’t very well travelled. The party was kind of weird. The snow that weekend was seven or eight inches deep, it was really busy and people couldn’t get in. There were loads of problems with the sound, loads of problems with the lights. It was really stressful. But after that show, I felt like I could deal with anything.”

June 2012: Completing University
“I’d been putting off music as much as I could because I was doing a PGCE course to be a primary school teacher. It’s a lot of work, like you do a full day’s unpaid teaching, then do all the coursework and lesson planning when you get home. So I literally had no time for shows, no time for press. But a few days after I finished, I went and did a full US tour with Purity Ring and I haven’t really had time to look back since. I do want to go back to teaching at some point though.”

January 2013: The Yeezus call
“That was really, really strange. And completely out of nowhere. One day Robin was like ‘I’ve just got a really weird e-mail’. One of the guys from G.O.O.D. Music had been in touch but they were being kind of cryptic. Robin met them in New York and they told him, on the low, that Kanye was working on this really electronic, experimental record, and that he’d be in the studio in two days time so I’d need some beats to send. So I stayed up for two full days and nights just making beats. I didn’t hear anything for a while and then one night, just as I was about to log off and go to bed, I got this message saying ‘Kanye wants you to come to Paris immediately, can you get on the next flight please?’ And that was that, I went over.”

Present: The Waterfall EP
“The EP is about to drop in March, it’s noiser and more banging than my previous stuff, and that’s just kind of where I’m at now. I’ve been going to a lot of noise and techno orientated shows, I saw Pete Swanson in London and that was a big influence on this EP. I went to see Vatican Shadow and that was inspiring in terms of abrasion, and allowing the volume to become something super physical. But I’ve been keeping the ambient elements in there. I’m trying to mesh something together which shouldn’t make sense.”