Professor Elemental - Profile

  by Fiona Hutchings

published: 26 / 11 / 2022

Professor Elemental is a busy chap hop star. Always a joy to chat to, he gifts me the perfect description of a life he doesn’t quite believe he’s living. His always busy diary has taken him from a travellers’ rave to weddings via a poetry reading in a church to Anti-Christ- a dark techno fetish night. It is quite a thing, he tells me, to instigate a conga line in a full-on fetish club. But then wearing PVC and latex has never precluded a sense of humour (or excellent music taste.). So yes, the Professor and his orangutang butler/confidante Geoffrey never seem to know where they’ll end up next. “Sometimes I feel like I’m living a bizarre sort of Quantum Leap life” he muses. So, what’s next? First up we have a new EP, hopefully coming out on 1st December 2022. This is a collaboration between our Professor and Victor and The Bully. Together they have brewed up ‘Timebomb’. I am not overly familiar with this eclectic guitar driven swing trio. The professor tells me that “the new EP with Victor Ghastly (of Steampunk group Victor and the Bully) is a mashup of Electroswing, Steampunk and Hip Hop. We've experimented with some of our existing tracks and made some more weird and wonderful new ones. It's out in November, along with a new video. We're very excited to share it with the world.” It’s something a bit out of the ordinary then? Victor and the Bully don’t sound like hip hop is a usual part of their repertoire. Professor E replies that he lives by the famous Bowie quote; ‘Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don't feel your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.’ We agree this is an excellent code to live a life by. Later I check out the band, fall in love with the seasonally appropriate Trick or Treat and every other track of theirs I can find. I add them to my ‘bands to see live’ list and go back to impatiently waiting for the promised EP to arrive in my inbox. And so to Professor Elemental and Victor Ghastly’s ‘Timebomb’ EP. Opener ‘Everything Stops For Tea’ sounds like the Professor in his tea quaffing happy place. ’Rum and Coke’, meanwhile, sounds the soundtrack to a steampunk tiki bar on a desert island. ’Showstopper 2’ is a remix of last year’s ‘Show Stopper’ by the Prof, and makes it even more of an earworm. It captures that bit of every gig when the artist and audience are on a total high and it’s the best night ever. Then adds a bit of what happens after the fourth encore. ’Toast Remix’ is about the bread-based foodstuff, but more violent than you might expect. ‘When The Fun Comes Back!’ Is the most upbeat taking apart the misery of lockdown and the aftermath. Alongside events, conventions and his favourite Yule Ball, the Professor is also working on the Ape Quest Game. Already fully funded on Kickstarter, he laughs as he describes including in the game a multiverse with lots of different professors, “to avoid it being only populated with middle aged dads like me!” One of the stretch goals of the campaign is a special EP which will be exclusive to backers. Having already made one album called Ape Quest, this special collection allows him to time travel to come periods he had to miss out last time. The game is hopefully going to be out early 2023. There’s also a music-meets-science project hopefully coming to fruition next year. It’s a real departure even by Professor Elementals eclectic standards. Working with neuroscientist Sarah Scott, he is putting together an EP that looks at the impact on the brain of laughter. Lord knows there’s been plenty of studies on how trauma and difficulties impact the brain, this is much more than turning a frown upside down. Regular readers already know that brains are a particular interest of mine since my own brain medically misbehaves every now and again. Currently slated for release in 2023, this is another one I can’t wait to hear. For now though keep up with all things Elemental via his Website https://professorelemental.com/home socials and also on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/join/professorelemental where you can support him from as little as £1 a month

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