Ruby Yacht does not dock for winter. The artist-owned label best known as the vehicle for all of rapper Milo’s latest releases is gearing up for the November 24 shipping of Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day by label co-founder s.al (fka Safari Al). With this new vinyl/tape/digital offering upon the masthead, the Yacht’s deckhands reached out to see if Tiny Mix Tapes would be up to premiere the video for Little Man’s first single, “King Size,” and conduct a mini-interview to go along with it. Both follow. Pre-order the album here.
Your man tells me you’re now s.al not Safari Al — are you officially “off” safari? Follow-up questions: what are your feelings on the S.Carter mixtape, and if I say “Sal,” who do you think of?
Yeah, I truncated it. It’s still in there, just abbreviated. The “safari” (the exploration) is more internal now. Didn’t rele bump that tape. I think of “extra cheese is 2 dollahs” re: Do The Right Thing.
Sorry, that was my pithy way of trying to figure out if you’re expecting to be called S-dot-Al or Sal.
LOL now I get ya. It’s a good consideration. I read it as “Sal” but there’s somethin about “S-Dot.”
The press release says “a mistakenly broken loop on ‘King Size’ is work flow, the steady rhythm of carpentry.” If that’s so, then to paraphrase Tom Waits, what are you building in there? Which is to say, if “King Size” is a creepy garage in the bucolic community that is Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day, what’s going on inside of it that has the neighbors stirring?
I’m building the death scene in there. The set pieces. “King Size” is not the actual death but the recollection of a previous death. By recalling something one might awaken it. In that way it is also a premonition. The Hagakure basically instructs to rehearse your death daily.
This is prep work. But it is lost on many people that the “prep work” can constitute the majority of total labor for a given task. Grow comfortable, familiar w the idea of personal death. Prepare yourself mentally. And you will be more prepared to let things die. My dad has given me one piece of advice that governs my style and aligns w this mode of thought: When the painting is done, let it go… and it’s finished sooner than you think.
What inspired you to use Kihachiro Kawamoto’s Shisha No Sho for the video?
I rented Shisha No Sho (The Book of the Dead) from the Milwaukee Public Library just for a weeknite inspo flick and was completely floored by its intricacy.
I’ve been working on a SUPERCUT of the movie since then. It’s a 30min visual score to the album. So Ive condensed, resequenced, and re-subtitled the lot of it. Got maybe 4 left minutes to finish in this next week. The “King Size” video is excerpted from this 30min SUPERCUT.
I chose this film because of its ability to communicate the metaphor of personal death and acceptance thereof.
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