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Joelistics
Joel Ma, better known by his stage name Joelistics, is an Australian rapper, producer and multi-instrumentalist, who was a member of the Melbourne-based Australian hip hop group TZU and a solo artist on the Elefant Traks music label.
Ma was born and raised in Sydney, to a Chinese father and an Anglo-Celtic Australian mother. Ma attended Fort Street High School in the inner western Sydney suburb of Petersham, which was also attended by other Australian hip hop musicians, such as Adit Gauchan, producer for Horrorshow, and Kaho Cheung (aka Unkle Ho), producer for The Herd.
Ma said in October 2014 that he played in punk and hardcore bands during his adolescent years, and drums was his first instrument. His high school band "The Mechanical Bumcheeks" won the "Battle of the Bands" competition at Balmain Town Hall in Sydney.
After travelling to Melbourne, Ma formed TZU with Paso Bionic of Curse Ov Dialect and members of Pan in 2002. During their years of activity, they released four studio albums under Liberation Music before disbanding in 2013.
Under his MC name "Joelistics", Ma signed with Sydney-based Australian hip hop label Elefant Traks for the release of his first solo album Voyager. Released in 2011, Ma collaborated with Ella Thompson (Oz Soul Collective, Axolotl), Dustin Mclean (Moon Zero studios) and Natalie Pa'apa'a (Blue King Brown) for the recording of the album. Ma explained following the release of Voyager that the album is influenced by his travels to locations such as Berlin, France and Bangkok; where he wrote sections of two songs—"All the Rebels" and "Sooner or Later":
There is a hotel near Sukhumvit Rd called The Atlanta and it's my favourite hotel in all the world ... and in the marbled foyer they provide letter writing rooms for guests. I set up my laptop in one of these rooms and cooked up "All the Rebels" ... I stumbled across the beat [for "Sooner or Later"] in my last few days before I returned to Australia, and the verses about travelling tumbled out while I was in transit from Thailand back to Oz. They were mostly written at Suvarnabhumi Airport in a sleep-deprived, half-excited, half-delirious state.
Ma's second solo album Blue Volume was released in mid-2014, again on the Elefant Traks label, and the musician explained in a June 2014 interview that while Voyager was "a largely positive record", the follow-up is "about breaking up and being quite caught up in the frustrations of certain things, certain emotions and the loss of identity." Ma further explains that the Australian social climate had changed after he returned from travelling in Germany and Spain, and he proceeded to channel feelings of frustration and anger into the creation of Blue Volume, an album that he describes as "uncomfortable". Between the two albums, Ma also experienced the end of a long-term relationship with his former partner and the death of a close friend:
... I experienced some loss that I hadn't really touched before. And people who were close to me are no longer there or no longer close to me ... the things that I think are worth fighting for and believe in, I think, are still the same ... Maybe, if anything, I've got more doubts.
Joelistics
Joel Ma, better known by his stage name Joelistics, is an Australian rapper, producer and multi-instrumentalist, who was a member of the Melbourne-based Australian hip hop group TZU and a solo artist on the Elefant Traks music label.
Ma was born and raised in Sydney, to a Chinese father and an Anglo-Celtic Australian mother. Ma attended Fort Street High School in the inner western Sydney suburb of Petersham, which was also attended by other Australian hip hop musicians, such as Adit Gauchan, producer for Horrorshow, and Kaho Cheung (aka Unkle Ho), producer for The Herd.
Ma said in October 2014 that he played in punk and hardcore bands during his adolescent years, and drums was his first instrument. His high school band "The Mechanical Bumcheeks" won the "Battle of the Bands" competition at Balmain Town Hall in Sydney.
After travelling to Melbourne, Ma formed TZU with Paso Bionic of Curse Ov Dialect and members of Pan in 2002. During their years of activity, they released four studio albums under Liberation Music before disbanding in 2013.
Under his MC name "Joelistics", Ma signed with Sydney-based Australian hip hop label Elefant Traks for the release of his first solo album Voyager. Released in 2011, Ma collaborated with Ella Thompson (Oz Soul Collective, Axolotl), Dustin Mclean (Moon Zero studios) and Natalie Pa'apa'a (Blue King Brown) for the recording of the album. Ma explained following the release of Voyager that the album is influenced by his travels to locations such as Berlin, France and Bangkok; where he wrote sections of two songs—"All the Rebels" and "Sooner or Later":
There is a hotel near Sukhumvit Rd called The Atlanta and it's my favourite hotel in all the world ... and in the marbled foyer they provide letter writing rooms for guests. I set up my laptop in one of these rooms and cooked up "All the Rebels" ... I stumbled across the beat [for "Sooner or Later"] in my last few days before I returned to Australia, and the verses about travelling tumbled out while I was in transit from Thailand back to Oz. They were mostly written at Suvarnabhumi Airport in a sleep-deprived, half-excited, half-delirious state.
Ma's second solo album Blue Volume was released in mid-2014, again on the Elefant Traks label, and the musician explained in a June 2014 interview that while Voyager was "a largely positive record", the follow-up is "about breaking up and being quite caught up in the frustrations of certain things, certain emotions and the loss of identity." Ma further explains that the Australian social climate had changed after he returned from travelling in Germany and Spain, and he proceeded to channel feelings of frustration and anger into the creation of Blue Volume, an album that he describes as "uncomfortable". Between the two albums, Ma also experienced the end of a long-term relationship with his former partner and the death of a close friend:
... I experienced some loss that I hadn't really touched before. And people who were close to me are no longer there or no longer close to me ... the things that I think are worth fighting for and believe in, I think, are still the same ... Maybe, if anything, I've got more doubts.