Interview with Kenan and Kray from Chances with Wolves
JB: Could you please introduce yourselves?
KLS: I’m Kray La Soul
KJ: I’m Kenan Juska
JB: What makes you happy?
KLS: Collective action.
KJ: Friends&Family
JB: How did you get started with Chances With Wolves?
KLS: It was by mistake. We never meant to make a career out of this thing. We had an opportunity to pitch a show to EAST VILLAGE RADIO and so we made a really good demo. That was 10 years ago. When we started I was worried that we would run out of records. But it hasn’t happened yet and I think the show is better now than ever before.
KJ: Yeah, it’s interesting, I mean I had been DJing for a while, but the show really gave us space to figure out what we could be.
JB: Who are some of your influences?
KLS: Stretch & Bobbito were the radio heroes. Used to obsessively tape their show when I was in High School. I’d stay up late to tape it and leave a 120 min. TDK in the radio deck – cause it had that mechanism where it would flip over and record on the other side while i was sleeping. Another huge influence on me were these cool girls I met when I was a kid. I loved them and I figured out I could impress them and make them happy by making them mixtapes of cool old records. It was always those tapes – and that spirit – I tried to emulate on the show.
KJ: All the lost and forgotten eccentric people who made beautiful music that no one cared about when they made it. The outsiders and never-weres.
https://soundcloud.com/chanceswithwolves/episode-340
JB: What projects are you currently working on?
AKL: Actual Magic is the name of our musical collaboration with Javelin. We take our old records and cut them up and the Javelin guys add their instrumentation. Sample based music.
KJ: We’re also developing a „TV show“ translation of Chances With Wolves, and doing some other production work.
JB: What do you do for a living?
AKL: Chances With Wolves
KJ: Chances With Wolves
JB: Where do you see yourselves in five years?
AKL: Chances With Wolves
KJ: Chances With Wolves
JB: Tell us something about your home, New York?
AKL: It’s a terrible place. Like, if you’ve never been – you should visit, but it’s really a hard place to live. I feel like I’ve been trying to escape my whole life and haven’t succeeded yet.
KJ: I actually live in Detroit now. NY is much nicer when you don’t live there full time. Its hard not to be jaded by all the changes in Brooklyn, and NY as a whole. There are still places that feel authentic, mostly Pizzerias. lol
Chances With Wolves really gave us space to figure out what we could be.
JB: How does a typical day in the lives of Kray & Kenan look like?
AKL: I spend most days looking for and listening to records. Which is a pretty good life. Poor but happy.
KJ: I have a lot of kids and I’m on airplanes a lot.
https://soundcloud.com/actualmagic/goldenvoyage
JB: What springs to mind for the following keywords?
Music — AKL: The best thing there is in life. The best form of human therapy. Makes you feel less alone.
KJ: LIFE
Role Model — AKL: The Real ones, who figured out a way to „do their thing“ with minimal compromise and survived.
KJ: My friends mostly.
Flow — AKL: Lots of different ways to have flow and have it sound good, but you gotta have good flow, if you’re gonna move the crowd.
KJ: Hustle and Flow is some real shit. Like there are periods where I’m Hustling so hard and others where things just flow.
Inspiration — AKL: The truly inspired is channeling some divine spirit. I call it god. But you can call it whatever you like. Tapping into some greater cosmic consciousness.
KJ: People say “the devil is in the details”, maybe that’s true. To me the divine goodness exists in the small moments, the mundane kindnesses we take fro granted.
Adventure — AKL: The most valuable thing in this world is the ability to travel. The means to do it, the right kind of passport. Everyone should have the means and ability to move around and see what there is to see on this planet before we all gotta go.
KJ: You gotta open yourself up to joy and pain, sunshine and rain (here we go!) Stand in the middle of the leaping flames and don’t shrink back.
