The Ghost Who Raps

Jeremy Koren has just finished the kind of run that INXS or Midnight Oil might have done in the early '80s – tagging along with Seth Sentry, Mantra and crew, taking in Australia's many expansive highways, stopping off roughly every second day to put on a show for punters in places where Friday night entertainment is usually relegated to blockies and maybe a slab in the backyard.

“It was really a lot of fun, and the fact that it was regional meant that there was a lot of funny shit!” he says without divulging. “Being the support act, you can sort of kick back even more.”

While there may be less pressure being the support artist, he's about to flip that up by taking on his own headline tour, albeit a bit further from the bush. He's promoting The Elixir EP, a new project which has seen the culmination of his artistic pursuits come together for the first time in such a personal way. Koren has recently seen much success doing graphic art for heaps of rappers including the aforementioned Sentry and Mantra, and his work has gone even further in video form. The self-taught filmmaker has recently directed the videos for Sentry's massive hits Dear Science and Float Away – both humourous and meticulously stylised.

“The fact that I'm doing film clips for other artists at the time of putting out the EP and did the artwork – which is all the comic art referencing Tin Tin – it felt like it was a time in which all of those things were coming together,” he says. “I was able to fully realise the Grey Ghost thing in a visual and sonic way. It's a nice feeling when you can 100 per cent represent yourself and you don't have to tell other people how you want to be represented. I've also got a great team around me, my cinematographer and producer and my management – it's not like I'm out there completely on my own in the dark.”

He's quick to point out that he has not made a straight-up hip hop record. Even in the live sense he uses a live band to make it all work properly. He says that the diversity of hip hop in Australia means even in rural Australia people are not shocked by what he does.

“I'm doing my weird kinda electro rock with post-punk references and really some deeper electronic stuff that's quite odd, and I'm up there looking all weird and they love it!” he laughs. “If that had been even five years ago, I think I would have just been beaten up and chased out of town, so for me it's an exciting time.”