Danger! High Voltage!

Long before he lovingly mashed together The Beatles' The White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album into The Grey Album and became the go-to producer of the last decade or so, Brian Burton aka Danger Mouse was just another dude making beats and producing bands in a bedroom.

“It was a minute ago,” Electric Guest frontman Asa Taccone says of when the idea for starting Electric Guest came together. “I was in college and I would call my brother and just play him songs of mine over the phone. One day he was like, 'Oh, I have a friend over here that does music, you should play him one of your songs over the phone,' and so he put Brian on the phone – you know, Danger Mouse. And you know this was way before The Grey Album or anything with the Gorillaz or any of that stuff, but he had done some underground hip hop and stuff. He said he thought it was cool and I should send him some more stuff, so I did. He would send me stuff back, and we just kinda kept doing that until I finished school.”

“He was moving out of this house in LA,” Taccone continues, “with like a whole bunch of other artsy people in it and he said that since he was moving out, I should move in. So I ended up moving into his old room there and I just made music and wrote songs for years. He kinda mentored me for – wow, I dunno, until this very day to be honest. I still call him all the time and ask him stuff. About two years ago he asked me if he could produce the album.”

It's not surprising that Burton and Taccone have formed such a close bond over music, especially when you reflect on Burton's career as Danger Mouse and listen to Electric Guest's Mondo. Like Danger Mouse's undeniably eclectic output, the record spans genres while still retaining a real sense of identity about what the band should sound like. There are tracks that could be lifted from the golden era of Motown next to psyched-out numbers and straight-up guitar pop, and lurking somewhere beneath the surface is the subtle influence of hip hop production.

“I actually used to produce a lot of hip hop,” Taccone confirms. “I kind of got weaned off that and just really got into songwriting, and then I was just in LA and I was writing songs for other people. I always loved doing my own stuff and then this project ended up having some hip hop elements. Like, the way some of the drums are programmed were done in a hip hop kind of way, but for the majority of it, it's more about the songwriting.”

When asked if he thinks he'll ever get back into hip hop, Taccone sounds really unsure, and says that he still really wants to keep exploring songwriting.

“But I actually have this chunk of songs,” he starts to sound like he is revisiting the idea on the spot, “that I haven't played to anybody but Brian, and Brian wants to use some of it on the next Electric Guest album but I feel like it's for something different. It's super-psychedelic lo-fi hip hop, and I sort of keep it just in case I meet someone, the right rapper who might be able to do something cool with it. But I don't know.”

“I grew up listening to a lot of '90s hip hop,. and the best part about that shit for me was the way that hip hop artists would find the most emotive part of a song and then sample it. That's what hip hop was about for me; finding the most emotional part of a song and then looping it. It ends up giving you this sweet tooth for the very best parts of a song and then figuring out how to write songs like that.”

Taccone is not going to be short of material for the next Electric Guest album, at least.

“I was just looking at my little library of shit today,” he says with the same modesty with which he delivers even the most name-dropping of anecdotes, “and probably in terms of like fleshed-out songs, there's over 100. But there's also about 400 ideas of stuff. I've got a ton of shit! And I'm always writing for other people as well as myself.”

Electric Guest themselves have only been playing together as a live unit for little more than a year, with drummer Matthew Compton as the only other official member. To flesh out the songs on stage, Taccone has recruited the brothers Dahlhoff – Todd and Tory –on keyboards and bass.

“I met Matt after I'd been living in LA for about a year and I heard him playing drums downstairs in the house I had moved into. There was like a proper studio in the basement and he was coming around to record drums for some other kid. I heard him playing for a couple of months down there and he was just amazing. I would consistently ask him to come and play drums or guitar on stuff and he was the only person ever who would always just come over and play on my stuff, so when we were doing the record I asked him to be a part of it because it just felt right.

“The two brothers who play with us live are super-close friends,” Taccone continues. “For so many years the band was just this project with me playing in my room, but in the future I'd really like to get those guys in to play some parts when we record. I don't know if it will ever be like a whole band recording thing, but who knows?”

As he rattles off the many places that the band have been touring during the last few weeks, it seems that the penny drops for Taccone that he's sure gonna be spending a large chunk of the next couple of years at least on the road.

“Yeah, it's funny, I just had that realisation, like 'Damn!'” he laughs. “This shit is actually my life now. Because this is really my first band, I've never, ever done it. For all the other guys, and for most of the people in other bands I meet while we're travelling, they've been touring their whole life or have been around the world a few times and stuff. I'm the only one in the group that's kind of new to everything. Pretty much every day I'm doing something that I've never done before.”