Yesterday, Jogai Bhatt talked with the people behind creative collective Nah Zone. Today, she talks with one of its closest musical collaborators, Church & AP.

Church & AP is a rap duo comprised of Elijah Manu (Church), Nah Zone’s head writer, and Albert Purcell,  the younger brother of Nah Zone’s founding director Jonique Purcell. The 17 and 18-year-old duo are making waves in Auckland, with the former receiving acclaim from the likes of David Dallas and SWIDT after a standout 64 Bars performance. Now they’ve released their debut project Thorough Bread – a nine-track EP chronicling their everyday observations of clout, societal pressures, tall poppy syndrome, and life in Aotearoa.

How did the EP come together?

Elijah: Thorough Bread was never really meant to be a project. A lot of it just came out of catharsis. We didn’t have a cool name for ourselves. We’re not SWIDT, you know. We’re just Church & AP. That’s us. We were just making songs together, and we saw other people were releasing joint projects and we just figured, we can do that. We’d only really planned to do this one thing, but then we started doing live shows, people started associating us more as a duo, the chemistry worked and everything just fell into place. Now we just run with it.

At what point did you realise you worked better as a duo?

Albert Purcell: It was around when we started getting more gigs together, maybe December last year. It was Let Me Loose at Whammy, that was the first time we were Church & AP.

Elijah: I begged Rizvan for a spot and he was like, ‘You should come with your bro from the Introvert video’, which was a song we’d done a long time ago. I was like, ‘Sweet, we’ll be Church X AP’. Then I was like, ‘Yo, Albert, I put us down as Church X AP’, and he goes, ‘Nah, that’s Eno X Dirty, change it!’ So that’s how Church & AP became a thing.

Albert: We were trying to come up with a name. One of them was gonna be “Clap”.

Elijah: But then clap’s chlamydia so it didn’t work. Anyway, people notice us as Church & AP now, it’s nice.

How do you guys know each other?

Albert: Year nine. I was talking to my mate about Chance the Rapper, and then this guy just came out of nowhere and was like, ‘Yo, I heard that project as well’. It was his first day at MAGS too, and I was just like, ‘Eh, who are you?’ Then I saw him at school rapping, he did a lot of freestyle battles.

Elijah: I was just that guy who would love to go somewhere and show off. I was really terrible back in the day, but still, that was me for a long time. Before people took me seriously, which was only like a couple weeks ago, I was always just that guy.

Thorough Bread is a great showcase of local talent, you’ve got Diggy Dupe on there, you’ve got a Jinzo feature, you’ve got Rizvan and MeloDownz. There’s also Baccyard and Shallows on production. What’s it like working with those guys?

Elijah: They’re cool. Working with them came along all quite naturally. The first song we ever made for the tape was Alladat.

Albert: That was after we dropped ‘Introvert’, then Baccyard commented on that and was like, ‘Keen to work’.

Elijah: The Alladat beat was one he’d posted months ago, and that was the one we knew we wanted, so that song came along really quickly. It was done by September, and we just held on to it. Then Baccyard was like, ‘I’ll make some beats for you guys, what do you want?’ So I just asked him to make a random beat with a certain sample and that ended up being ‘Call It Clout’. Then with Shallows, we met him at the Te Atatu community centre. Turns out he went to school with my sister. So many random connections.

Albert: And Melo and Rizvan were through the Wesley Community Centre.

Elijah: They were just like our mentors at the time.

Albert: And Jinzo I just came across through Soundcloud.

Elijah: But I met Jinzo through DNP. DNP was supposed to meet Jinzo at Auckland City Limits in 2016, but he ended up meeting me, which is really weird because we all know each other now.

Albert: I was there trying to sneak in, g.

Elijah: We were all there, we were all in the vicinity. None of us were working together, but you know Kendrick, he just brings people together. We got to talking and by the end of the show we just had so much in common, so we added each other on Facebook and then he was like, ‘Yo, one of my mates Jinzo, he raps, here’s this video I did for him’. So we’d known about him for ages, but we only properly met him in person at the Nah Zone pre-party. Prior to that it was all over the internet – the beat was sent over the internet, the verse was sent over the internet, the whole song was just made online.

It was a real natural process of us being like, ‘Hey, we like your music, do you wanna jump on a song or something?’ The Rizvan song, part two to ‘Bills’, was just because we loved ‘Bills’ and that was our favourite Rizvan song. So I just asked Rizvan, like, ‘Can we flip it?’ And we were gonna just rap over the same instrumental but the version he sent didn’t have any drums. He was like, ‘Sorry, bro’, and so we got Shallows just to reproduce it, and he did his thing.

Elijah, you got major recognition through 64 Bars. What’s it like getting that recognition from industry heavyweights like David Dallas and SWIDT?

Elijah: It’s cool because these guys just as excited as we are. They’re excited to see what we’re doing, and we’re just excited to do it. It’s an awesome feeling to get those kinda words of affirmation, when they say stuff like, ‘Watch out for Church & AP, they’re gonna be the next big thing.’ It was only a year ago that we didn’t know any of them, we were just fans, but now it’s at that point where they’re playing really big roles in mentoring us. In 2017, we didn’t release a lot of music, we just sat and waited and soaked up all the knowledge we could, and this year we’re finally executing all those plans. So it’s been a process, and it’s still going, but now we’re just a bit more in the public eye which is always cool. And to have that kind of support from those guys, it’s almost like a verification sticker, like, this guy’s official. If David Dallas says he’s cool, then he’s cool.

It was mean seeing that Sniffers profile of you, especially with the 64 Bars parallel between you saying you were inspired by Abdul Kay, and Abdul saying he was inspired by the person before him. Kind of reminds you how instrumental something like 64 Bars can be in fostering a new generation of talent.

Elijah: We were all inspired by Abdul. Albert knew him just by living around him, and going to school with his brother. Abdul came up as Facebook famous, man. We all knew him.

Albert: Then he put out that rapping video and that was part of our motivation as well.

Elijah: We were like, ‘Yo, he’s actually doing it’, then when we saw the 64 Bars we were like ‘Yooooo, he’s for real doing it’. I remember I messaged him after that came out – it’s so cringe looking at it now – I was like, ‘Hey, man. How do you get on 64 Bars? Who do I send my music to?’ That was the kinda impact those guys had on us.

I know people always mention your ages in these things but I think it’s important to note in the context of this EP because you guys are so young, but you’re speaking on some quite poignant issues. One that gets in me particular is ‘Bill$ Pt.2’ – you’re saying you don’t want fame or pay, you just want do enough to be able to provide. Can you touch a bit on that track?

Elijah: That was probably the most important verse that I wrote.

Albert: Definitely, you didn’t wanna mess that up, especially with Rizvan letting us remix that track.

Elijah: We made sure that we spoke on something that was important, so we kind of flipped the idea of Bills and added to what Rizvan had put on the original song.

Albert: Because that’s from Rizvan’s perspective, and he’s much older than us.

Elijah: He’s working and he’s doing the nine-to-five, and we’re seeing our family do it. We’re seeing our parents do it. It’s a pretty emotional subject for me in all honesty, when I played it for my mum, she cried. That’s how you know it’s real. I was just commenting on the things that were around me, and it was just a small line about my mum having bills and not knowing what would come next. Just constantly having to wait on the grace of God. Like, yeah, we wanna rap and we wanna do all these things, but at the end of the day, it comes down to family and trying to provide. It was a very personal thing for both of us. It ended up being a long prayer.

Albert: He sent his verse first, which had the ‘Dear heavenly father’ line at the beginning.

Elijah: And Albert’s verse finishes with ‘Amen’. A lot of people don’t really catch that, but it’s just one big prayer. I hope people look at the tape and know there’s a bit more substance there.

Another one that gets me is ‘Tall Poppy’. I remember talking to SWIDT at the VNZMAs last year about this whole obsession we have with tall poppy syndrome, and they were like, ‘We work so hard all the time, why shouldn’t we celebrate?’ Do you think we’re seeing a kind of pendulum shift happening culturally?

Elijah: Yeah, and it’s something that Nah Zone is definitely helping with. Giving that confidence back to the artists. For us it was like, why should you be shunned for being young and putting yourself out there? People will support you, but then when you put yourself out there they’ll be like, ‘This guy’s cocky’ or ‘He thinks he’s the man.’

Albert: Especially being in school, eh.

Elijah: Especially in school. They’ll just be like, ‘This guy’s wack’.

Do you think you’re more susceptible to that criticism being brown? Because I know for me culturally, humility is kind of instilled in us from a young age.

Elijah: Definitely. You’ll still get roasted for being a rapper. I think especially within the Pacific Island community, it’s within that culture to bring people down, and it’s not even a negative thing, it’s just about how you should act or how you should be perceived by people. Albert’s a bit more humble than I am, but when you’re out here just being unapologetic, people feel a certain type of way about it. It’s understandable, but it’s also something that we both felt like we needed to speak on.

What’s next for Church & AP?

Albert: Just keep it going.

Elijah: A lot of people care about us now. You can’t gauge the type of people that listen to you until after the fact, but just seeing that there are people listening to what we have to say, that just motivates us to keep going. We have a lot more coming, like two or three projects before the end of the year. Time to get more shows.

Albert: Time to get more money.

Elijah: Yeah I didn’t wanna say it, but get more money.

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Adam Goodall talks to the developers of Kiwi game Grabity about soccer cars, flailing swords and big honking machines.

I’m playing Grabity online and I’m getting absolutely caned by this person named Chinnaru. They’re showing up in every other game and wrecking my shop, boosting over to my side of the map and firing off crates like they’re homing missiles. I’m suffering, I can’t get above third place, and Chinnaru’s taunting me. “You can press enter to talk,” they message me in-game, somehow intuiting that I’m new to this whole thing. I bring this up with programmer Steve Salmond and artist Moritz Schlitter. “Chinnaru’s a monster,” Steve laughs. “He’s just merciless.”

Steve and Moritz, two thirds of New Zealand studio Ninja Thumbs, tell me I shouldn’t feel so bad about my lacklustre performance. Chinnaru’s a die-hard: he’s been around the game since Grabity’s beta-testing stage late last year and is a moderator on the game’s dedicated Discord channel. “He’s probably been our most hardcore player,” Steve says. Moritz laughs and adds, “He destroys us, if that makes you feel any better.” It absolutely does.

To be fair to Chinnaru, Grabity’s plenty challenging without him. Set up in the side-scrolling wide-shot style of Smash Bros and Brawlhalla, you and up to three other players play bulky little robots with Half-Life 2-style gravity guns. You use those guns to hoover up crates and fire them at everyone else.

Grabity moves at a breakneck pace, and yet it demands precision. Even for casual players, if you’re not constantly building speed, if you’re not constantly aware of where crates are dropping and people are fighting and getting to those places fast, you’re not winning. It’s an adrenaline shot of agile twin-stick platforming in a genre largely defined by slower, combo-driven brawling.

I talked to Steve and Moritz about the games and other things that inspired them to create Grabity.

Moritz: I came to New Zealand about nine years ago, maybe ten now. I went to high school here for a bit, and the good thing about high schools here in New Zealand is that they actually promote arts a bit more than they do in Germany. In Germany, I had no angle on what I was going to do after school because it was quite academic. It’s more stressful in that way.

Anyway, I found my way to art, went to Media Design School to do an orientation course and then taught myself to make 3D art. Then, two jobs later, I landed at Outsmart [Games, the Auckland-based studio behind SmallWorlds] and that’s where I met Steve.

Steve: I’m a little bit older than Moritz, and I came up with Doom and Quake and those kinds of games. I’m a real shooter buff. So I sort of missed out on the whole console thing until I landed at Outsmart Games. They were my introduction to couch gaming.

Moritz: [The time w]hen we started working on the game more intensely was during the time that we played Rocket League. What I remember from Rocket League – y’know, when you guys said for the first time, “Oh, you want to play Rocket League?” and I was like “What’s that?” and you were like “It’s soccer for cars” and I was like “Ugh that sounds so dumb” but we played it and I was hooked and I went home and bought it straight away to get better so I could keep up in the office – is this idea that you play it for the first time and it’s these intense, five-minute matches where you always feel like you’ve gotten better at the game and learnt.

The mechanics are very simple to begin with because everyone’s played a driving game before… and it’s the same mentality with our game. The core mechanic of grabbing and shooting objects is familiar to a niche audience – like, people that know it from Portal…

Steve: I think anyone that’s played twinsticks could get it up and running.

Moritz: The core platformer mechanics are very familiar. You can get in the game, jump around, and then later on you can find out that you can stomp on enemies, you can use your crate to dash into enemies.

Steve: [Rocket League’s] really accessible at first but it has a really high skill cap. You can always learn something new in the game – like, develop a new type of mobility you didn’t have a week ago. That’s the feeling that we were trying to capture. We’ve really focussed a lot on that freedom of movement and allowing the player to grow into an expressive way of moving around.

Moritz: It was an interesting development process as well when we were coming up with the mechanics because we had that group of friends that we could play Rocket League with during lunch. We would then boot our game up at work and had our colleagues play it. We wouldn’t say too much – like ‘this is how you have to play it’ – and that way we could observe what they were trying to do, go home and make changes so that it was more natural.

Steve: The cool thing about Halo is, you’re just so mobile. You can sprint, you can hover. It’s not just a shooter where you are constrained to looking around.

Moritz: In Halo you have these assassination moves. If you sneak up behind somebody and you press the melee button you do an animation takedown where you tackle them to the ground and stab them. And afterwards, a healthy dose of teabagging doesn’t hurt. [Laughs]

We’ve got a crouch button in Grabity that doesn’t actually do anything. It’s purely cosmetic. It’s just so, after you get a kill, you can do a little victory dance. That’s translated out of the Halo days as well, because there was nothing more satisfying than sneaking up on somebody for the fifth time and they’d get angry at you – just shoot! Don’t do this!

Steve: I was doing a lot of explorations with the physics engine in Unity through different game jams. That was definitely a big factor for me, exploring different concepts of what people can do in games.

I was doing Ludum Dare, which is a 48 hour game jam. They hold those three to four times a year. I got into them just because I wanted to get better at programming for Unity and that was a good way of doing it, but I got hooked on the designing side of it, which was something I hadn’t really thought a lot about previously – the mechanics of games, how you progress in a game. Game jams were really awesome for that.

The cool thing about game jams is it really forces you to crystallise an idea in a couple of days flat, basically. They give you a topic, and then you have to have a game two days later, so you’re forced into making interesting decisions that you might not otherwise do.

What’s your favourite of the game jam games you ended up making?

Steve: There’s a really dumb one I made called Berserker. It’s this stupid game where you’re this Conan the Barbarian-type guy and you’ve got two big swords in your hands and you use the mouse to wave them around in this kind of physics-based thing. I would never make a game like that if it was something I embarked upon with a lot of forethought.

Steve: I was personally quite inspired by Swordy, which is a Kiwi game. I got to know the devs when they were making it, and I just rated that game a lot. I think it’s a really cool idea, and that played a part in us deciding to make something in that vein because it was so much fun playing it. I still remember when Hamish [MacDonald, developer at FrogShark] brought it over and demoed it to us, and I was like, ‘Woah, that’s sick. We could make a couch game.’

Swordy’s a physics-based character combat game where you’re these knights and you pick up different weapons and you swing them around, whirling dervish-style, and you try and hit the other players. It’s this chaotic, melee-type game… and it had that couch mentality to it, but it also had some really interesting physics stuff going on. I was jamming on physics things at the time.

Moritz: When we were working at Outsmart, [Steve] would show me videos and go, ‘check this out’, and it’s just machinery doing its thing.

Steve: I’ve this weird, unhealthy obsession with Youtube videos of big machines and foundries and things like this.

What types of machines?

Steve: I love CNC machines, for example. Do you know those Youtube videos, they’re just CNC machines making things?

So, I don’t know what a CNC machine is.

Steve: Oh. I can… dig up some videos for you, if you like.

Moritz: My personal taste is more… cartoonish, cute stuff. So I tried to couple, as best as I could, the sort-of sci-fi preference Steve has – I’d look at those videos and I’d look at the machinery and the shapes they use and I’d try to incorporate them – but at the same time, I tried to keep the proportions of the characters somewhat cuter? So that it’s not just full-on sci-fi mecha stuff. It’s a bit much for my personal taste.

I also like to have the option of keeping things a bit more silly, as well. I don’t know how much you’ve played of the game, but you unlock new hats, for example. One of the default hats is a plunger on your head, and it’s just keeping that option open: you don’t have to be too serious about the game, because at the end of the day it is a game.

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