Joelistics
| Joelistics | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Joel Ma |
| Origin |
 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
|
| Genres | Hip hop |
| Years active | 1999–present |
| Labels | Liberation, Elefant Traks |
| Associated acts | TZU |
| Website | www |
Joelistics (born Joel Ma) is an Australian MC, producer and multi-instrumentalist, who is a member of the Melbourne-based Australian hip hop group TZU and a solo artist on the Elefant Traks music label.
Ma was raised in Sydney, Australia, 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 members of local acts Curse Ov Dialect and Pan in 2002. As of August 2014, the group has released three studio albums with the Liberation music company.
Using 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 travels to locations such as Berlin, Germany; France; and Bangkok, Thailand, and he wrote sections of two songs—"All the Rebels" and "Sooner or Later"—while in Bangkok:
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.
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Wikipedia