Image via Chester Watson/Instagram
Kevin Crandall still misses Rudy Gobert in a Utah Jazz jersey.
Zooming in from his room in Georgia, Chester Watson lays out his theory of connection between dreaming and astral projection: “Anytime I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream,” he explains. “That type of mental power is a step towards astral projection…[it] starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.”
Astral projection has long been a constant in Watson’s life and career. The St. Louis-born rapper actively pursued the spiritual practice as a teenager and “still [feels] the residue” of those experiences as he’s gotten older. That residue grounds his music, where Watson regularly evokes the spiritual realm to “bridge the gap between this world” and the astral plane, often supplementing with a heavy dose of weed.
During his COLORS X STUDIOS performance this past September, Watson put those astral residuals on full display, conversing with an enchantress about dark magic while lighting up a gushers strain joint on “chasing clouds.” The COLORS show would lay the groundwork for his first release of the year, winter mirage, in February. A static-riddled collage of spliff smoke and meditations over Ill Sugi beats, the record concludes the mirage series Watson began as a teenager, completing the seasonal cycle almost a decade later.
Watson’s latest evocations of astral travel are penned in Montisona, a collaborative EP with Ontario producer and Mello Music Group familiar Elaquent. The project came together over the course of a few days, with a flurry of emails and beat-swapping driving the creation. When it comes to developing EPs, Watson explained that he “wants them to be quickly digestible…there’s a lot packed into them, but the messages are so concise cause they have to be.” Each track is crafted like a quick hitter, rolling up spiritual transmissions and Japanese imagery in the bass-driven boom bap Elaquent lines the paper with to emit a throat-burning high.
The EP opens with a lecture sample on Igbo metaphysics over lush piano refrains before dissolving into a flurry of ruminations by the monotone samurai. Later on, Watson blends the physical world with the spiritual, buoying advice with good-faith skepticism, while meditating for guidance on “odyssey.” The music unearths the subconscious with marijuana and a katana.
As he was prepping for the release of Montisona, I caught up with Watson over Zoom to talk about the latest arc of his career odyssey, the intricacies of astral projection, and his dream of designing a fashion collection.
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
When did you and Elaquent first link up? When did that relationship start?
Chester Watson: He had reached out to me for one of his projects with Mello Music Group, and I was like of course. I had been a fan of him for a really long time and he had already shown me love from a distance, like on Twitter and shit like that, so we had known of each other for a bit before we actually worked with each other. That was the beginning, and then I did something else for his recent project and afterwards I just hit him up randomly like “let’s make an EP bro. Let’s just do it.”
Did that snowball rather quickly? Like, was he sending you beats right away or was there a little bit of a gap in time between there?
Chester Watson: Nah bro, it was immediate. That’s the homie, like that’s my brother. I’ve never met him honestly, but that’s our synergy working with each other. It’s different. So when I hit them up about it, it was like “yeah, of course, I’ll put some beats together and send them through to you.” He made a pack and out of that pack I think I chose maybe two or three, and then he made one or two new beats. That’s how this one came to be. Basically, we put it together in like three, four days. We definitely could have gone and made an album, but I think what we made here was just a good breath of fresh air project.
Did you have any production assistance or was it all Elaquent?
Chester Watson: It was all Elaquent. That’s one thing that I started to do more of, being like, okay, let me not do so much producing. I do produce, but I like rapping to other people’s beats as well.
I think it kind of brings me into a different world. I don’t know so much about the beat and I’m focusing on one thing. It’s always a breath of fresh air to work like that.
Could you expand on that? When you’re rapping on your own beats versus rapping on somebody else’s and how your thought process differs.
Chester Watson: By the time I get to the writing portion of writing to my own beats, I’ve made the beat and I know so much about the beat that I’m built into a certain pocket that I’ve already made making the beat. I always kind of jump in and out of pockets when I’m rapping, but I think when you have beats from other producers, you get introduced to different pockets as well. You get introduced to how you can fit into different sounds and things like that. It’s definitely a different headspace when I’m writing because they’re coming from a different head space as a producer, so there’s more influences that are unknown to me that may hit my brain subconsciously and make me write a certain way.
What does that headspace look like for you to be able to write an entire EP in a day when you receive those beats?
Chester Watson: I have been working on an instrumental album myself and my own stuff, so I was just making beats for weeks, I wasn’t writing much at all. It was just like, damn, I just wanna write something. I reached out to Elaquent, because that’s somebody that had made a beat on his last project that I really liked, and I was like, damn bro, I want to write to something like that. So I hit him up and you know he cheffed it up for me. I think it’s really just the urge. You really have to wanna do it, you can’t force yourself to write really well. When you really want to write something and get something off your chest, I think that’s when you get the best stuff. Obviously, he sent me a number of beats, but I chose the ones that spoke to me the most. So, the same thing there—it just kinda has to come to you.
Where does the name Montisona come from?
Chester Watson: Monti is my nickname for my real name, and Sona is Elaquent’s real name. I had seen something of him saying that he wanted to use his real name for something, and I had always wanted to eventually grow into using my real name. I didn’t know if I actually wanted to use it, but I did want to introduce it in some way, and so I felt like this was just the perfect project for it. We’re just doing this ourselves you know, making it. We did it really just off the strength of enjoying each other’s music and resonating with each other as people. So, let’s call that Montisona. I think I said Sonamonti and he said Montisona. I was really down for either one but I try not to be vain and put my shit first, so I always put it second, but he was like, yeah, let’s do it that way.
How do you balance your persona as Chester Watson versus your real name?
Chester Watson: I don’t see it as business because a lot of friends know me as Chester and they don’t call me Monti, but I see the separation of it being not necessarily a persona but more so an “also known as,” like a business name. I did that early on because I was young and I just didn’t want people to know my real name, so I was just like, all right, how can I do something that’s still professional but still also kind of random. It works in a lot of instances, it’s very natural. I just came up with another pseudonym kind of nickname, like a double agent. But, there’s really no difference. I was just trying to protect myself as a kid.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Did that snowball rather quickly? Like, was he sending you beats right away or was there a little bit of a gap in time between there?
Chester Watson: Nah bro, it was immediate. That’s the homie, like that’s my brother. I’ve never met him honestly, but that’s our synergy working with each other. It’s different. So when I hit them up about it, it was like “yeah, of course, I’ll put some beats together and send them through to you.” He made a pack and out of that pack I think I chose maybe two or three, and then he made one or two new beats. That’s how this one came to be. Basically, we put it together in like three, four days. We definitely could have gone and made an album, but I think what we made here was just a good breath of fresh air project.
Did you have any production assistance or was it all Elaquent?
Chester Watson: It was all Elaquent. That’s one thing that I started to do more of, being like, okay, let me not do so much producing. I do produce, but I like rapping to other people’s beats as well.
I think it kind of brings me into a different world. I don’t know so much about the beat and I’m focusing on one thing. It’s always a breath of fresh air to work like that.
Could you expand on that? When you’re rapping on your own beats versus rapping on somebody else’s and how your thought process differs.
Chester Watson: By the time I get to the writing portion of writing to my own beats, I’ve made the beat and I know so much about the beat that I’m built into a certain pocket that I’ve already made making the beat. I always kind of jump in and out of pockets when I’m rapping, but I think when you have beats from other producers, you get introduced to different pockets as well. You get introduced to how you can fit into different sounds and things like that. It’s definitely a different headspace when I’m writing because they’re coming from a different head space as a producer, so there’s more influences that are unknown to me that may hit my brain subconsciously and make me write a certain way.
What does that headspace look like for you to be able to write an entire EP in a day when you receive those beats?
Chester Watson: I have been working on an instrumental album myself and my own stuff, so I was just making beats for weeks, I wasn’t writing much at all. It was just like, damn, I just wanna write something. I reached out to Elaquent, because that’s somebody that had made a beat on his last project that I really liked, and I was like, damn bro, I want to write to something like that. So I hit him up and you know he cheffed it up for me. I think it’s really just the urge. You really have to wanna do it, you can’t force yourself to write really well. When you really want to write something and get something off your chest, I think that’s when you get the best stuff. Obviously, he sent me a number of beats, but I chose the ones that spoke to me the most. So, the same thing there—it just kinda has to come to you.
Where does the name Montisona come from?
Chester Watson: Monti is my nickname for my real name, and Sona is Elaquent’s real name. I had seen something of him saying that he wanted to use his real name for something, and I had always wanted to eventually grow into using my real name. I didn’t know if I actually wanted to use it, but I did want to introduce it in some way, and so I felt like this was just the perfect project for it. We’re just doing this ourselves you know, making it. We did it really just off the strength of enjoying each other’s music and resonating with each other as people. So, let’s call that Montisona. I think I said Sonamonti and he said Montisona. I was really down for either one but I try not to be vain and put my shit first, so I always put it second, but he was like, yeah, let’s do it that way.
How do you balance your persona as Chester Watson versus your real name?
Chester Watson: I don’t see it as business because a lot of friends know me as Chester and they don’t call me Monti, but I see the separation of it being not necessarily a persona but more so an “also known as,” like a business name. I did that early on because I was young and I just didn’t want people to know my real name, so I was just like, all right, how can I do something that’s still professional but still also kind of random. It works in a lot of instances, it’s very natural. I just came up with another pseudonym kind of nickname, like a double agent. But, there’s really no difference. I was just trying to protect myself as a kid.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Did you have any production assistance or was it all Elaquent?
Chester Watson: It was all Elaquent. That’s one thing that I started to do more of, being like, okay, let me not do so much producing. I do produce, but I like rapping to other people’s beats as well.
I think it kind of brings me into a different world. I don’t know so much about the beat and I’m focusing on one thing. It’s always a breath of fresh air to work like that.
Could you expand on that? When you’re rapping on your own beats versus rapping on somebody else’s and how your thought process differs.
Chester Watson: By the time I get to the writing portion of writing to my own beats, I’ve made the beat and I know so much about the beat that I’m built into a certain pocket that I’ve already made making the beat. I always kind of jump in and out of pockets when I’m rapping, but I think when you have beats from other producers, you get introduced to different pockets as well. You get introduced to how you can fit into different sounds and things like that. It’s definitely a different headspace when I’m writing because they’re coming from a different head space as a producer, so there’s more influences that are unknown to me that may hit my brain subconsciously and make me write a certain way.
What does that headspace look like for you to be able to write an entire EP in a day when you receive those beats?
Chester Watson: I have been working on an instrumental album myself and my own stuff, so I was just making beats for weeks, I wasn’t writing much at all. It was just like, damn, I just wanna write something. I reached out to Elaquent, because that’s somebody that had made a beat on his last project that I really liked, and I was like, damn bro, I want to write to something like that. So I hit him up and you know he cheffed it up for me. I think it’s really just the urge. You really have to wanna do it, you can’t force yourself to write really well. When you really want to write something and get something off your chest, I think that’s when you get the best stuff. Obviously, he sent me a number of beats, but I chose the ones that spoke to me the most. So, the same thing there—it just kinda has to come to you.
Where does the name Montisona come from?
Chester Watson: Monti is my nickname for my real name, and Sona is Elaquent’s real name. I had seen something of him saying that he wanted to use his real name for something, and I had always wanted to eventually grow into using my real name. I didn’t know if I actually wanted to use it, but I did want to introduce it in some way, and so I felt like this was just the perfect project for it. We’re just doing this ourselves you know, making it. We did it really just off the strength of enjoying each other’s music and resonating with each other as people. So, let’s call that Montisona. I think I said Sonamonti and he said Montisona. I was really down for either one but I try not to be vain and put my shit first, so I always put it second, but he was like, yeah, let’s do it that way.
How do you balance your persona as Chester Watson versus your real name?
Chester Watson: I don’t see it as business because a lot of friends know me as Chester and they don’t call me Monti, but I see the separation of it being not necessarily a persona but more so an “also known as,” like a business name. I did that early on because I was young and I just didn’t want people to know my real name, so I was just like, all right, how can I do something that’s still professional but still also kind of random. It works in a lot of instances, it’s very natural. I just came up with another pseudonym kind of nickname, like a double agent. But, there’s really no difference. I was just trying to protect myself as a kid.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
I think it kind of brings me into a different world. I don’t know so much about the beat and I’m focusing on one thing. It’s always a breath of fresh air to work like that.
Could you expand on that? When you’re rapping on your own beats versus rapping on somebody else’s and how your thought process differs.
Chester Watson: By the time I get to the writing portion of writing to my own beats, I’ve made the beat and I know so much about the beat that I’m built into a certain pocket that I’ve already made making the beat. I always kind of jump in and out of pockets when I’m rapping, but I think when you have beats from other producers, you get introduced to different pockets as well. You get introduced to how you can fit into different sounds and things like that. It’s definitely a different headspace when I’m writing because they’re coming from a different head space as a producer, so there’s more influences that are unknown to me that may hit my brain subconsciously and make me write a certain way.
What does that headspace look like for you to be able to write an entire EP in a day when you receive those beats?
Chester Watson: I have been working on an instrumental album myself and my own stuff, so I was just making beats for weeks, I wasn’t writing much at all. It was just like, damn, I just wanna write something. I reached out to Elaquent, because that’s somebody that had made a beat on his last project that I really liked, and I was like, damn bro, I want to write to something like that. So I hit him up and you know he cheffed it up for me. I think it’s really just the urge. You really have to wanna do it, you can’t force yourself to write really well. When you really want to write something and get something off your chest, I think that’s when you get the best stuff. Obviously, he sent me a number of beats, but I chose the ones that spoke to me the most. So, the same thing there—it just kinda has to come to you.
Where does the name Montisona come from?
Chester Watson: Monti is my nickname for my real name, and Sona is Elaquent’s real name. I had seen something of him saying that he wanted to use his real name for something, and I had always wanted to eventually grow into using my real name. I didn’t know if I actually wanted to use it, but I did want to introduce it in some way, and so I felt like this was just the perfect project for it. We’re just doing this ourselves you know, making it. We did it really just off the strength of enjoying each other’s music and resonating with each other as people. So, let’s call that Montisona. I think I said Sonamonti and he said Montisona. I was really down for either one but I try not to be vain and put my shit first, so I always put it second, but he was like, yeah, let’s do it that way.
How do you balance your persona as Chester Watson versus your real name?
Chester Watson: I don’t see it as business because a lot of friends know me as Chester and they don’t call me Monti, but I see the separation of it being not necessarily a persona but more so an “also known as,” like a business name. I did that early on because I was young and I just didn’t want people to know my real name, so I was just like, all right, how can I do something that’s still professional but still also kind of random. It works in a lot of instances, it’s very natural. I just came up with another pseudonym kind of nickname, like a double agent. But, there’s really no difference. I was just trying to protect myself as a kid.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
What does that headspace look like for you to be able to write an entire EP in a day when you receive those beats?
Chester Watson: I have been working on an instrumental album myself and my own stuff, so I was just making beats for weeks, I wasn’t writing much at all. It was just like, damn, I just wanna write something. I reached out to Elaquent, because that’s somebody that had made a beat on his last project that I really liked, and I was like, damn bro, I want to write to something like that. So I hit him up and you know he cheffed it up for me. I think it’s really just the urge. You really have to wanna do it, you can’t force yourself to write really well. When you really want to write something and get something off your chest, I think that’s when you get the best stuff. Obviously, he sent me a number of beats, but I chose the ones that spoke to me the most. So, the same thing there—it just kinda has to come to you.
Where does the name Montisona come from?
Chester Watson: Monti is my nickname for my real name, and Sona is Elaquent’s real name. I had seen something of him saying that he wanted to use his real name for something, and I had always wanted to eventually grow into using my real name. I didn’t know if I actually wanted to use it, but I did want to introduce it in some way, and so I felt like this was just the perfect project for it. We’re just doing this ourselves you know, making it. We did it really just off the strength of enjoying each other’s music and resonating with each other as people. So, let’s call that Montisona. I think I said Sonamonti and he said Montisona. I was really down for either one but I try not to be vain and put my shit first, so I always put it second, but he was like, yeah, let’s do it that way.
How do you balance your persona as Chester Watson versus your real name?
Chester Watson: I don’t see it as business because a lot of friends know me as Chester and they don’t call me Monti, but I see the separation of it being not necessarily a persona but more so an “also known as,” like a business name. I did that early on because I was young and I just didn’t want people to know my real name, so I was just like, all right, how can I do something that’s still professional but still also kind of random. It works in a lot of instances, it’s very natural. I just came up with another pseudonym kind of nickname, like a double agent. But, there’s really no difference. I was just trying to protect myself as a kid.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Where does the name Montisona come from?
Chester Watson: Monti is my nickname for my real name, and Sona is Elaquent’s real name. I had seen something of him saying that he wanted to use his real name for something, and I had always wanted to eventually grow into using my real name. I didn’t know if I actually wanted to use it, but I did want to introduce it in some way, and so I felt like this was just the perfect project for it. We’re just doing this ourselves you know, making it. We did it really just off the strength of enjoying each other’s music and resonating with each other as people. So, let’s call that Montisona. I think I said Sonamonti and he said Montisona. I was really down for either one but I try not to be vain and put my shit first, so I always put it second, but he was like, yeah, let’s do it that way.
How do you balance your persona as Chester Watson versus your real name?
Chester Watson: I don’t see it as business because a lot of friends know me as Chester and they don’t call me Monti, but I see the separation of it being not necessarily a persona but more so an “also known as,” like a business name. I did that early on because I was young and I just didn’t want people to know my real name, so I was just like, all right, how can I do something that’s still professional but still also kind of random. It works in a lot of instances, it’s very natural. I just came up with another pseudonym kind of nickname, like a double agent. But, there’s really no difference. I was just trying to protect myself as a kid.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
How do you balance your persona as Chester Watson versus your real name?
Chester Watson: I don’t see it as business because a lot of friends know me as Chester and they don’t call me Monti, but I see the separation of it being not necessarily a persona but more so an “also known as,” like a business name. I did that early on because I was young and I just didn’t want people to know my real name, so I was just like, all right, how can I do something that’s still professional but still also kind of random. It works in a lot of instances, it’s very natural. I just came up with another pseudonym kind of nickname, like a double agent. But, there’s really no difference. I was just trying to protect myself as a kid.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Pivoting a little bit, you dropped winter mirage earlier this year, yeah?
Chester Watson: Yeah. We had done the Colors show last year, and I did those two songs [off of winter mirage] so we were sitting on it for a while. Then I was just like, bro, let’s drop it. There’s no point in trying to hold onto this, so we released it. Earlier this year I got the artwork done, packaging, and I just dropped it. It was good as it was, we just needed to let it out. That was one of those moments where I had an epiphany that I realized– you know when you get older and you re-realize certain things? This was like why are we holding onto this? Let’s just make it and release it and then make some more. I don’t know what people are afraid of, like they’re gonna not be creative the next day or something like that. I feel like I have an endless amount of creativity and I just need to get that out. That’s how I felt when I was younger, but then I got into the releasing schedule part of stuff like, all right, yo, now we gotta wait. We gotta make vinyl. We gotta do this, we gotta do that. And that’s cool. I love that process because I take pride in doing my own vinyl packaging and all that stuff, but it makes me miss just being able to just let it out, you know? Let’s just pick a day where it makes the most sense and let’s just drop it. We don’t gotta do nothing extra other than that. I feel like that was a part of how we became so prolific, at least me and the people I grew up with in the music scene.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
When you were putting together winter mirage, as a four part series at this point, did you have any hesitation dropping it as that finale or were you just like this is a great conclusion let’s just put it out there?
Chester Watson: That’s exactly how it felt: this is an amazing way [to end the series]. Two of these songs are on Colors, it’s with one of the producers that I really like working with the most and really respect, and it just felt right. It’s winter, let’s just put it out. My life at that point felt like a winter mirage. It felt like so much shit was happening at once and a lot of stuff was changing. It just felt like this is what they should be for where I’m at in my life right now. Then it also, like you said, closed the chapter on something that I started when I was a kid, bro. That was another thing that I felt compelled to do. Let me just do this for the vision that the younger me had.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
What was doing a Colors performance like? You’ve mentioned it was like a dream come true, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what that meant to you?
Chester Watson: I feel like for every musician, if you grew up looking at Colors, that’s one of the milestones where it’s like, I got a Colors show. That’s something that I remember, seeing Freddie Gibbs and Gunna and just so many people that I was introduced to musically, not really through Colors, but it gave me a deeper appreciation for their music. I was just honored to be in that lineage of performers and artists and I think it was just an honor. I went to Amsterdam around that time as well—I linked with the homie Shungu who I hadn’t seen in years—so it was just a lot of things coming full circle around that time. It just felt like a moment.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Recently, you also had that collaboration working on the record that I Love Ugly just put out, you helped pick out the songs for that?
Chester Watson: I helped them get the word out, tell people about it and just let people know that this is an opportunity for really anyone. Then I was able to help be a judge of the music and give my opinion on which songs I thought were the best and which songs I thought not only were the best, but just worked well with each other. There was a lot of amazing songs that didn’t make it and they were still just as good. There was just so many good songs, so I think it was definitely an honor and I think it was full circle too. I Love Ugly is a brand and team that I kind of grew up with. I’ve been working with them for the last almost decade. I’m honored that they wanted to bring me on to do something like that and that it came out so well. I was literally just playing it. That’s something that’s really special to me. I really had fun doing that and that project is special. I’m proud of the team over at I Love Ugly.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Your relationship with I Love Ugly as a brand, how did that come about and when did you first start collaborating with them properly?
Chester Watson: Initially they reached out to me. The homie Zach, he doesn’t work there anymore but he reached out about an opportunity. They were doing something musical as well back then, so that was the introduction to them as a brand. From there, we just kinda kept in touch. They had a store in LA, and that’s when we actually started really building. We really got to know and connect with each other. I had started going out to LA—like literally every two months I was out there—so I would just be at the store all the time. Every time I went up there and didn’t have shit to do I would just post up at the I Love Ugly store with the homies who worked there. I would be emailing back and forth with whoever was working at the time and just really build with them. I was buying clothes and stuff back then so I was definitely a fan of the brand, and grew to be able to work with them and collaborate with them. I remember we did this show at their LA store and then they closed down the LA store.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
By that point our relationship was pretty strong, so we just kept in touch. I’ve just been repping super heavy ever since. They’ve shown me nothing but love. I mean, we’ve shown each other nothing but love really, so I think the respect and the admiration is pretty mutual between myself and their team. But it definitely started back when I was younger and blossomed around the time when they had the LA store. For sure, cause I started doing video stuff for them and I just started working with them like a whole bunch. They were probably my first really big– cause I had gotten free clothes and stuff, but I had never done campaigns and editorials and shooting and stuff like that. I had never done that, and even now they’re still including me in stuff like that.
Do you have a want to do a design campaign for I Love Ugly or another clothing brand?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah bro. I would love to do a design campaign for any brand, but I Love Ugly for sure is top of the list. If I could do a collection for I Love Ugly that would be amazing. I think Nike. I mean, I don’t really wear too much. I worked with Dickies before; I didn’t design anything for them. I think really just I Love Ugly, Nike—if we’re talking about luxury obviously Louis [Vuitton] or something like that would be cool. I just wanna really get the opportunity to make some stuff like that on a higher scale.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
What would the Chester Watson line look like?
Chester Watson: [Laughs] I wear a lot of tan and I wear a lot of brown, and a lot of orange, so there would be a lot of those colors in a lot of my collections. I feel like it would just be very trippy, bro. It would be like all types of weird designs and weird cuts and cut-and-sewed type stuff. It’d be dope. But, the silhouettes would also be pretty modern—well, a mix of modern and vintage silhouettes, so just a whole bunch of stuff. I try to do everything and touch every type of person, but still introduce them to other types of silhouettes and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely bright, and I’d have dark seasons—my shit would be like each season feels like a different theme or something like that. You know what I mean?
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
That’d be sick. You could pair it with your mirage set.
Chester Watson: You feel me? Something like that, like the theme for this season is this, so… It’d be some cool shit like that. I think they try to do that, but it don’t really transfer as much.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Have you dabbled in accessories as well or is it mainly just pants and shirts type shit?
Chester Watson: I’ve never made any accessories. I’ve only made shirts and customized pants. I think for accessories, I wouldn’t even know what to make, honestly. You mean like stuff like lighters and stuff?
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Yeah. Lighters, belts?
Chester Watson: Oh yeah, I would like belts.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
I’m not sure what accessories you like. Socks maybe?
Chester Watson: Socks would be dope. See, you’re giving me ideas right now. We’ve thought about that. We’ve definitely thought about that cause I love socks too. I love a nice, comfy sock with the cushion bottom. I’m here for that. I definitely want to get into that and I feel like that’ll kind of fall in when I start really leaning heavily into creating stuff that isn’t music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Where do you take inspiration from clothing-wise? Do you have designers you look up to, or just vibes?
Chester Watson: Retro-type of fits. Colors. I don’t necessarily like the silhouettes unless it’s like flare pants from the seventies, but the color combinations that they were using back then is something that I take a lot of influence from—their color combinations and just how they didn’t care if colors really clashed. That was one of their things. Really just a lot of vintage, old film coloring, technicolor type vibes, those are what I take influence from in a lot of ways. Sonically, I stay sampling stuff from the seventies. Vocals are always from someone who’s much older and has seen life. I definitely take my influence from the past, but also Afrofuturism or just futurism in general. I take it from that, looking in the spaceships and stuff like that. I wanted to have elements of the past but also be forward thinking and pushing the envelope. I would say people who I take cues from fashion wise…hmm…I mean Tyler [the Creator] dresses super dope. I don’t necessarily dress like Tyler, but I like how he dresses.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Who else? Pharrell, for sure. There’s not too many people’s style who I really model mine after, but more so how they put stuff on. Like they did that that way or this is how they put these two colors together, you know? Stuff like that I remember, so I feel like the people who are most creative are Tyler and Pharrell. And Gunn. Westside Gunn’s pretty dope. He has a lot of fly shit. Oh! Ye, too. Kanye. Obviously you can’t forget the goat. Goat fashion, you know what I mean? I feel like clothing now wouldn’t look the way that it does, just in a fast fashion form, without Kanye. It would be completely different. So I would say those are probably the top four. Ye, Tyler, Pharrell, and Gunn.
You gotta meld them all together, put a sepia film over it.
Chester Watson: You feel me, and it’s me. It’s ya boy. [laughs]
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
I’m really curious about your dabbling in astral projecting and your experiences with it as a self-described astral projector.
Chester Watson: I definitely feel like there’s moments when I feel like I’m not necessarily in my body when I’m asleep. With astral projection, when I was younger it was something I was actively practicing and actively trying to attain. I also feel like when you’re younger, the veil is thinner. That’s something that I’ve just learned—as I got older it was harder to astral project. I also don’t remember very many of my dreams anymore, so there’s a lot of things that I feel kinda coincide. We may mistake astral projection for dreaming and dreaming for astral projection. I think those two things in those two worlds are so close. They say sleep is the cousin of death, you know what I mean? They don’t say that for no reason. I think that has more implications than people look into. Astral projection is one of those things; it’s very similar to being dead, you’re essentially a spirit. The dream world is very different, and also very similar. It’s a very surreal experience, which is why I feel like people may do it and not know.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
In my experience, I feel like I can catch myself in my dreams—pretty much any time I’m dreaming, I know I’m doing it, and I can lucid dream. Rarely in my dreams am I at the will of my dream. I can control what’s happening. I’m not saying I can just bring the sword out of nowhere in my dream, but some shit like that can definitely happen if I’m like “damn, I need a weapon to get out of the situation,” so shit’ll pop up. Stuff like that. I think that type of mental power is a step towards astral projection, but I don’t know how much you can control astral projection. I think some shamans and people like that who are super connected to the earth probably have a better grasp of that, but me bro? I’m not. I rap. I’m into materialistic stuff and stuff like that, so I think I’m taken a lot further away from remembering any astral projection shit that happens.
I feel like really everybody astral projects, that’s my opinion. We just call it dreaming, or we call it near death experiences or stuff like that. There are moments where the spirit or our essence is not necessarily away from us, but it’s observing our physical form. I don’t know, maybe not everybody because they also say that not everybody has an internal monologue. When I found that out, I was like woah. I don’t know how many people would have control over something like that or even know it exists. Astral projections, it’s something that you can’t research because we don’t know what happens in our dreams. You can’t research dreams. People try to, but I don’t know. I could talk about astral projection all day, bro. That’s something that I think about very consistently and experience I think and have experienced in more ways than one throughout my life. I can’t say that I’m gonna go to sleep tonight and astral project; I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you kinda gotta be in a space where you’re conducive to what is happening in the world and what is happening around you. Some people may be able to astral project on command or say “I’m gonna leave my body now,” but I can’t say that I can do that. Honestly, I think it’s something that starts with lucid dreaming and you progressively have more control over what happens.
As you’ve grown older and it’s gotten harder for those sorts of things to happen, have you found yourself having to cope with that in a way? Or did you just kinda take it in stride?
Chester Watson: I think there is nothing to cope with because I still feel the residue. I feel like we all feel the residue of dreams when we wake up, so I still feel it. I still feel the influence of whatever is happening over there, I just can’t remember. I think a movie that put that really into physical form was Everything Everywhere All at Once. That was a movie that really gave shape to the idea of the self in multiples and the self being able to be within multiple realities at once. Same thing with Marvel. The whole metaverse thing that’s going on right now within cinema is a revelation for mankind. I feel like people have always had these kinds of thoughts and ideologies, but on the global scale of acceptance it’s re-circling. Maybe it was accepted once upon a time. Everybody was tribal at one point, and we all did believe in stuff like that—shamanism and druidism and all of these things. History repeats itself and either their spirits are coming back to this Earth to bring this knowledge back or the knowledge itself is. finding its way through the human consciousness, the collective consciousness.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing a similar thing to what Everything Everywhere All at Once does with the different universes that you can go into by doing these different actions and things like that? Within your music and within different projects that you have.
Chester Watson: Yeah. I feel like that’s an ability that you can do with it. Look at Doom. I think he was one of the people who kinda spearheaded that “I’m three different people, but I’m the same person.” That’s one of those things that you see as possible—same with Madlib and [Quasimoto]. A lot of rappers in their alter egos, honestly. There’s always been this Jekyll and Hyde understanding of the human. When you lean into that, you see that humans aren’t just Jekyll and Hyde. There’s probably more Jekylls and more Hydes within one person because of how emotions and things in a person can be. I definitely think I bring that. I try to keep that introspection in my music, but also make it relevant to today and what’s going on. At the end of the day it is philosophy, bro. I feel like a lot of us writers are just philosophers on wax. We’re just philosophers on rhythm. I just got to spread whatever my philosophy is through my music more adequately and more adeptly. Get my message across more concisely and break it down even more, not to the point where it loses its meaning, but break it down to where it’s so understandable and relatable that it can almost become common knowledge to people who hear it. I think that’s something that I’m working on.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.
How do you feel like that comes out in Montisona?
Chester Watson: The surrealist aspect of my writing, I think. It’s always there. Me trying to bridge the gap between the other world and this one. Anytime where I say I’m talking to the spirits or anything like that is tied to that realm. I’m talking to something that’s here, but we can’t physically see it. We feel it. So, I think it’s very present in my writing. With Eloquent’s beats, I was able to really latch onto that and build on those ideas in those philosophies because his beats are so fantastical and storytelling in a way. It was definitely a vibe. They’re all vibey and they can be trance-like, just because of how smooth they can be. We always try to keep it a bit psychedelic with what we do with the music.