The Invisible touch

J.P. hip-hop trio set to make some noise

 INTERVIEW. Just because you haven’t seen Invisible Inc. doesn’t mean they aren’t present on the scene. They’re just in different places than what you might expect from a hip-hop act.

The trio, who met in grade school in San Francisco and currently live in Jamaica Plain, have an impressive collective résumé  that includes emcee George Watsky’s National Poetry Slam title and beatmakers Max Miller-Loren and Daniel Riera’s appearances at the San José Jazz Festival. When Watsky called us he was in San Francisco, getting ready to head to another very un-hip-hop place: the Republican National Convention.

What are you up to at the Republican Convention?
I’m just there for a day. It should be a laugh. I’m actually going to film a pilot for a TV show about sustainability and the arts and how they intersect.

How do you describe your music?
At its core, it’s a combination of jazz and hip-hop, with an influence of spoken word poetry. What we’re trying to do is change, or at least bring something new, to what it means to be a jazz group and what it means to be a hip-hop group. What we’ve done to achieve that is to have a new and original stage setup when we perform. Max and Daniel are set up on either side of me, and they’re triggering the music on laptop stations and simultaneously doing horn solos.

In the creative process, are you usually on the same page?
We’ve definitely gotten more on the same page the longer we’ve been at this. Max and Daniel create the music ... and they give it to me to write lyrics on top.

What’s next for Invisible Inc.?
We’re actually all doing solo albums and releasing them at the same time in about a month or two. Then we’re planning on doing another group album after that. So we’ve all been hard at work on those in Boston all summer. We’ve all had a hand in each other’s albums, though. We live together, so it’s really easy to collaborate. If we need a horn arrangement, we just yell upstairs.

Invisible Inc.  with The Press Project
Tonight, 8
Café 939 at Berklee
939 Boylston St., Boston
MBTA: Green Line to Hynes
$7, 617-747-6038
www.cafe939.com