Thanks to their acclaimed appearances on Tech N9ne’s Bad Season and the Best Buy Deluxe Edition of All 6’s And 7’s, Kansas City’s CES Cru has carved out a spot for themselves in the Strange Music world. The lyrical duo, made up of Godemis and Ubiquitous, has been blazing up the independent scene for years and now with Tech N9ne behind them, they look to take their unique style of music worldwide.

With Ces Cru’s appearance on Welcome To Strangeland becoming a hot topic, we recently caught up with Tech N9ne and asked him to share some insight on his relationship with Ces Cru and what he hopes will become of it.

When did you first become aware of CES Cru?

I knew of Godemis back whenever the 50 Mcs cd came out. I was asking people “Who is that?” back then. I started catching their shows right after that. I’d go to like Devin The Dude or something and I’d see their show, like, “Oh, my goodness gracious. That’s those guys that I’ve been hearing about.” If you in the MC circle, you get to hear about who got the talent, who really got the talent. I saw it with my own eyes at a Devin The Dude concert. I was like, “Oh my goodness gracious.” You know how you see some stars? I consider myself a veteran at performing and shit, and if somebody wows me, it’s totally good. I just take it as fate, it’s fate. I was meeting one of my songstresses at Houston‘s, I was going to do some music for…I don’t know what song we were doing, we were doing something, and I met her down there. We had a drink and everything, I was talking about CES Cru to her and the bartender had a fucking CD like, “Here’s this CD man.” I’m like, “What?!” The bartender, he was like, “I’m glad you’re into CES. I’ma give you my CD, The Playground.” He gave it to me and I took it home dude. I was playing it and I fell in love with it. I put it up on Twitter with a YouTube video of me jamming out to CES, getting dressed and just listening to they shit. I looked at the camera and said, “You ain’t know nothing about this, real shit nigga.” I been on them ever since, so I started putting them on music with me. I try to plant seeds with the talented people that rap with me to get with me, so I can get them on tour with me, so I can put out albums on them, so they can be heard by many people. What’s happening with CES is that people are enjoying them on some of our stuff, but they already have fans. So they have more fans now on top of their CES Cru fans. I just want it to keep growing. As a matter of fact, Travis is having a meeting with them as we speak at Strange Music headquarters right now.

How far are you looking to take the working relationship with CES Cru?

After I get off the phone with you, I’m going to call Travis and see if the meeting is done or if they had it earlier or how’d it go. I’m over here crossing my fingers. I want those hardcore MCs on my team. I want those hardcore MCs on tour with me. I want those hardcore MCs overseas blowing up shit of their own. I want those hardcore MCs everywhere with the Strange emblem dog. I want all the hardest muthafuckas on my team and they are some hard muthafuckas. They really know how to make music, in my opinion and in everybody else’s opinion too. I just hope that everything works right so I can do something to better their career in rap.

That’s really exciting to hear, the fans seem to love CES Cru.

Wait til you hear what they did on Strangeland dude. The song called “Unfair”, it’s me, Kaliko, Ubiquitous, and Godemis. That’s four the hard way brotha. It’s one of the highlights of the album to me, it’s really enchanting sounding. Seven really tapped into Strangeland on this beat. When I told him what I wanted the beat to sound like, enchanting and Nightmare Before Christmas-ish, and Beetlejuice-eque, you know what I’m saying. They killed it.

Click here to pre-order Welcome To Strangeland.

-Victor Sandoval, Assistant Editor Strange Music

Follow Victor on Twitter: @VicMSandoval