Aqua Island's Startist and Bacchanal have an incredibly languid lyrical flow. It's a fluid cadence that flies solo as easily as it rolls with the band's samples and music. The duo is aggressive, proactive, and questioning in the spirit of the contemporary poetry slam, yet exhibits the splendor and ease of hip-hop hybrid innovators like Gil Scott-Heron. Both members come from Caribbean decent (Startist's family is from Trinidad, Bacchanal was born in Barbados), and Aqua Island's casual trips to tropical rhythms and tones add a pleasant patina to the local group's more direct rhythms and searing soul.

Though Startist and Bacchanal have been friends for 16 years, this project is still in its infancy. Aqua Island's first CD, "Above Sea Level," will be out in October, and the duo is in the midst of putting together a live band to keep with its organic mission. Sure, there are the beats, the groove, the twists, and the soul, but let's not forget about the love, brothers and sisters. Aqua Island hasn't, and sat down to tell me all about it. Who knows? The revolution may be televised after all...

So what was the idea behind Aqua Island?

Startist: Just mixing our different cultural aspects; mixing our personal culture with hip-hop music, then in turn mixing all the music we liked.

Did the Caribbean music you grew up with influence your current sound?

Startist: Definitely. Calypso, soca, stuff like that. Guys like The Mighty Sparrow, even Harry Belafonte. All that stuff was in my house, along with the Beach Boys and other random stuff.

Do you find it plugs well into a hip-hop format?

Bacchanal: It works very well. It's the basis of hip-hop. DJs like Kool Herc, he was from Jamaica and he moved to the Bronx. He brought the sound system aspect from Jamaica to the Bronx, setting up speakers in the park, spinning records with people chanting over the top of the records.

Do you need to be a native from the islands to incorporate this influence?

Startist: Authentically, I'd say yes. But I look at music, or even the way people express themselves artistically as a reflection of what you know. Even when you go back to the Rolling Stones, and they talk about the guys that came before them...they may not have been from America, but these sounds of the early blues and early rock 'n' roll, Chuck Berry, and whatever, were still influences, and they turned around and made beautiful music. And to discredit them and say, "Oh, they're not from America" or "They're not African-American" - they still made amazing music. All I care about is the end result. Music is really what you know and what you love.

Your music and lyrics seems very proactive.

Startist: To me it's positive energy. I believe that energy is transferable. If somebody opens a door for an old lady it can cause a chain reaction for everybody. Sometimes people just need to see a positive act. You can't fight fire with fire. Someone could hit me and, yeah, I can hit them back. But we still haven't solved the problem. My thing is spreading love for love's sake. Putting that in music, showing what you love, that this means so much to me that I want to share it with you.

Can the audience find their own identity in this?

Startist: When you're growing up they say you've got to find yourself. But I believe we know who we are from birth and we spend our lives hiding from it to fit into social norms.

So music helps strip that away?

Startist: Absolutely.

How do you guys write?

Bacchanal: I've been working on four or five projects for the last three years. Aqua Island is the first project where we actually sat down and mapped something out. It's like scripting a movie instead of going off by yourself, writing some lyrics and bringing them back to the table.

Startist: But sometimes something comes up in the studio that is alive that moment, and you have to stamp that moment on the song. I try not to think of the little ad libs in the back of a song.

If you did they'd be planned libs.

Startist: Exactly.

You guys don't have a live band yet?

Bacchanal: Not as of yet. We're just going with tracks, but we try to do something interesting with each one. We try to tell a story.

Startist: But let's put that out there; any musicians that would love to rock out, we'd love to do it with you.

Bacchanal: We want it to be fun for everybody not just for us because we wrote it.

In the meantime how do you approach the music live?

Bacchanal: Our first show we did as a tribute to some of the samples that other people have used before. So we'd use the original and speak over that. I collect a lot of wax.

Startist: He's a record nerd and I'm a movie nerd.

What do you feel you can brag about at this point? What are you most proud of?

Startist: Having something done. Bringing something to fruition.

In your short history, what's an audience comment that's surprised you?

Bacchanal: The fact that there's no cursing. Our vocabulary is pretty advanced, so if I do curse it's for a reason.

Startist: Words like that I put in the category of punctuation marks.

So without cursing, how do you punctuate?

Startist: Emphasis and delivery.

Aqua Island

Myspace.com/aquaisland