Half-way through The Funkoars' set at The Basement in Sydney, the band suddenly announce that they are going to bring a "very special guest" on stage.

Their fans, who were already acting like a bunch of unhinged lunatics, start roaring like they've been freed from the asylum. Who could it be? Perhaps their label mate from Golden Era Records, Aboriginal hip-hop heavyweight Briggs? Maybe their label bosses, Australia's most popular hip-hop act, the Hilltop Hoods?

Instead, out steps morning TV and game show host Larry Emdur, sporting a 1000 kilowatt grin that threatens to swallow his ears. The crowd, who know The Funkoars' song "Larry Emdur" off by heart, go apeshit wild, chanting: "LA-RRY!!! LA-RRY!!! LA-RRY!!! LA-RRY!!!"

The fans are spilling onto the stage, but the venue's security detail are too busy laughing to do anything. Prolific producer and rapper Trials puts his arm around Emdur and the pair begin doling out a plate of dry Weet-Bix to fans. The fans try to cram as many as they can into their mouths before dry retching the lot up on the stage carpet, wheaty flakes spewing everywhere.

It's a little different from when Trials used to help his mum hand out Weet-Bix to the homeless as a teenager.

Pause. Rewind. So his mum was a social worker?

"Yeah, yeah," reminisces Trials, talking back home in Adelaide, just days after the Sydney gig. "She was for the majority of her life and my stepdad as well, which was great. I used to go there and pack shelves with them and give out all the Weet-Bixes and all that sort of stuff. To do those things, you know how real it can get."

Trials and the Funkoars hand out Weet-Bix with Larry Emdur in Sydney. Photo: www.snappatronik.squarespace.com

Trials, born Daniel Rankine, knows how real it can get. His biological father, a Ngarrindjeri man, was sent away when young Dan was only as high as his dad's knees - not an uncommon story in Indigenous families.

"My dad ended up doing a little bit of prison time for a while, as is customary in most families," says Trials. "That kind of kept up being a main thing, a constant theme in his life, unfortunately. So we don't have really much to do with each other at all."

But he has nothing but love for his stepdad.

"You can either strike out or you can get really lucky with a stepdad and I fucking scored," he says. "He's Black too, so it was really easy that I had someone that I could pick up and talk to me about the things that mattered."

The rapper's ancestors are from Raukkan, the Indigenous community at the end of the Murray River near Adelaide.

"It's beautiful," says Trials. "All along the Coorong there, that's pretty much our area, which is just gorgeous, if you ever come down here, it's just a beautiful sight, to be amongst the greenery."

It's a sight that instils avarice. In theory, the Act that established South Australia guaranteed the land rights of Aboriginal people. In practice, the colonists interpreted it as meaning they could take any land they reckoned Aboriginal people did not permanently occupy. In 1839, the "protector of Aborigines", William Wyatt, conveniently recorded that no sites were permanently occupied.

The Ngarrindjeri never stood a fighting chance. Most were wiped out by a smallpox epidemic that swept down the Murray after vials of the disease were deliberately brought by the First Fleet. The Ngarrindjeri recorded the epidemic in traditional songs, some of which were sung to try to ward off the disease. The songs find their modern-day equivalent in Indigenous hip-hop, which records and resists the ongoing genocide.

On Trials' left wrist, just up from the hand that sometimes holds his microphone, is a circular tattoo featuring the gold sun, Black skin and red earth of the Aboriginal flag. 

On the other wrist is a circular tattoo featuring another flag - a red dragon on a green field.

"My mum's Welsh," he explains. "I bounced to the UK when I was about three years old. I was deep in the heart of south Wales, which is right in the middle of the green, green hills.

"My parents split up around three and I went to the UK until I was about 11-ish. My mum saw fit to kind of take me back to the 'motherland', as it is. So that was an experience in itself, being the only kind of half-black kid in a school full of EXTREMELY white kids. It was constantly fighting, fisticuffs every single day, because you stood out the most from the pack and you were constantly reminded by everyone that this definitely wasn't your place to be at that time."

However, his mother made sure he kept a sense of place.

Trials' homeland, the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia. Photo: www.thedirtsa.com.au

"I got a pretty lefty upbringing," he says. "She was always really, really, really set on keeping me in touch with my roots and where I was from and the other side, as opposed to the white side, which I was really living in. She was phenomenal at that, so she kept the contact up.

"I had cassettes, you know, the old Dreaming cassettes. It was big, fold-out double books, with like, eight cassettes in them. Oh man, they would give me nightmares at night, but you'd listen to all the stories overnight all the time."

The stories are legendary. Raukkan's most famous musician, acclaimed pianist David Unaipon, became the first Indigenous author to be published in Australia with a book on Aboriginal myths and legends in the 1920s. Unaipon, known as "Australia's Leonardo Da Vinci" for his brilliant mind and inventions, is immortalised on Australia's $50 note. Ngarindjerri comedian Kevin Kropinyeri acts out on stage the kind of reactions that gets.

"This whitefella the other day asked me where I was from," says Kropinyeri in his live show. "So I flopped that $50 note on the bar and said, 'See that Blackfella there, and that church? It's an Aboriginal community where my mum was born, called Raukkan, my mum used to clean his house, the whole lot.' He said, 'Wow! That is so amazing!' I said, 'It is, isn't it?' He said, 'No - I've never seen an Aboriginal with a $50 note before.'"

Trials, who has inherited big doses of Kropinyeri's humour and Unapion's creativity, says he was shocked by the prejudice when he returned home from Wales.

"I went back around 12-ish, I reckon," he says. "It was kind of weird again, because I was still like, 'I'll be better off when I get back home. It'll be much easier. There'll be none of this kinda bullshit when I get back home!' And then there was the same kind of shit, the constant racism."

Unaipon never had enough money to take out full patents on all his inventions, including his famed sheep shearing machine, for which he never received any financial return. In 2008, his family took out an unsuccessful $30 million lawsuit against the Reserve Bank of Australia for using his image on the $50 note without their permission. Aboriginal people are still owed billions of dollars in unpaid wages.

In a world where even people who support workers' rights think music should be free, Trials - despite all his success - has also struggled to make his work pay. Yet Munkimuk told listeners to his Indigenous hip-hop radio show in 2013: "Trials is probably the richest man in Indigenous hip-hop - he's a damn millionaire!"

Told about the quote, Trials nearly falls off his chair laughing. When he laughs, it's like a cross between a movie villain and a claxon going off, as if his creator has deliberately signposted him with, "CHECK OUT THIS GUY! FUNNY GUY! RIGHT HERE!"

"That's amazing," says Trials when he's finally regained his composure. "I wish I could confirm! Oh my God, I wish I could confirm. Oh my God."

It must be said that Munkimuk is hardly ever serious, though.

"Exactly," says Trials. "Up until, I guess, the last two years, I was working full-time. Only in JB Hi-Fi or you know, shitty, remedial jobs like that, which were not really brain-intensive jobs. But you could go home and you could really pour a lot of shit out. And you would pour a lot of shit out at JB's because you'd be listening to a lot of shit as well. And you'd be like, 'Ah, that's trash', or you know, you'd find inspiration in all areas of it, man."

Trials soaks up music like a sponge. Samples have been his lifeblood ever since he bought a pair of turntables and a microphone with the payout from a car accident at the age of 16. His signature sound - huge drums, big guitars, relentless funk and stabbing horns - is in such demand that it has soundtracked Hollywood films, prime-time TV shows, documentaries, sports broadcasts and even ads.

"Yeah, well, mostly adverts for like fighting documentaries, surfing documentaries, all high-energy kind of high-octane stuff," he says. "Hyper everything - hyper this, hyper that, you know, that kind of shit!"

He laughs.

"All of my music in general is just pretty up-tempo, pretty energy-heavy stuff, you know? It's been a case of syncing pre-existing work because it's catchy or whatever it may be. I've never written a jingle! Never!"

The Funkoars - Trials, Sesta and Hons - are dismissive of their own work. One of their skits features them receiving an award for "yet another generic drinking track". Yet Trials has also released some of the most radical albums in Australian hip-hop. His friend, Vents, admits he is so lazy that he would have never got out both his highly politicised albums were it not for the fact that Trials produced them.

"Yeah, I can absolutely 100% confirm that," laughs Trials. "He's the laziest, most talented dude I know. That's why I've plugged through two albums with him, because he's phenomenal."

Their shared political outlook also helped.

"At 20, 21, me and Vents were just hardcore Commies - you know, we thought we were, anyway! So that's why on every single song he's talking about May 1st and Haymarket Squares and whatnot and we were like, 'Yeah! We're fighting the good cause here!'

"As we were growing up, we went through the exact same stages together, you know? Because we were reading things together and he'd be like, 'Fuck man, have you heard about Lenin, brah?' And I'm like, 'OH FUCK! Lenin, man!' You know what I mean? And then we'd go on a whole Marxist trip for like six months or some shit like that.

"I don't even know where we're at any more. I think he calls himself a Libertarian these days. But I think we stopped trying to identify with terms a while ago when you'd become comfortable with your own brain and you're comfortable with the fact that your outlook on life is an outlook original to itself and that's a cool thing."

From left, Trials, radical rapper Vents and DJ Adfu. Photo: www.adelaidenow.com.au

Vents' radical, underground albums were recorded in the same unglamorous vocal booth as Trials' most commercially successful hip-hop albums, which he made with Perth rapper Drapht.

"This share house I was staying in, oh, fuck, man, it was terrible," laughs Trials.

"The vocal booth was at the end of the laundry and there was a cat litter box right next to the booth. So if I didn't change the litter for the day, it just fucking stank, man! And that was often. So Drapht and Vents both did both their albums in that fucking kitty litter box."

Trials and Drapht were caught off-guard when "Jimmy Recard", one of the tracks off their first album together, took off.

"That was a total accident," says Trials. "That was the last song he showed me on the album that we were going to work on and we were like, 'Ah, let's chuck it on, whatever.' We chucked it on and then it just fucking happened, something happened, it resonated hard as fuck.

"This whole thing was going on around us that we had no idea about till we started doing shows live and seeing the reaction that people had and when playing the song in clubs, because I was deejaying the whole time, you know? It was like when you drop a Jay-Z song and get the fucking huge arms and when I dropped my song and got that, I was like, 'What the fuck is going on here?' That was crazy, you know? That really fucked us up and that's why we took the next record, Life Of Riley, really fucking seriously.

"We just did the Big Day Out tour, we just did two big laps around the country and the songs we liked playing the most and the crowd liked the most were the big, uptempo fucking heavy ones and I love making those songs! We were like, 'Fuck it! We'll do a whole album of that shit!'"

The album, recorded next to cat shit, went straight to number one. It also gave Trials the confidence to start speaking out.

"When you're growing up, when you're 18, 19, I was still a fucking IDIOT," he laughs. "So it was just like, I don't want to champion causes when I'm a FUCKING IDIOT. As much as I want to champion it and as bullshit as I see everything, right now, I am a fucking JERK.

"So it took me a long time to realise like, 'OK, cool, I've done some pretty cool things, I've got some pretty sweet - according to the industry - accolades, that's cool, that means I've got at least two feet on this small, pretentious soapbox, so I can stand on it and fucking say some things now and people have to listen to them.'"

On the Funkoars' last record, Dawn Of The Head, Trials raps: "Want a Black PM before my day's in."

Asked about it, he says: "That one was just a sweet jab at how far away we still are, you know what I mean? People always make comparisons with the States, like, we're maybe 10 years behind or something like that and it's like, 'Fark!' I feel like we're 50 or something at the moment, you know?"

Even just across the Tasman Sea, Indigenous political rights seem light years ahead, with guaranteed seats for Maori.

"You go to New Zealand and you've got your designated seats in Parliament," says Trials. "That's beautiful. That's the way it should be. At least it's a start, a step towards progress - and it's so hard to fight for small, incremental things like that, when they should just be, for lack of a better word, god-given.

"I started writing a lot of things just because I knew I could speak on them now confidently. So that in an interview situation when someone does ask about it, it's like, 'OK, I can talk about it.'"

Asked about another Dawn Of The Head lyric, "Stupid like bringing a racist to gigs", Trials laughs. Is this something he experiences often?

"Constantly," he says. "This is Australia, man! They're everywhere! I'm on the lighter scale of Black, so a lot of people have no idea what my heritage is.

"We don't drink until we get off, because it's got to be a decent-ish show, so it's usually pretty full-on talking to someone who's that drunk as it is at the end of the night. But then when they hit you with those kind of bombs, you're like, 'Oh, jeepers creepers guys, I appreciate what you're trying to say, but get a stubby holder and go fuck yourself!'"

There is a flip side, though.

"My favourite trip in the world has been, I have people at gigs, like, just fellas coming up to me, just saying, like, 'Man, I didn't realise you were Black and then I found out and then I was like, "FUCK, yeah!!!"' It was like, 'Yeah, bruz! You see!!! We can do this, bruz!' 'We can fucking do this!' And that's my favourite when it happens, homies coming through at gigs like that, that's my favourite, ever!"

That desire to fill Black kids with pride is epitomised by A.B. Originals, the new duo made up of Trials and big-hitter Briggs.

"The A.B. Originals joint, it's like fucking hardcore, it's unadulterated," says Trials. "You know what the fuck we stand for, because we know what we stand for and we also know that we can deliver it in a world-class fucking fashion.

"It's like a West Coast-sounding hardcore album with some of our favourite West Coast rappers on there, purely because that's the music that resonated with us hard as fuck when we were young.

"You do a lot of workshops with a lot of kids now and that's still the same kind of shit - Tupac, Snoop Dogg - all that shit resonates with the kids all the time. So we made that album sound like that with our shit over the top of it so that it gets right in their ears, so they can blast it while they're driving down the street with their cousins and shit, you know what I mean? And then the next record that they make is totally fucking Black, it's all theirs then."

As the first song to drop off the album, "Black Balls", puts it:

They claim I ain't deep enough
Damn, they want to turn their speakers up
They forgot about two things
My Black balls

A.B. Originals' ballsy live debut in Sydney would have certainly filled Black kids with pride. The duo played in front of thousands.

Trials and Briggs on stage as A.B. Originals in Sydney. Photo: www.bjwok.com

"Yeah, we played Beat The Drum, which was wicked, the Triple J thing," says Trials. "We got to come out to a big song there - and one of the A.B. Originals joints, we did half of that, and then we did 'The Hunt', which was the joint Briggs did with 'G', that was a whole thing in itself."

"G", as Trials calls him, is Indigenous international superstar Gurrumul, with whom Trials wrote Briggs' hair-raising album track, "The Hunt".

"I'm honoured to be a part of that," says Trials. "They could have chosen a million producers in the world to do that, so I was really lucky to get that one. It's weird how that one came about."

It came about after James Mangohig from bass-heavy Darwin duo Sietta introduced Briggs and Trials to Gurrumul and his right-hand man, Michael Hohnen.

"Michael gave me Gurrumul's whole catalogue," says Trials. "So I took this one, 'Baru', chopped it up, sent it all back all weird and Gurrumul didn't even recognise it as what it was any more - it was a whole different song.

"We got Gurrumul to play over the top of that then, so the whole song is a completely different song, built on the bed of an old song, which totally fucked him up!

"We're listening to Gurrumul's stems and his harmonies, and that's blowing our minds, and then when he was equally freaked out at what we had done, we knew we had something really, really cool. When he was touching down in every state, buying a new boombox, specifically to plan this track, that was unreal. Then to do it live in Triple J was something else."

The live performance of the track on Triple J radio was the first time all the musicians on the track had got together in one room.

"It literally was," says Trials. "We had some unbelievable minds in the room. It was like I just Blacked out! We came out and I thought, 'What the fuck did we just do?' That was the most artistically, spiritually rewarding song I have ever been a part of. It was easily the highlight of my - quote, unquote - 'career'."

Even better than playing live with Larry Emdur?

"Well, that's a different realm," laughs Trials. "Briggs and G is like this realm and us and Larry is the matrix has been snapped in half. Some PR firm fucked up along the way somewhere! That's what that shit shows!"