March 5th, 2010
The Valley gets a bad rap. Westside snobs caustically snipe all day but the basin between the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains has brought us such fine things as Poquito Mas, Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Russo, and now SFV Acid. The DJ/producer born Zane Reynolds crafts a psychedelia alien to those expecting swirling guitars and elliptical chants, opting for ideas instead of orthodoxy. So we get refulgent rainbow synth washes and drums that skitter like a wandering mind, loping five minute tracks that resemble a compromise between Dam-Funk, Tobacco, and the blunted beats that smoke out of the Low End Theory. A slinking drugged funk equally equipped for late night Freeway drives and scorching Summer days.
With the weather getting warmer and my inability to score high grade blotter acid at an all time high, I sent SFV Acid a few questions hoping to learn more about the man behind the mist.
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Posted in SFV Acid, Interviews | 3 Comments »
March 1st, 2010
Parts of this interview were originally published at Pop and Hiss.
Much of “There Is Love in You,” was live-tested at London’s famed Plastic People nightclub, where you recently held a DJ residency. Last week, the news broke that it’s in danger of being closed down due to concerns about drug use and excessive noise complaints. How have you been reacting to that news?
I’ve been hearing about it while I’ve been away on the road, but it sounds really terrible. It’s one of those situations where the police seem to have really targeted it. After all, it’s just another club on a major stretch in London where there’s hundreds of nightclubs right next to each other. I’ve got a feeling that of all the clubs in the area, it’s the least full of bad behavior. It’s been a very inspiring and influential place for many many people in London. Hopefully, it’ll be able to keep going.
Plastic People is a little sanctuary for people whose focus is purely music, and there aren’t many places like that. The people who run it aren’t interested in it as a commercial venue. It’s like a temple of sorts, in the tradition of Paradise Garage.
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Posted in Four Tet, Interviews | 2 Comments »
February 23rd, 2010
Rapper/producer yU is probably best known as one third of D.C. rap supergroup Diamond District with X.O. and Oddisee, but he’s been toiling for years in Washington’s underground scene. He also stakes membership in the Remainz Crew and the 1978ers, a production team formed with fellow beatmaker Slimkat78. Last year saw the free release of y’s Before Taxes, a 16 track album comprised of leftovers from his official solo debut The Earn. That Before Taxes is so consistent and cohesive despite being compiled from b-sides stands as testament to yU’s forceful, agile rhyming and exceptional ear for beats.
In anticipation of The Earn’s release later this year, the rapper born Michael F. Willingham reveals his back story, his influences and illuminates the state of D.C.’s hip hop scene. –Aaron Matthews
What was your first experience with hip-hop?
My moms was into hip-hop. I remember seeing Breakin’, Beat Street at the movie theatre. Her music collection, she had the first Tribe album, Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s Mecca & The Soul Brother. My first stepbrother used to perform at talent shows. He would call the radio station and rhyme, freestyle or whatever. Actually that was the first time I actually seen somebody doing it. He put me onto “Showtime at the Apollo,” the latest show I’d ever seen come on. EPMD was on there with DJ Scratch and he was doing tricks and stuff.
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Posted in Diamond District, Aaron Matthews, Interviews | No Comments »
February 16th, 2010
Jay Electronica may have been the obvious choice as 2009’s “rapper that everyone could agree on,” but the only other outfit as unanimously lauded was Washington D.C.’s Diamond District, a super-group of sorts formed from two of the DMV’s best rappers (X.O. and yU) and arguably its best producer (Oddisee.) While In the Ruff may have served as the national introduction to X.O., the 24-year old Northeast and Northwest D.C. native had already garnered a sterling local rep for his solo mixtapes, inking a deal to the Studio 43 label run by former Roc-A-Fella exec Kenny Burns, and collaborating with many of the region’s major artists including Wale, Best Kept Secret, and Tabi Bonney.
Blessed with a highly versatile rhyme style, Jamaal Walton’s laid-back flow is equally comfortable over everything from Fela Kuti to Go-Go tinted beats, to straightforward rugged boom-bap. Combined with a lyrical style that stays bent between detailed street narratives and good old-fashioned shit talking, his most recent mixtape, last month’s One.One. Ten, successfully builds on his buzz, and is bound to be of the young year’s most enjoyable. This is some of the story behind Unknown Origins.
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Posted in DMV, Diamond District, X.O., Interviews | 3 Comments »
January 27th, 2010
Edan the DJ make Fast-Rap and Funky Drummer mixtapes. Edan the rapper make Prince Paul, LL Cool, and The Hollies play nice. Jewish critical cabal say, “Beauty and The Beat better than The Go-Gos.” Edan release Echo Party. We Like Very Much. Edan talk to Passion of the Weiss from Brooklyn Flea Market. Edan purchase Gold Label pressing of “Forever Changes.” Edan have good taste.
How did you link up with the people at Traffic Records to make Echo Party?
A long time ago, when I lived in Boston, I used to make these old cassette hip-hop mixes, you know with whatever was cool at the time, Nas, Gangstarr, etc. I put my phone number on the mixes for some networking shit. So one day this guy Matt Welch called me to tell me that he liked it and we ended up becoming friends and roommates. I indirectly got him a job at LandSpeed, the company that became Traffic. Landspeed didn’t exactly have the best reputation, but they eventually got it together, shuffled around some staff and became Traffic. Now they’re a lot more reputable and a more formal business that distributes records all over the world.
Traffic was getting this new label off the ground called 5 day weekend. They started with a Peanut Butter Wolf project called 45 Live, which was all mixes of 7-inches. Then they approached me about maybe doing a mix of stuff that they had in their back catalogue. It wasn’t supposed to be as elaborate as it ended up being, but I’m a passionate artist and I ended up giving them more, cutting up doubles of “Smoking Cheeba Cheeba” and all kinds of stuff like that. I haven’t done anything in a while and I sort of view this as an interim project, but I put all my life into it. Life is too precious and art is too precious to fuck around and half-ass it, so I went all-out.
How was your approach different from the Fast Rap and Funky Drummer tapes?
Those were almost more of documentarian type things; this was more of an artistic project. It’s more than a mix to me. Really, if you’re calling it a mix you’re underselling it. The precedent is those old classic Hollywood disco mixes, those old cut up records. I don’t know. It seems unique to some degree, at least I hope it does.
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January 21st, 2010
Had Blockhead chased trends or devised a corny back-story to match his noirish smoked-out instrumental hip-hop, it’s likely that he would’ve garnered more acclaim and media attention. But that’s not what the New York City producer is about. With a no bullshit approach and a caustic wit, the man born Tony Simon has racked up one of underground hip-hop’s most estimable and underrated resumes, crafting some of Aesop Rock’s best songs, the greatest comedy rap album ever made, and four excellent solo efforts on Ninja Tune. His most recent, The Music Scene, further illustrates why he’s one of the best beat-makers to emerge from the 2000s. Plus, his blog is on-point. If you disagree you are a mental stockbroker.
Did you ever get any blowback from the Party Fun Action Committee record?
Well, I have a friend Dub L who produced some of the early Aesop stuff, and he worked with Paul Barman. I think Paul Barman heard it, but I don’t know what he thought about it. He could only think so much.
How did you even come up with the idea?
We had this public access show in the 90s, which had loosely improvised sketches and it got a little following in New York. Aesop used to be on it, Adrian Grenier was on it. It stopped in the early 2000s and Jer and I started making comedy songs for fun. So we’d amassed four or five song by the time Aesop got signed to Def Jux, and I guess somehow El heard the songs. Mind you, at the time Def Jux was at its peak, Aesop and Can Ox had just came out and they hadn’t had a miss and El was like ‘Yo I’ll put that out.’ We were like, ‘word, really?’ This was around the same time I got signed to Ninja Tune and I thought it would show a different side to my personality.
How did you even come up with those characters?
A lot of it was improvised and it just got more and more crazy as it went on. The idea was that these dudes were the worst guys on the planet and they knew nothing about music, so they became A&R’s. We put it together as a complete album, El put it out, and everyone hated it. People were like this is awful.
Your Def Jux blog has been filled with hilarious invective directed towards Lil Wayne and other contemporary rappers. Do you listen to much new rap anymore?
As much as I love rap, I can’t name five rappers in the last three years who I don’t personally know, who I’m checking for.
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Posted in Blockhead, Interviews | 12 Comments »
January 18th, 2010
Parts of this interview originally ran last Friday at Pop & Hiss. Words from the Genius.
How did you end up collaborating with The Black Lips and King Khan?
Originally, it came about through my manager Heathcliff [Berru]. The bands were fans of Wu-Tang and I and we decided to perform together. It worked out well; they’re good musicians and we have a mutual admiration and love. The thing is, they were already connecting with me in some way first. I’d never heard their music before, but I was feeling it and when I saw both of those groups perform live, I knew I could work with them. The vibe was there.
Much of current hip-hop — particularly the more mainstream iteration — is characterized by glossy shiny-sounding production. Did some of your desire to work with the Black Lips and King Khan stem from the similarity of their lo-fi aesthetic to the beats you came up rhyming on?
That’s my problem with the stuff today — it doesn’t sound raw and uncut. When the Black Lips sent a track over to me, I thought it sounded like a Beastie Boys track, the way the singer was singing and flowing on it. He was right in the pocket. You don’t get hip-hop that sounds that gritty anymore, you get some Auto-tune, ping-pong computer-made and Casio stuff.
And the collaboration with Devendra Banhart?
I met Devendra at Coachella. I watched him and Gang Gang Dance perform and thought they both put on really great performances. I was like ‘who is this guy,’ because he was rocking, and it turned out that he was a big fan. When I met him, he told me what an honor it was and how much he loved “Liquid Swords” and Wu-Tang. So it was a beautiful connection.
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Posted in GZA, Interviews | 3 Comments »
January 5th, 2010
Let’s be honest, a significant portion of the purple/wonky/whatever tunes–even the exceptional ones–lack personality. Enter Rudi Zygadlo, yet another of the Scottish-bred beat contingent, who have spent the last year and change convincing the seven Americans paying attention that Glasgow is far more than the sum of Belle & Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand, and cheap stereotypes involving Groundskeeper Willie and his retirement grease. Like Mike Slott, Hudson Mohawke, and Rustie, Zygadlo operates at the hazy intersection of hip-hop and dubstep, and despite the reductive simplifications they’ve engendered, like anything truly creative, their styles are singular.
Inspired by classical, church liturgies, opera, folk, Zappa, and early ’00s early hip-hop, Zygaldo’s music stands out from his peers for his eclecticism and deep devotion to song-craft, boasting well-constructed hooks, bridges, and breakdowns. Calling these “beats” does them a grave disservice, with their brain-frying synths, ruthless groove, and symphonic inclinations most closely resembling Guido and Nosaj Thing. Hearing Zygadlo on a Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC1 mix for the first time, engendered a stop-whatever-it-is-that-you’re-doing epiphany, one that immediately made me want to know more about the man who will soon be eliciting a spate of bad “Rudi Can’t Fail” headlines. A Google search brought back little information other than mentioning that he used to play in an indie-rock group called The Velcro Quartet. Thus, this interview needed to happen. Zygaldo’s first full-length, Great Western Laymen, drops in April on Planet Mu. If it’s anywhere as good as the singles and remixes (everything from Hot Chip to “White Lines”) collected on the Hobbs mix he dropped last month, it promises to be one of the year’s most memorable debuts, even better than “The Shinning.”
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Posted in Rudi Zygadlo, Beats, Interviews | 1 Comment »
November 9th, 2009
Parts of this interview originally appeared in my Pop and Hiss article on Wale. More on Attention Deficit tomorrow, maybe.
So judging from the title of Attention Deficit, its wide-ranging sound, and interviews that you’ve given, it seems like it’s your commentary on the fragmented nature of the Internet world, with a million blogs, twitters, and dozens of mixtapes released daily, How hard is it for an artist to create something that has a life span longer than the next blog post?
I think a lot of the blogs are selfish, they don’t really care. There might be five or six really legit hip-hop blogs, your Rap Radars, your Nah Rights, your 2 Dope Boyz, and others, but some that are very minuscule, if you don’t give them what they want, they’re going to shit on you. I think that their visitors aren’t even 1/1000th of another blog that you’ve already done an interview for and they want one to do one with them too.
Q-Tip one time told me that 15 years ago, all people had to judge you on was your album, one or two interviews, your record for the radio and picture on the album cover. That’s it. The only way you can remain relevant is to give yourself up, unless you’re blessed every once in a while there’s a Drake situation, but that’s not even once in a while, that’s a once thing.
But that’s pretty much a different stuation unto itself. A lot of people watched Degrassi, a lot of girls watched Degrassi.
And now they’re more mature and can hear words like fuck and shit. Look, I’m happy for what happened to dude. But the game is just completely impossible now. You have to give yourself up. That’s why I’m so frequently on Twitter, it’s because I don’t have a big record out right now. I don’t have a lot of things to explain and prepare people for the person they’re about to listen to.
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Posted in Wale, Interviews, LA Times | 21 Comments »
August 19th, 2009
When he’s not cooking up something marvelous in the lab, Disco Vietnam drops basic instructions before leaving earth via Twitter.
Three minutes after our interview with Austin-based producer’s Eli Elkin, AKA Memory Man, a tweet appeared on Twitter (as they are wont to do) from the Chef himself.
@RAEKWONICEWATER Ayo foreal i dont know who made that new mixtape “Cuban Revolution” been gettn alot of phone calls bout it but Salute who put it out! THANKS
The responsible party is, of course, Memory Man whose Cuban Revolution tape is easily one of the hottest releases to drop in the last … 18 hours or so. The tape succeeds in authentically reproducing the Wu-Tang’s elusive and unique sonic aesthetic, while elevating some perhaps unfairly dismissed Raekwon verses in anticipation of the forthcoming Only Built For Cuban Linx II.
Passion of the Weiss’ contributor Sach O enthusiastically posted the tape yesterday. Today we got to speak with its creator because we’re fucking nice like that.
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Posted in Interviews, Disco Vietnam | 3 Comments »
