3rd Annual All Rap Round Robin @ Load Of Fun
7/3/2009
120 W North Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland 21201
Cost: $5

Mad heads spit - King Rhythm, Height With Friends, Jones, Mickey Free and Secret Weapon Dave, PT Burnem, The Plural MC, AK Slaughter, Food For Animals, and Rapdragons

I’m listening to Another Green World by Brian Eno and memories flood my mind of the first time I heard this record.  It was around 2001 and I worked at a really cool indie book/ record store - many interesting people and adventures.  Here’s the anomaly.  I’m in the year 2009, listening to a record recorded in 1975, yet reminded of my life in 2001!  Wow:)
I think we as a society have a tedancy to limit ourselves to automatically date our memories and experiences to current situations and events surrounding us from the same time period.  To realize that art can and cannot be a current event simultaneously shows that it transcends time - this is something truly amazing.  Real art, quality art cannot be pinned to a time, it can be an integral part of any time period no matter what time period it was concieved in.  Is this a very basic form of quantum mechanics?

I love Parliament but I’ve always felt that Funkadelic was iller.
Kind of like how I feel that Band of Gypsies was much tighter than The Experience.

Good things are going down.  I’ve almost finished the artwork for Hardships & Head Trips.  It’s a psychedelic collage of colors blended with pictures from my studio.  It looks real fresh.  All I need to do now is design the back and get all the credits and fonts just right.  I feel pretty fulfilled because with the exception of mastering, I’ve done everything on this record with my own two hands - production, rapping, engineering and now the artwork.  
It  is really strenuous though and I do wish I had some people helping me out, but things just didn’t work out that way for this record so I had to do it all myself.  In the future I will do the best to include more people in the mix.  

Oh, the extra fresh news is that it’s going to be a vinyl release (yay) so get ready!

Why is it that rhyming over a 4/4 beat for the most part sounds cheesy?  I can’t come to a definitive and conclusive reason for the life of me.   I have all these ideas in my head for some hard 4/4 dance type music with rhyming over it.  The tracks that I’ve made so far are awesome but once I lay the verses down it just all turns to crap.  It’s not my lyrics, it’s not my flow - I’ve tried everything and the only conclusion that I can come to is that adding rhymes to a 4/4 beat evokes the feeling of corniness or a fun time at best.  Something happens when you replace that snare with the kick on the 2 and the 4.  The faster the track the worse the results.  Anybody remember Happy Hardcore with vocal tracks on 45 or 78?!?  Snares not kicks on the 2 and 4 just seem to be some intrinsic foundation for Hip-Hop verses to sound good, deviate too far from that formula and it all goes wrong.  I’m frustrated, I’m not somebody that believes in musical limitations.  I believe anything is possible, so for now I’m going to keep hammering away and see if I can figure out the secret ingredients.  I think I’m missing something.  I must be doing something wrong.  
On the other hand, If you think about it there has really never been a specific genre based around the premise of rapping over dance beats.  Remixes aren’t a genre.  Early 80’s Hip-Hop used a lot of Disco but I believe that’s a little different.   The closest we’ve ever come is Hip-House and that lasted about a minute… maybe that’s all the evidence needed.

If anybody has any thoughts on this, hit me up.

Great video, check the cinematography.

I used to be in a group called The Utopian Downslide.  It consisted of me and 4 other friends.  We made many different styles of music and even made it to the top with a song released on a CD with Good Charlotte (so awesome).  The group splintered off into a Hip-Hop duo called The Downslide (pic above) and it consisted of me and one of the other guys from the main group.  As some of you might know we had a 12″ released and if you have a copy today you’re freakin’ rich.

Recently I’ve been listening nonstop to an amazing record called Birdseed by the group Emily Rugburn.  In a way it reminds me of some of my past musical endeavors, Downslide included, though listening to it you might not hear the connection.  After rocking Birdseed for who knows how many times, I vaguely recalled a Downslide song that was recorded a few years after the 12″ but never completed.  It took me hours to find the files because they were on a CDr labeled “more random stuff 4″.  After multiple failed attempts at loading it in SX 4 and even more failed attempts in other legacy versions of Cubase, I was able to get it up and running in VST 5.2 (trusty OS9).  I don’t know why this song wasn’t finished, it’s so dope and all it really needed was a vocal mix, a few tweaks here and there and some automation.  So, inspired by the Birdseed I set off on a mission which I can happily say I just completed.

It’s called 7 Days and it is in 7/8 time (challenging time signature for Hip-Hop).  We played all the instruments:  Fuzz Guitar, Electric Bass, Magnus Organ, & Oboe (strangely enough I do know how to play the oboe).  The drums were programed by yours truly and a special guest appearance from Raoul Duke and The Good Doctor make the song complete.  The great thing about this recording is that it’s well before programmers had either figured out how to remove all of the aliasing from vst effects or weren’t able to do so without using considerable amounts of resources, so basically it has a bunch of unintended clicks and pops throughout which I shall now deem intended.

From the file dates it seems we recorded the instruments on Mon Sept 15th and Tues Sept 16th 2003 and recorded the vocals on Fri Sept 26th.  Such a long time ago, but why does it not seem dated at all?  Could it be I hadn’t listened to any Hip-Hop in a few years and created the song totally in a vacuum?  All I can really say is wft, what were we on, where were our heads at?  Seems like a little slice of magic left floating from another time…

After well over 5 years I’m happy to finally present the song 7 Days, enjoy!

One too many pbr’s and unfortunately I look like this^

This past sunday I got to catch Martin Atkins give his lecture on touring.  I’ve had a couple things released on his label and I’ve talked to him on and off through the years but this was the first time I got to hang with him.  If your not familiar with his work, check the resume.  You’ve probably moved around to something of his and didn’t even know it.  Soaking up game from a 30 year vet is an amazing experience.  I’m not one of those people that slings the term genius around loosely but he comes pretty damn close in my book.  All in all quite an inspiring and informative night.  If he comes to your town do yourself a favor and check him out.

What’s up everybody!  Welcome to my new website.  I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve had a functional website.  I thought certain things were going to happen that never did, so as usual I had to take matters into my own hands.  I’ve been wanting to have a better web presence and now I have the means to do so.  I decided to make this mainly a blog so I can update easily and often.  It’s still a work in progress so hold tight while I get everything set up.

Let’s get down to the music.  I currently have 2 new records finished:

1.  Hardships & Head Trips  - This is my latest and greatest.  It’s massive and progressive.  One part Psychedelic, one part Shoegaze, one part Prog, and half Hip-Hop.  Dust some some Classical, Jazz Fusion and a little bit of weirdness and there you have it.  I set out to make a truly original Hip-Hop record and I can confidently say I did that and much more.  I rhyme on the whole record with the exception of one instrumental track and I have 1 guest appearance by K-the-I??? of Mush and Big Dada Records fame.  There is a part of me that feels that I will never be able to do better than this record, but the reality is that I will never do a record quite like this again.  I will never invest this much time into any single song/ album - what I set out to do was far too much for one person to fulfill on their own.  It was overwhelming and drained me completely.  My life fell to shit making it but it is done and I’m still here.  Nonetheless, it is a sick record and it’s coming soon.  The other side in the sun with evidence in hand feels mighty nice.  I’ve also been fortunate enough to have a lot of awesome musicians do remixes so you can look forward to a companion release of remixes as well.

2.  Thieves Versus Clues - This is a record that I just finished with my friend and amazing musician Colin Johnco - It is a full on collaboration between us so it will be titled as so:  King Rhythm / Colin Johnco.  This record is the culmination of work done from June 07 to  halfway into December 08.  Almost 2 years of sending files back and forth over the net between here and France:)  It’s a pretty avant-garde record.  When we get closer to release I will talk more about it.

——

Right now I’m back in the studio writing new material and I’m more excited than I’ve ever been about what I’m coming up with.  For the first time in my life I’m making a complete right turn from what I’ve done in the past.  I’ve always made very elaborate and fully thought out songs, compositions if you will.  Even when I was writing Drum &  Bass, my music was never fully for the dance floor because it had too much of a structure.  I’ve always liked parts and changes too much to settle for simple repetition.   The songs that you can listen to over and over and hear new things each listen is what I dig most, each song like its own world.  At the same time I’m one of those musicians that never does the same thing twice.  I just don’t see the point!  While some cats 5th record sounds the same as their first, I’m busy trying new things and reinventing myself.  My first record was Drum & Bass meets Hip-Hop.  Hardships & Head Trips is Psychedelic and Prog meets Hip-Hop.  Thieves Versus Clues is of avant-garde proportions and this new material will continue in the tradition of evolution with no exception.

It is safe to say however that I’ve laid to rest my love of psychedelics and strict crate digging. That’s seems like a fairly strange and outlandish statement to make but they have been a staple in my music for a long time.  All good things must come to an end and with the completion of Hardships & Head Trips I can do no more.  I can’t surpass that.  Nuff respect to crate diggers and psychedelic lovers of all kinds, these aesthetics will always hold a warm place in my heart but it’s time for me to move on and strangely enough in a way back to where I started.  I’m going in a more minimal direction, no more elaborate songs and arrangements.  Things are happening now and for the first time in a while that I find very inspiring and I feel as though my history has given me the ability to fully embrace and contribute to the sound.  I know this is all somewhat vague but in time it will make sense.

till soon