Happy Valium

A few months back I entered a competition known as the crate diggers death match. It was a strange competition that pitted producers of different styles against one another in an Iron Chef like way. One of the organizers and competitors of the Death Match was an artist named Doc Popular.

Doc Popular seems like an all around good guy, he's a yo-yo champion, a hand made craft creator, and a musician. Awhile back he asked me to remix a track from his new album Me Geek Pretty One Day. Of course I initially said no but changed my mind because I got an unexpected vacation from work.

The track I worked on was called Happy Valium. I actually chose to remix the song without listening to the original first so that I could get a clearer vision of where to take it. It was strange, when the accapella first came over the speakers thoughts of an old favorite popped into my head, De La Soul's "Roller Skating Jam named Saturday". This song, produced by Prince Paul one of my all time influences, has a great laid back vibe that is perfect for rollerskating in circles to.

With the De La track in mind I dug through some of my samples that were already chopped and never used and found just what I was looking for, which is the main portion of the loop. I threw in an intro from a pharmaceutical companies webcast (since it fit the point of the song) a siren, a drum break, and some levitra commercial snippets and called it a day. That's pretty much the story behind the song.

Of course after remixing the track I checked the Drown Radio album in detail while on a trip to Maryland and found that it was full of suprises. To me it represents Doc Popular to the fullest, it is electronic based with acoustic touches, it's digital but made with a human feel. It's like digital craft project made by hand. It features a little bit of everything from circuit bending to singing. The hottest track to me is LOLCatz, which is playing on the funny Lolcatz site.

Do yourself a favor and pick up this album, it's only $8 and you'll support a true independent artist in the process.

Chubby Chaser Nation

My crew The Chubby Chasers made it into this months Blender magazine. We are really proud of this and it totally blew our mind. Buying a bunch of magazines at Borders that contain your picture in it is a really surreal experience, although you don't want to brag you just want to tell the cashier that you are actually in the magazine. I almost told the cashier, Kid Creation actually did tell the cashier.



If you haven't heard of our group, we are the premiere hip hop group that is dedicated to the love of plus sized women. Don't hate! The three of us (Kid Creation, Drunk C and I) are childhood friends and we never thought we would make it this far. If you haven't checked us out yet at least visit the myspace page and give it try, you might like it.

The Magic of My Cars Trunk

Everyone wants a new car but the benefits of having an old used up car that's running on its last leg are numerous, especially for music lovers like me (and all of you).

For us our old cars act as musical time capsules that are capable of taking us on an audio journey through memory lane. It seems like they intentionally hide things from their owners then reveal them when their existence is about to slip from memory.

I've had the same car since 1995 which means my car has been with me for my entire adult life. This also means that my car is hiding a lot from me. I’ll never understand how an Ultramagnetic MC’s tape will somehow wiggle its way up from beneath the backseat and slowly make its way under my brake pedal.

In 1995 I first started making beats using software called Hammerhead Rhythm Station, it was free and it was the illest thing that I had ever seen in my life. You could use their included drums or you could even input your own sounds. Hammerhead had a ton of limitations but that’s what made me be creative. It forced me to input very lo-fi sounds (16 bit, 22 khz, mono, raw format) but the tracks came out raw, they were like wu-tang demos that got left out in the rain.



I remember having to program drums then export them, put in a guitar sample then export it, put in a bass sample then export that, this process would keep going until all the layers were complete. Then I’d take these layers and actually mix them on top of each other in Cool Edit (the O.G. free version, one track only). This was a one shot deal with maybe one level of undo, no equalizer and a real crude volume control but it the process was addicting.

There’s no way to accurately count the number of songs that were created in my bedroom using this system but there must have been hundreds. Some of these are on floppy disks and some actually got dropped to cassette tapes with lyrics on top (using a really funky system).

Now it seems that every time I start to think about how terrible modern software is one of these hammerhead beat tapes seems to slowly make its way from my trunk into the passenger section of my car. As soon as I pop the cassette into the tape player my mind hits the time portal and I’m taken back to a time when I thought hammerhead was the future and I’m reminded that creativity evolves from our limitations.



When it’s my time to finally trade my car in, it will be a sad day because for the past 10+ my car has been making mixtapes for me, reminding me of where I was in my life, who my friends were, and how I got to the present. It will be a sad day to have to dig into the spare tire well, the dark corners of the trunk, the lint filled underbelly of the backseat, and the crumb lined carpet beneath the drivers chair to uncover those memories for the last time. Of course I can display the memories in a case or on a bookshelf, but music is meant to be heard, and silent cassettes will stare me in the eye like a solar eclipse. I’ll feel the sounds of my past fade away while I hope to recapture just a small bit of their essence in my sounds of today.




Now to make this post a little more upbeat, today I was lucky enough to find Hammerhead Rhythm Station online so I dug up some of my old 3.5 floppy discs. I popped them into the drive and found that one was now blank and the other was now a backup Quicken diskette.

That leaves with only three hammerhead songs that I know of which are Generate Momentum, Rejuvenate, and Fat People (this is 10 years before the debut of the The Chubby Chasers). These tracks were all recorded in 1995-1996 using some samples downloaded from the old AOL sound archive. I can only upload one of the tracks because the others are still on cassette only, so enjoy listening to the awesome beat making and rhyming talents that I possessed a little over 10 years ago.

Rock The Vote: This Ain't The NH Primary

No, I'm not talking about the primary elections here, I'm talking about something much more important: voting for the best song in the Crate Digger Death Match. You can vote HERE, my song "It's True They Have Elevators" was going back and forth for first place with Bomarr of Anticon Fame.

We both currently have more votes than Bill Richardson received in NH but that's for discussion on somebody else's blog. Right now is also a good time to thank everyone who has voted for me, from the beginning I figured there was no chance to win the popular vote so win or lose it will feel good to know we made a contest out of it.

I'm not asking everyone to vote for me but at least vote for someone because finishing the album was a difficult endeavor. Only 7 producers completed the task and they all deserve props for kicking some major booty. My personal favorite single is from Snake Eyes, his song is unbelievable. Also while you're there DL Doctor Popular's album, he had some technical issues but finished the next day. Very dope album.


The fan vote is 1/5 of the final score, the other 4/5 belong to the 4 human judges that will be announcing the winner on Friday.

If you don't know what I'm talking about read the previous post, it talks all about the contest.

Also if you're thinking of subscribing to this blog I'll give you a synopsis of what it's about: Everyone listens to music and has music linked to memories and specific moments in lives. This blog is going to talk about the music that I make and how it connects to my life. Basically it's the soundtrack of my life or "This is the score" of my life.

Plus If you visit you'll constantly get free original mp3's and albums and I've heard my music is great as background music when nobody is listening.

Crate Digger Death Match

Yesterday was a busy day, I entered this competition called the Crate Digger Death Match . The idea behind the contest is to see what different musicians can create in a short amount of time with a limited budget. For this contest each contestant was limited to $12 worth of shopping at thrift stores and 12 hours of music production. At the thrift stores anything that makes sound could be purchased, for me I purchased 7 records, others purchased childrens toys, cd's, vhs tapes and some other crazy things. With your supplies we had to complete a minimum of 6 2 minute tracks. The winner will be chosen through fan voting and by four judges, you can listen to all of the contestants singles and vote HERE. The organizers also added three last minute rules (like the iron chef secret ingredient) to throw a kink in peoples plans. The three rules were:

1. One item has to be from the 80's. For me this was a Wham UK record
2. One song has to have a major element that involves a sound played backwards or circuit bending. I used a major melody in one track played backwards, a second song also has a bunch of reversed components as well.
3. One song has to be either a dance or country song. I chose to make a dance song, specifically a breakdancing song. I made this the last track and modeled it after an old school break party.

Here's a list of the vinyl that I purchased:

• Clouds by Joni Mitchell: Used this one quite a bit. She's the devil on the album
• Everyday People (Self Titled): This was extremely funky and it looks like it sales for over $100 retail. Mine is heavily scratched though. Damn good. This is why we crate dig.
  
• Inside by Paul Horn: Thought this was going to be really cool but it turned out that it's a guy playing his flute inside the Taj Mahal. So much reverb and the record was super scratched.
• Saturday Night Fever by Various Artists: For hip hop you need drums, but surprisingly I got more drums from the next record.
• Fantastic by Wham U.K.: This record had tons of cool drum hits plus I scratched the whoo and ughh grunts in a couple songs. This was probably the most used record
• On The Threshold of a Dream by Moody Blues: A little bit of everything on this one plus I found a Masta Ace sample (one of my favorite artists).
  
• Winter Into Spring by George Winston: I thought I'd get some nice piano from this one but it was so boring. There was one track that used this one but it got axed.
• For a moment I almost went for a Pavorotti/Fogerty duet but changed my mind.
  

This was really difficult for a lot of different reasons besides the limitations, for one thing I usually make beats for people to rap over which is totally different than making instrumental compositions. A beat can actually be very simple and sparse because the vocals provide the main element.

I started the whole thing off by visiting a Goodwill and a Salvation Army, lucky for me they are next to each other. The record choices were sort of slim (besides Everyday People) at both but I managed to pick up seven records at $1 & $1.99 each. After shopping I pulled samples off each of the records. At this point about 4 hours of my time had been spent and not even one track had been started.

Production was challenging, trying to convert the samples into songs in such a short amount of time was messing with my brain. I tried a lot of different things, chopping samples, scratching, looping, making kits for drums, playing samples with the keyboard, bass filters, and pretty much anything else I could think of. The tracks all sort of took on personalities of their own and the finished products are some songs that are really unlike things I've made before. The contest really did open my mind up.

For my 6 tracks I had to create a way for each song to keep the listeners attention. Besides that and some minor equipment bugs (major static which you can hear in one song), it wasn't all that bad, just challenging and inspiring. In the end I came up with a 6 track album called "Up or Down". It has story to it which is hard to express without vocals but I'll explain it here so you can have an idea when you listen.

It's about a break dancer that isn't quite good enough. He questions whether he should sell his soul to the devil to become a better breaker (Track 1). He has visions of heaven and hell in his sleep (Tracks 2 & 3) and has to deal with the devil trying to trick him into selling his soul (Track 4). Eventually he chooses the route of ascension (Track 5) even though the devil is still fresh in his mind (listen to the growls). Once he's ascended he finds himself at the gates of heaven where he is asked to pass the final test (Track 6): A break dancing contest mixed by GOD himself (on to 1200's). Whether he goes or not is up to you.

That's the album, it's not the best, it's a little sloppy and the music is strange but who cares, it was fun and it only cost $12 and half a day. The organizers of this did a great job and I can't wait to hear all the other albums that were produced by the 12 contestants.

You can download it here: "Up or Down" by D-Form or visit my Myspace for some low quality versions. Here's the tracklist as well.

1. From Below
2. It's True They Have Escalators
   
3. Antispinbackward
4. She (devil)s Talking to Me
5. It Sounds Better Than Hell
6. Pass the Test

Here are all the tracks from the album in order. Later on I'll add some production notes if anyone is interested.