TOWNFOLK

2.25 Monday minutes to kill

Mon, 28 May 2012 21:56:04 -0400

2.25 Monday minutes to kill

Why don't you rap!

Mon, 28 May 2012 21:50:47 -0400

good question. i should probably start huh?

ALT ARTWERKZ

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:29:25 -0400

ALT ARTWERKZ

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:28:21 -0400

ALT ARTWERKZ

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:27:52 -0400

ALT ARTWERKZ

DOWNLOAD new beat tape y’all. now go party and celebrate...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:54:00 -0400

DOWNLOAD

new beat tape y’all.

now go party and celebrate as if it were the King of Festivals!

TOWNFOLK INSTRO CHRONICZ NUMERO OCHO. between 2009-2010 I...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:22:42 -0400

TOWNFOLK INSTRO CHRONICZ NUMERO OCHO.

between 2009-2010 I produced 13 tracks for various artists and one clothing brand: Blue Scholars, Macklemore, Grynch, Das Racist, Fences, Bambu, Rocky Rivera, Burkman Bros. all but one were released for life on the Internet.

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16th AVE SW (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:51:50 -0400

16th AVE SW (Taken with instagram)

RAINIER sticker preview (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:12:20 -0400

RAINIER sticker preview (Taken with instagram)

get it here NAW RUZ MOBARAK!it’s the first day of Spring...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:32:05 -0400

get it here

NAW RUZ MOBARAK!

it’s the first day of Spring and i have new old instros direct from the TOWNFOLK studio to the holes above your earlobes.

in the spirit of cleaning house, i’ve dug even deeper in the crates (ok, computer folders) and compiled another tape of unreleased beats—some of which date back almost 9 years. this one is massive: a collection of beaterinos, slappers, nuggets, sketches, and concepts (finished and unfinished) never before heard until now and available for a limited time at a special New Year price of 5 bucker bills.

wishing you a happy and prosperous year, full of fresh starts and new beginnings, son!

new tape to kick off the month

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 20:12:20 -0500

new tape to kick off the month

How much would you charge my high school if you agreed to DJ our homecoming dance this year? That would honestly be SOOOO CRACKIN' to have you rock that!

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 01:46:56 -0500

thousands of dollars! email me and let’s GET IT CRACKIN’!!

what do you think was the most crucial component of finding your own individual voice and identity as a producer / musician?

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:46:29 -0500

finding my own individual voice and identity as a person, which is a never ending process.

have you released the instrumental for the same tattoos remix? so AWESOME!

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:34:59 -0500

that’ll be on a future Instro Chron collection with all the other remix and one-off tracks i did for various artists between 2009-2010

If you're willing to release that information, what's the sample on "plus sign" from maplewood playfield? i've always felt like i recognized it but i just can't place it.

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:32:23 -0500

if you read the RAVENNA essay, the answer to your question is in there :)

I'm not trying to sound like a cheap asshole, but why did you bump every installation of the Instrumental Chronicles up to $5? Wasn't it suppose to be free? :o I have no problem buying them, just curious.

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:28:22 -0500

you don’t sound like a cheap asshole, you’re just fact-checking :)

the first 6 issues of the Instrumental Chronicles were supposed to be free from Dec 25 to Dec 31, but so many ppl downloaded without paying that my account ran outta free downloads and Bandcamp itself automatically bumped the price up.

i just earned more download credits tho so they’ll be back to “pay what you want” until Jan 1.

DOWNLOAD

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:01:52 -0500

DOWNLOAD

download TOBACCO, 1 & 2contrary to the popular belief of...

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:42:00 -0500

download TOBACCO, 1 & 2

contrary to the popular belief of many who know me to be “the sober guy,” i don’t abstain from intoxicating substances because i dislike them or because i think they’re bad. i actually refrain from kickin it like that because i’d probably enjoy that activity too much.

whatever i do, i have a tendency to lean to the extreme. kinda like the explanations of these beats. choosing a more vice laden path in my younger years would have likely driven me to be far more successful socially and in my music career and ultimately ending up like Bradley Nowell (who was rad, btw.) however, since i’d like to actually live to see at least some of my 30s, blah blah etc etc.

so, in my late teens, eliminating alcohol, pills, and herb from my lifestyle ultimately boiled down to a habit of smoking copious amounts of tobacco. plenty of cigarettes were burned during the creation of these beats.

although it is becoming increasingly popular to consider cigarettes the worst thing in the world, there is some rationale behind this choice of vice. smoking can be a foul and offensive habit, no doubt. however, my experience has taught me that, contrary to mind-altering substances, tobacco doesn’t cause irreparable damage to my intuition, conscious creative thought, motivation, or my capacity to reflect. in a way, for me, it turned out to be the safest way to do something stupid to my body (something that a lot of American teenagers feel compelled to do for some reason?)

so, while the goal ideally is to live a life that is clean and healthy in all aspects, i choose to keep the preservation of my inner consciousness as the top priority because it’s actually the only tool i’ll be able to use in order to break free from material addictions and attachments in the first place. there might be a shred of circular logic in there somewhere, but hey, it worked for me.

also, i already quit smoking, so it’s whatever.

anyway, like many college students, i had also taken an interest in the armchair approach to studying the struggle of working people around the world. eventually i stumbled upon a book called Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell that tells a story of a family of poor white farmers in rural Georgia. it’s gotta dood named Dude in it.

the story is set during the worst years of the Great Depression when the business of many southern independent agriculturalists was pretty much destroyed. Jeeter, one of the main characters in the book, is deeply attached the land he grew up on and can’t seem to understand why he’s unable to get the resources he needs grow crops. despite the fact that he was poor, a little slow in the head, and everybody around him was comically ignorant, i didn’t see it simply as his lack of outward opportunity that kept him stuck in that rut. Jeeter’s failure had more to do with his unawareness (or unwillingness to see) that greater forces further than his locale—economic and cultural forces beyond his control—had shifted thereby making that craft he had to offer, or at least the way he had to offer it, no longer relevant.

there’s a striking parallel between this story and the tales of woe sung by so many artists that claim the “real hip-hop,” wink wink.

my buddy Ryan, the MC in Common Market, had grown up in Kentucky and would occasionally tell me stories about the various labor intensive jobs he’d worked in the South. coincidentally one of these was a brief stint in the tobacco fields. during one of our discussions i suggested the name of Caldwell’s book as the title of our next album and he said “heo yea.”

tobacco, the South, existential dilemmas, labor, the struggle for clean living, touring, debates about hip-hop, poor white people, a couple of pre-96 Dilla beat tapes i had on rotation in the Sentra hooptie—and the hilarious irony of naming a boom bappy record after a book about your boy Jeeter—all turned out to be the rather unique gamut of inspiration for this era of instrumentals.

TOBACCO, 1 is a sort of evolved, neo-‘96 era, minimalist sample based boom bappery. Good music for driving, studying, freestyling, thinking, chillin(g) and alladat.

TOBACCO, 2 is the more experimental, banger-arm of the this beat era that took a brief detour when i heard the Neutral Milk Hotel album in a coffee shop one afternoon featuring a minor in synthesizers.

(#2 comes out tomorrow)

download GLORIOUS MELANCHOLIA2006 was kind of a dark period. a...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 06:50:17 -0500

download GLORIOUS MELANCHOLIA

2006 was kind of a dark period. a lot of attention was on the war, housing was really expensive, nobody liked the president, and Dilla had just died. maybe this is what inspired me to make a bunch of beats that some would call melancholy, hopeful, or glorious. i liked that.

this collection moves away from the classic drum-break approach and explores a whole lot of snares and off-beat claps, the fusion of samples and synthesizers, and a handful of live instrumentation. a darker, electronic and also organic vibe.

these instrumentals served as the production bed for the second Blue Scholars LP, “Bayani”

DOWNLOAD The Maplewood Playfield a bulk of these tracks were...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:47:00 -0500

DOWNLOAD The Maplewood Playfield

a bulk of these tracks were composed during a period when the home studio was located in a cozy attic atop a house across the street from The Maplewood Playfield.

in the summertime we’d run extension cables from the house, over the trees, and across the street to the field to power turntables and speakers while the homie from Whitecenter who hooked me up with my first car grilled hella koobideh and joojeh kabob for about 30 of our friends.

the crazy landlady tried to remodel the house while we were living in it, at one point putting the kitchen entirely outta commission simultaneously talkin bout raising the rent. she also smelled hella bad.

The Maplewood Playfield contains (with a couple exceptions) the breakbeat-iest sounding instrumentals out of the first three collections and concludes the “drum-break era” of my production. these 15 tracks were selected to serve as the production bed for the eponymous Common Market album.