STATE OF THE ARTIST
THE LA PRODUCTION POWERHOUSE SHARES SOME THOUGHTS
What have you been up to recently? "Production-wise, I've been focused on wrapping up the new Busdriver album, and working on material from Shapeshifters and Awol, as well as various Eps."
How would you describe your production style? "I'm pretty bad at describing my own stuff, but I like to think that I'm versatile. I've spent the last few years trying to demonstrate that I can do the dark vibes and the light vibes, and everything in between."
If you could work with anyone, living or dead, who would it be? "Alive, Kurt Elling. Deceased, Miles Davis."
What was the first production you ever did? "I got an old Akai S01 sampler back in college. That thing was janky as fuck, but I MIDI-ed it up to my computer at the time and made some of the worst beats in history. That was all circa '93, '94ish."
What was the most recent? "Most recent would be some of the Busdriver material. Nowadays all of my production happens in ProTools, so I feel like I'm able to do a lot more than I was with a drum machine and sampler."
What's the best record you've heard in the last six month's that you weren't involved in? "There's an underground group out here called Dyslexic Speed Readers. It's on a comedy-rap type vibe and it gets really cheesy at some points, but the lyrics are truly remarkable."