Thursday, April 13, 2006

Coast on by
Check out Coast on Maori TV tonight at 9.30pm - they've got an interview with Damian Marley (Son of Bob) and the interviewer is Ahmen Mahal (Son of Taj Mahal) . Their fathers were friends, but never collaborated together. Ahmen sings with Rhombus and has a bunch of crazy-ass aliases, like Olmecha Supreme, Murk108 and Imon Star. Check it.


I spent a thoroughly enjoyable few a hours last night at the Red Bull Studio, listening to Wajeed of Detroit's Platinum Pied Pipers talk about his musical experiences. He also did some hands-on production with the MPC, and I got to talk with him about remixes, which was cool. I've got three of em coming up soon, more on that later.

You can check out Wajeed's talk at last year's Red Bull Music Academy in Seattle over here - big video file (interviewer is Fat Freddy's Toby Laing), or text transcript for you low-fi cats. Entries for this year's Red Bull Music Academy have just opened, keep an eye out for application forms at your favorite record store - it comes with a cool CDRom of some of last years interviews. If you can't find it, check the Red Bull Academy site for your local rep's contact details.

Wajeed is in town for a gig - catch him DJing tonight along with Prefuse 73 at Galatos.

SNIP... from Red Bull Seattle lecture...
"My dad said if you want to be really, really good at something, if you want to be great, lock yourself in your room and do that thing for one year. And that’s what I did. I took my MPC and all these records that I’d collected all these years. I knew what every break was because I was a DJ. I knew like Paul McCartney or The Beatles, I knew records like the back of my hand, and I locked myself in my apartment for a year.

It started almost as a dare. Jay Dee had this beat machine [an MPC 2000] laying in his basement, and ?uestlove[The Roots] had broken the beat machine. He’d got some disc tangled up in it, I don’ know. But it started as a dare. “Yo, if you can get that disc out of there you can take this machine home and use it.” So I took it as a challenge. Great, ok, I got the disc out and he was: “Great, take it home.”

So I took it home for a weekend, no manual or anything, just based on ‘alright, I’m going to make this thing work’. So I made four tracks and left a message on Jay Dee’s voicemail, saying: “This is what I did, I know it’s kind of wack but check it.” So I played them on his answering machine and he called me back immediately. “What was that?” I was: “That’s just something I was messing around with.” “That’s pretty good man, play it again.” I was thinking I might have something here, let me re-evaluate this.

So after that I had the encouragement from my crew. “Yo, you could really do some things with this.” I locked myself in my apartment for a year. No, I’m telling you man, I had this big willie lumberjack beard. It was wild! So I locked myself in my apartment for a year, every day, chopping up records. My schedule would be getting up late afternoon because I’d always be up late at night, into the morning.

So I’d say: “You knock out two beats and you can get a glass of water.” For real. I’d have this military voice in my ear telling me to knock out these two beats so I could get a glass of water. I’d be thirsty, thinking: “Damn man, I’ve got to knock out these beats fast.” So I’d knock out two tracks and before I could get up the voice would say: “Ok, make another one, then you can get the glass of water.”


Wajeed told this story last night, and added that he got that stuck disc out in about 5 seconds flat, cos he'd been to college - he went for 7 years, and studied a variety of things, including doing jewellery, so he had excellent steady fingers etc.

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