“It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done." -- The Hagakure. This is usually true, but not because of perceptions of those moving in or using those spirits passed... moreso about the present spirits love of that attention in "their time", and how each generation waves in a whole new order, a new spirit, but this is an arrangement between them. Dig it, there's folks who dabble into spiritual practices that understand this, and the illusion of power of it, really just the energy of the understanding of this and the understanding of the amount of potential energy and the ability to focus it in present moments to create realities.... you can do what you want in all honestly. You can return to the passed past ages and spirits, ways and understandings, but with the present vibration... the flavor and lingo, the styles of the present. Sounds confusing, but ok, dig this... you can be happy listening to swing music and big band today just as you can when it first came out. Now the whole age in which it came out was one of newness and revelation of that discovery, while today it's not a new thing to the world, but maybe new to you, so you'd be returning to that same spirit, experiencing happiness and swing music in the same way or spirit as those in the past. All depends on what your i's are focused on seeing. Having said that, this is a spot where a lot of newness and revelations and exploration of sounds and styles came about for us, so... in The Asylum where we live, there's a spot that opens up into it. Time travel is a mind making technique. Easier than you think because you think it's not easy.
Humble beginnings. So, way back when, in the great ignorance, when music was a new thing and sounds and vibrations were something i sat in and took a ride while watching the scenery... before i was driving as much as one could drive a Knight Industries Two-Thousand.... this was "The Lab." This was at Byrdo's mom's spot, also in Philly. You go upstairs to the back of the house, pretty much isolated from everything else. The house was on a row-home block. If you don't know what that is, picture a wall of houses with no gaps for pretty much the whole block. One row on one side. Another row on the other side. You could walk down the block just by jumping from porch to porch or stairs to stairs. hope he don't mind us posting this, but thinking back on all of these times, I bet he'd be glad to see all of this again. Sometimes we'd call it "The Nest" or just "Mom's" because Byrdo's mom was cool about us all packed up in there. Good times.
We'd go over there, Tyy and me, and kick it, learn about production. All of us are self taught. I don't even think Charlie took any lessons. We just made use of the time and applied ourselves to what we wanted to do. But this place is where a lot of that went down. First time on the mic was here. Byrdo and his homie Nico were doing a project called Def Theory, and at the same time he was in a group called Mixed Mediums, so he would always come back with stories of things happening, stuff he was learning, and we'd rap all the time so he was always pushing... "You can do this. It's easy. Here' get on the computer... I'll show you what i know. Might not be the official way of doing it, but it works..." And it worked. Learned how to do beats here, mixing, learned about mic presence... different styles of delivery. Also got really serious about lyrics here. It's cool when you come up with people who are into the same stuff, because you all push each other. It's a competition. A friendly one, but a serious one.
More than two thirds of the programs were freeware, bootlegs, and trial versions. We'd download stuff and just run it until we had to pay for it, and then delete it. Sometimes that deletion time came up quicker than you wanted, like you'd just be getting used to a program, but then... you'd have to get rid of it. I remember ripping samples and sounds off of the most unlikely places... taking aux plugs and plugging one end into a tv and the other end into the mic jack, and Byrdo standing at a vcr, and me on the computer, so we could time when to play movie clips and sounds, and record them on the computer, to keep the file sizes small. Play the tape, record, pause the recording, ffwd the tape to the next sample, pause it, then un-pause both to get the next sample, then pause the recording, ffwd to the next sample.... Not many folks knew there was a headphone jack in tv's back then. Other times, after the internet was invented and actually able to be in everyone's house... yes, i said that... we had the crap-arse NET-ZERO which would skip out and lag, and later on had AOL. We would get on and look up movie clips, commercials, anything unusual or rare, and plug one end of the aux cord into the headphone jack on the computer, and the other end into the mic jack on the computer, and press record and watch the levels so it didn't peak. Sometimes you got a loud buzz, but you could pull samples from ANYWHERE. Things were a lot more relaxed back then. Folks weren't so into suing everyone for using samples. I mean, yeah, there were laws and everything, but it wasn't as tight as it was later on after the whole Napster thing and folks started worrying about Net-Neutrality making things harder to find.... which is kinda happening. Google, Amazon, and like 4 other companies maybe run the world.
The first radio there was a "Sony My First Radio"... the blue one from Radio Shack. The blue one had AM. The red one had FM. You only got one band, the red or the blue, and he had the blue one. AM kept you out of the mainstream crap from the brainwashing hip hop and R&B stations, and all of the top pop stations and crap you hear 50 times a day,and as a trade-off it exposed you to more culture. There was talk radio that you wouldn't listen to because FM had the "popular" stuff. So glad we didn't have the brainwashing one with the popular stuff. I mean, yeah, it was around, but when we went over there, even though he had a few by the time we were hanging out there, that one was a warrior. I dunno, something about it, the old Veteran... it was just a badass little box. There was a lot of latin music, jazz, country.... the jazz stations had blues programs that we'd sit up listening to, writing, heading sounds and thinking of styles of things to sample, and becoming aware of musical options and styles we'd never considered before. Opera and classical music... it was interesting. The mic to record was in the handle. There was one tape player, chunky buttons.. built pretty durable, for kids... ran on like 6 C batteries i think it was. Can't find a picture of it anywhere, but that thing put in work.
Later on Byrdo upgraded to a rounded black dual deck. I remember sitting up with Tyy, taking clear tape and splicing audio cassette tape reels together to make the 90 and 120 min tapes longer. Tyy would be beat-boxing one part, and Byrdo would play another part we'd just recorded behind it, to simulate having a multi tracked recording with just two tape recorders. We'd get a dual cassette recorder, and put in a song on one side, press record on the other side, pause the recording, hold the rewind button down slowly or the play button so it wasn't pressed all the way, but it made a low or high pitched distorted sound, record that, and then rewind the tape we were recording and play it again from the same position and record that... it simulated a record scratching effect, with that repeated/record skipping playback... so you could he-ri-he-ri-hear the same thing as turntables but without turntables because they were so expensive for kids with no money and a lot of ideas. When you lack the money you gain the ingenuity. That red book on the desk there is a Japanese-English dictionary. Seriously, if it wasn't for Byrdo and Slikk, i don't even think you'd be at this page reading this. Who knows where we would be now. Seriously. Folks like that believe in you, are willing to share what they have so you can get somewhere... that's what people are supposed to do for each other. Don't abuse it. Don't disrespect it. Don't take it for granted. Make it work. Make it count.
Long nights, and we'd rotate. One person would go to work and the other could have the computer, and another would be knocked out on a futon bunk bed with the couch bed bottom. The top was cleared off to make a shelf we used for storage. There was crap all over the place, but it was organized. You knew which stack of books and papers was who's. So if you were writing a song, you knew where it was. All of the cds and tapes were in alphabet order. There was an old found swivel office chair that creaked and you'd have to move really slow when recording so the chair didn't pick up on the mic. I remember being passed out at the computer, laid out on the desk, sometimes mashing down buttons on the keyboard, music blasting thru the headphones.... and someone would tap me on the back, "Hey yo, shift change. Go knock out." and I'd get up and slump on the couch/bed, and they would sit down in that squeaky chair, save everything, and put the headphones on, and get back to work. That place was a machine. A factory. That place got hot and there was no AC, just a window and fans, that you had to turn off if you were at the mic because we didn't really know anything about sound insulation, and when we learned, we'd just put the futon mattress up against a wall, which was tricky, or just bury yourself in the couch and record so the sound was walled in by the mattress. Behringer mic. Now and then one of those striped socks was the windscreen. Get a hanger with a stocking and some duct tape. The picture at the top of the page, the b/w one, is where it all started. That is the first computer we had. Monitor weighed like 40 lbs. Byrdo and Slikk got together on specs once things started really building and built the second computer that's in "The Wrath" cover pic (above this). We had zip disks. Throwback classic, right?! Some of this is maybe a throw over your heads completely. Infinite beings. Don't let Charlie start talking about "back in the day". Half vampire and half angel, she's been around a while. Her Back in the Day goes maybe back waaaay before Ahmad, to when people knew Lords as Loaf Wards. Anyways, i loved zip disks. I miss those. 300's the yellow ones. Well, I liked the yellow ones. Tyy liked the green ones. Byrdo and Slikk didn't care as long as they worked and held a lot of stuff. When we moved to the Asylum he donated some stuff to there to get us going, which was frickin awesome. To be able to work on your own stuff whenever you want is an amazing capability, but it didn't come free. We all put in a lot of work to get parts for things, dumpster dove, just straight up jacked stuff...
I remember Byrdo calling us up cause some folks had just left from a recording session like, "Yo, get over here. Don't matter how late. Come thru the back door, i can see out the window so i'll let you in. This was some boouuulllllllsheit." And we'd swing by and get to making music, kicking it. That's another thing about this place, the energy was right between all of us here. Byrdo was doing his thing in the groups and projects he was in, and we were doing our thing, but when we all linked up, everyone was on the same page. A lot of the stuff he was doing was pure Philly hip hop, and the only drawback to that was it was a tunnel vision kinda thing. Folks were either doing the same weeded out, corner kid thing, or doing something "different" which all ended up being either "girly stuff" or "political throw back pre-conscious" stuff. A little conscious but that regurgitated street thug consciousness. Folks talking about Egypt and folks were gods but never been there, and didn't even know the pantheon. Folks get sucked into trends because it exploits a hole in them. We were pushing for more than that. You get sick of hearing that. It's not creation. You're just re-creating the same box and putting yourself right in the center. Then there would be folks who were these super-thugs on the mic, but you saw them at work or at the bus station or something, knew their grandmamas, knew girls they were nervous to talk to.... but that's the image the city wants for black youth. A template for a min-dead soul numbed android... programmable to serve, either in jail or the military. Anything else is just a place marker for you to be until they can get you in jail. If you make it thru the game, you make it. Plenty more to take your place. We didn't care about trends or even making music that was going to sell... we were just into making music we thought was dope, and telling our sides of the story. That's what we did. That's where we all came together. Even if folks had different views, it all fit together like a puzzle to show this well rounded picture. I wish a lot of the stuff lost there we could get back. Those were some golden tracks. Glad we're all still working together as much as we are though. Not as much as back in those days, but still... when we get down? We get down.
Hey, this album is a good one. 2Pac, Me Against The World. This vid is just one song, but listen to that album. It's a lot of what was going on at that time. The vibe fits really well.
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