Kyteman (real name Colin Benders) is a dutch hiphop artist and trumpet player. The day Colin Benders, age 22, moved into his apartment in Utrecht-Overvecht, he started to work day and mostly nights, on his debut album. At the same time he started performing with Holland’s biggest, like Relax, Krezip, Voicst and C-Mon & Kypski.
Now, three years later, he presents his music. The album by the appropriate name ‘The Hermit Sessions’ is a reflection of Kytemans vision on hip hop: optimistic, soulful and pushing the boundaries of jazzy, lyrical hip-hop. It was released at 20th February 2009.
(www.kindamuzik.net)
TRACKLIST:
1. Intro - Allstars Anthem
2. She Blew Like Trumpets
3. Une Seule Fois
4. No More Singing The Blues
5. City Is Burning
6. Blow The Whistle On ‘Em
7. Sorry (Live @ Tivoli / Utrecht)
8. Pitchblack Darkness
9. Stand For Something
10. IT Circus (NOT)
11. We Know You Know
12. U-Town University
13. Peace Without The Rest
14. Outro - Marching Band
Tokimonsta is a piano-student-turned-producer who makes beats for Brainfeeder. Her new Creature Dreams EP is out now and fans of her All City and Art Union releases will be happy to know that she picks up where she left off. Toki speaks now about girls, touring, and the danger of knowing too much. This interview by Kristina Benson.
You said you started listening to hip-hop because you grew up in Torrance and you didn’t want to be like the other kids.
The kids I grew up with were listening to Green Day and Blink-182 and stuff. I felt like there was more to music than that. When I found hip-hop—even at that point West Coast gangsta rap or New York rap or local underground hip-hop, like L.A. hip-hop—I found something that really spoke to me. That was an age where hip-hop didn’t have this weird hip-hop-pop fusion. Hip-hop was very much its own category, and not pop. It could get popular and not the same. I found it fascinating—it’s not even just the lyrics. When I listened to rap, I didn’t listen to the rhymes—just the cadence. Which is probably why I make beats. I liked the idea of instrumental music a lot. With early rap, you just heard how they could kind of rock the beat with their rhymes.
You said in another interview that you like things that are really chill or really angry. What’s missing from the middle?
I pull from really diverse things that are polar opposites. I think people feel like they have to maintain a certain consistency—like all their music should sound like one style and it should all sound the same. That’s not how I am. One minute I might listen to bossa nova, but I also love death metal or something random. With my music and taste, I suppose it’s just a matter of how that translates into my music, since I’m just a product of my influences. And my influences and who I am is like the calm and the crazy. There really is a middle but I draw from the opposites.
You said you were an ‘unfocused student of classical piano,’ but you stuck with it for ten years. Why?
That was by force. It wasn’t willingly so I don’t think I was a very good student. With my family, it’s a running joke that I couldn’t play a single song from beginning to end. That’s because when I like to play music, I actually only like to play the parts of the songs that I like. It’s like my early rudimentary form of sampling, I guess—only taking the parts I like and then playing them until my family went berserk on me.
But Mozart did that—he just called it ‘Variations on a Theme.’
I should bring that up to them! They always say, ‘You’re a musician now but you weren’t very good at playing piano!’ I try to kind of convince them there’s a reason why I played piano the way I did, but it doesn’t quite click with them.
What do you think you got out of piano lessons that you bring to your music now?
Musical sense and musicality. I have that music theory kind of ingrained into me. Because I had piano lessons, I’m able to translate my taste in music into actual musical notes. I kind of came from the hip-hop scene originally and most of the beatmakers I knew didn’t know how to play an instrument. They were just really good at doing the drumming and picking samples. I felt I had the opportunity to play more complex melodies, more layers. Maybe my music doesn’t have the razzle-dazzle and as many effects as some other people, you know, but it’s really technical—I kind of brought the technique to what I was playing instead.
Do you ever feel hindered by knowing so much theory?
It has definitely placed a box around how I approach music. I really taught myself not to be bound by the rules. There are things you’re taught that work and things you’re taught that don’t work. The inspiration I had was just from looking outside. I realized someone like Sun Ra—who can play very straightforward, very musical jazz—never felt obligated to theory. He went really out there and the stuff that came out was so meaningful. Even with my peers and friends and the people at Brainfeeder, it’s not like many of them took lessons and learned to play instruments. Except Austin Peralta. That’s different. You get more creative the less you know, so with people who never took piano or any kind of instrument as a kid, the way they approach music is really refreshing. They’re not just going the way they were taught because they were never taught a specific way.
Mary Anne Hobbs referred to you as one of her favorite ‘female producers,’ and I think every time I read something about you, it’s like this main point: She’s FEMALE and she MAKES BEATS! Does that get old?
It does get old pretty fast. The way that people referred to me was, ‘She’s a female beatmaker,’ but it’s not even that—then they go, ‘Oh she’s Asian,’ so it gets compounded. ‘She’s an Asian female beatmaker.’ It’s like, ‘Come on! I’m so much more than that!’ As a musician, you don’t want people to focus on superficial things—you want them to focus on the music, you know? I don’t want people to really get stuck on these really kitschy points. Who gives a fuck if I’m a girl? Who gives a fuck if I’m this or that? What matters is if the music is good or not. One thing good about this scene in particular is it’s not like any of us are plastered on TV where your fans rely on how you look. It’s kind of a faceless scene—unless you go out a lot, when are you ever going to see these artists? You realize people can’t rely on what you look like, so they have to rely on the music. I’ve had conversations about this with Steve [Ellison, a.k.a Flying Lotus]—about how it really bothers me that people want to find a theme and kind of run with it. Like with him: ‘Oh you’re Alice Coltrane’s grandnephew or whatever.’ But if something like that gets someone to say, ‘This sounds interesting—a female beatmaker? I’ll check it out!’ and that person likes it, I guess it’s not a bad thing. It could be a blessing in disguise. My whole career I’m sure I’ll just have to struggle to get people to focus more on the producer aspect and less on the female aspect.
Do you think it matters if there are other women in music?
I just don’t want to be stuck in a box and be about femininity and woman power and all that … the music matters the most. I guess it doesn’t matter, I suppose? If they want it to matter, that’s cool too because at least I know that some people will be more motivated by seeing me—a girl will be more motivated by seeing other female musicians. I know a few little girls that have spoken to me and are like, ‘How do you even get started making beats? How do you get into it?’ If they see I can do it, they might be motivated to try a little harder.
When I was an undergraduate, one of my voice teachers said to me that she quit singing opera professionally because she became a slave to her voice—her voice had become so important that she as a person wasn’t important anymore. Do you ever feel that way about music?
I’ve kind of come to terms with the fact that people don’t pay for music anymore so most of my income is from playing shows. It’s exhausting and I feel like I don’t exist when I’m on tour. It’s fun and not fun at the same time. On tour you kind of feel like you’re in limbo. I’m starting to get a little better at making tracks when I’m away. I feel like people glamorize it. ‘You get to go to all these foreign countries—travel!’ Yeah, but I don’t really get to look at anything! You meet a lot of really cool people—which is one good thing. And very inspiring.
How do you approach live sets? Is it different than what you put out as recordings?
When I play live I use Ableton and a controller and it’s like arranging music live. It’s more like live remixes of my own music. You pick and choose what you want to play—put one drum pattern onto a different song. The audience can feel more involved that way because being behind a laptop is kind of a cold visual aspect. I’ve done this live set so many times that I have it at a level where I can turn off the music and talk to the people in the audience. I did that at Low End Theory for my birthday. There was a couple that was dry-humping in front of me, and I called them out and poked fun.
Why does your music arouse such wanton sexual impulses in the audience?
I didn’t know my music brought this out of people. I’m still on that tip where I want people to relate to it more emotionally. To make people a little bit more sensitive to themselves. If they hear something and it makes them want to move, or that song makes them think, ‘This is what I want to listen to when I’m in love!’ or something like that … that would be more rewarding to me. Let’s put it this way: If the world ever gets underpopulated, I guess I could do my part to help.
(Article from www.larecord.com)
TRACKLIST:
1. Fallen Arches
2. Little Pleasures (feat. Gavin Turek)
3. Bright Shadows
4. Moving Forward
5. Stigmatizing Sex
6. Darkest (Dim) (feat. Gavin Turek)
7. Day Job
"Nearly everything about No Bird Sing is innovative and artistic. Just the musical makeup of the group is gutsy: essentially a hip-hop band built on the raw sounds of one guitar, one microphone, drums and little else. The lyrics are bold, too, influenced by everything from "A Clockwork Orange" to Muddy Waters to Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz." - Chris Riemenschneider, Star Tribune
"There's a huge buzz about No Bird Sing around town and for good reason...they are the best new local band of 2009." – Empty’s Tapes
"No Bird Sing reject hip-hop clichés on groundbreaking debut… At their strongest, No Bird Sing show off three artists working their mediums to a tense high. The melancholic guitar riffs and sparse drumming of "Devil Trombones" weave a pulsing web around Horton's Clockwork Orange-inspired screed on the terrors of trying to be free.” - Carl Atiya Swanson, City Pages
"While No Bird Sing's minor-key melodies and funereal tone will likely try the patience of listeners seeking instant gratification, its stunning originality is rewarding over several listens. Those who take the time to let No Bird Sing’s shadowy tunes sink in will find them hard to shake. – Rob Van Alstyne, The Onion (Twin Cities Decider)
"Is it still hip-hop if the boom-bap is replaced by lo-fi winding guitars with echoes of lost blues tracks and indie sensibilities? No, but with a charismatic frontman in Joe Horton aka "Eric Blair" and a measured, thoughtful approach to songwriting they make for a winning combination." – Sound Verite
TRACKLIST:
01. Basquiat Loves Company
02. Afterlife Insurance
03. My Machine 04. Night Lights 05. Cool Hand Luke 06. Guns For Planes 07. Outcasted 08. Approved Disease 09. Glass Name 10. River Blue Truth 11. Pretty Pocket Snatchers 12. All Of Her Heart
"To the casual listener, hip-hop has always been a music form that is about its visceral power, a force to make its partakers revel in the moment through the shaking of asses. A common misconception about hip-hop is that it’s solely dance music for people lacking an affinity for the open hi-hat and bass drum stomp of the Euro-club sound. Less informed listeners tend to overlook hip-hop’s capacity to be a vehicle for pensiveness, instead simplifying the artform into one-dimensional party music that sometimes comes with a political conscience (backpacker hip-hop). In their minds, there is absolutely no way that hip-hop could possibly compete with ambient music as the soundtrack of choice for thoughtful reflection.
Aether’s beautifully layered, meticulously textured debut LP, Artifacts, which is unquestionably a hip-hop record, serves to challenge that claim. While only one MC is present on the album (in the form of a ghostly, sampled verse on its final track), its gritty drum loops, propensity for sampling, and emphasis on simple, groove-heavy rhythms allow it to fit comfortably into the genre. These aren’t mere soundscapes; each piece is driven by drum tracks that only enhance the hypnotic feel of the album. Each of the San Antonio producer’s tracks possesses a tragic sense of nostalgia, achieved through the use of some of the most basic elements of hip-hop. Choppy, hard-hitting percussion tracks, manipulated, low bit-rate string samples, and ethereal, soulful vocals form the core of the record’s musical palette. The gorgeous melancholia present on all sixteen tracks makes the album a cozy place to nurse your head when you’re not in the mood to be lulled into slumber by Brian Eno. Artifacts may not get anyone in the zone on the dance floor, but it’s perfect music to zone out to."
TRACKLIST: 01. Forgive Me
02. Dejame Dormir
03. To Her
04. Milla Ann
05. Anywhere
06. It Was
07. Autumn Pisces
08. Orfeu Negro
09. Reflection
10. Variance
11. Rain Or Shine
12. Caparra
13. Dame Un
14. Beso
15. Makeshift Sanctuary
In 2008 a humble basement apartment in Brooklyn became the laboratory for the Brooklyn-based electroacoustic duo, Live Footage. Mike Thies and Topu Lyo first met at a Halloween party, unaware that years later they would be described as some of the finest “surrealist soundtrack composers” in the making by scoring some of the most eclectic contemporary pieces on air, in dance and in tune composing their own music. Conceived through the art of improvisation, Lyo plays cello, incorporating the use of live loops and a handful of electronics with no pre-recorded samples of any kind. Thies plays drums and keyboards, often simultaneously. Live Footage’s formula is unique: songs are structured in such a way that enables them to actually build loops without disaster, all while keeping the music’s integrity and allowing ample room for improvisation even when covering the likes of Jay-Z, Dr. Dre and Squarepusher. It is Live Footage’s coherent complexity that inherently wow’s new ears away. Plain and simple, they are “cinematic, experimental, yet still catchyand melodic.” Their first & Second full-length independent albums are already available, their Jay Dee EP is currently live on Orisue’s Website. In the meantime, Live Footage will be touring America, Canada, Korea, and Europe while fulfilling their bi-weekly residency at Apotheke in NYC. (Article from www.livefootagebrooklyn.com)
TRACKLIST: 1. Lightworks 2. Think Twice 3. Sometimes 4. Stakes Is High 5. Got Till It's Gone 6. Didn't Cha Know 7. Runnin' 8. So Far To Go
