![]() “Olan is like the epitome of New York hip-hop. “All City is just the truth to me,” he says. And to hear it from Knxwledge, the match couldn’t have been any more perfect. Keeping busy as ever, though, he continued to make beats and upload them to his profile on the once-ubiquitous MySpace, which is how Olan O’Brien of Dublin’s All City label came to “randomly” get in touch with the artist. During those formative years, he enrolled in the computer-sciences program at Cheyney College, a historically black university located just outside of Philadelphia, and begrudgingly maintained a job at J. It was still sometime after his youth that Boothe began to make a name for himself in any real capacity. Even Knxwledge’s brand-new second LP for All City, Kauliflowr, features elements of recordings from “way back when.” They had like 15 minutes on each side, and I’d bring a 303 to church and record it straight to tape.” Surprisingly, many of these early tracks still exist, and sporadically appear on his new releases. He elaborates, “They used to record the sermons in church, and have these stacks of tapes. “I was trying to make hip-hop shit from the gate,” Boothe tells us with staunch conviction. And the musicians all had to get new instruments, so I would just take all the old instruments.” Inspired by early Nas (“the grimy soul-sample joints”) and ’90s R&B, the nascent, self-taught artist began to put together a ramshackle set-up and make his own recordings at the tender age of 11. “My mom and dad would clean the church every weekend,” he says of his childhood, “so I’d have access to every instrument that was there. It seems like a totally improbable number, but then again, his estimation brings to mind something the producer said at the very beginning of our interview: “I’ve been making beats since I can remember.”īorn and raised in central New Jersey, Boothe was one of three boys in a church-going family full of singers and musicians proficient in just about every instrument available to them. Boothe’s answer is suprising, and it comes after we’ve spent over an hour talking via Skype about his work as Knxwledge, the handle he uses to prolifically-some might say incessantly-drop his brand of soul-drenched instrumental hip-hop on Bandcamp and, with considerably less regularity, labels like Stones Throw, Leaving Records, and All City. Paak, and other beats twist, stammer, and glide, cutting across genres, decades, and moods, smoothed out with transitions involving humorous interview segments, movie clips, and interjections as often as gentle fading.After a long pause, Glenn Boothe responds, “I’d say probably half a million.” He’s seated at his desk surrounded by strewn-about records, a poster emblazoned with the word “BEATS,” stacks of unmarked cassette tapes, and a tousled bed, and behind him, the LA sun shines through his basement window, backlighting his slumped silhouette and accentuating the smoke that wafts from the second joint he just finished rolling. ![]() Among the shorter cuts, there's a dusty soul strutter graced by. ![]() "amansloveislife_keepon," one of two bright moments bringing back vocal trio Kut Klose (1995), coasts in a state of bliss induced by Patrice Rushen's electric piano, while the four-and-a-half-minute "minding_my business," similarly uplifted and rooted in sophisticated funk, is actually a backdrop for free-and-easy vocalists Durand Bernarr and Rose Gold. What few tracks eclipse the mark never drag. The tracks are a little longer on average but still rarely exceed two minutes. ![]() While it's even more tantalizing to imagine the result of Boothe restricting his sources to nothing but recordings from the titular year - sampling classics by the likes of BDP, Guy, Pebbles, and Super Lover Cee & Casanova Rud - this is lacking neither imagination nor creativity, and is another transfixing exhibition of the beatmaker's command. Boothe's second solo Stones Throw LP, 1988, obviously could not, as his label alleges with a wink, be based on recordings the producer made the year he was born, when he encountered an E-mu SP-12 sampling drum machine. Paak under the name NxWorries, and continued to supply his growing base with dozens of smaller-scale digital releases. Since offering his first Stones Throw album, Hud Dreems, in 2015, Glen Boothe has snared a Grammy nomination through his contribution to Album of the Year candidate To Pimp a Butterfly (for which he co-produced "Momma"), joined Anderson. ![]()
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