Quannum: Solesides - Fully Charged On Planet X - The Fly! August 1996
By: CK Smart and Dave Tompkins
From deep within the labs of SoleSides emerges proof. Hip-hop purism is alive…
The global music industry is a stifling machine, a second cousin, twice-removed of legalised racketeering, knavishly administered by a gang of pricey marketing wizards, shyster lawyers and dislocated accountants. Perfidious men and their puppet masters in ivory towers flail constant blah-blah and innumerable untruths while kneeling to the all mighty god of Bozack. Their unholy industry stifles creativity by excluding the creative. And the exclusion of the excluded includes their exclusion from the means. But when you say what you mean and mean what you say, you hear what you know and you know what you hear.
For in the house of the human mind there are many missions, many beats, many twitches and many mics. Many stages and many soundmen. But also many DATs. And many rappers dilute the solution. Delusion becomes the illusion, when reality is quite otherwise. Real hip-hop today does exist, continuing to elevate itself, expanding ever constantly by inquisitive futurists like Dr. Octagon, The Beat Junkies, DJ Spooky, The Invisible Scratch Pickles, DJ Pogo, X-Men, Cut Chemist, Mister Voodoo, Peanut Better Wolf and so on. But how many mics don't get ripped? Many money. Me say many many many.
"My album is 100% samples," declares Josh Davis, with a rare glimmer of pride. "It's an aesthetic that comes from being influenced by an era of hip-hop. Most of the records that inspired me were sample based: Large Professor, Mantronix, De La, Black Sheep. What about the “Big Band B-Boy”? (Mantronix, Music Madness 1987)
"I'm not convinced that's not from a soul record. It may have been a sound that he thought of looping a certain way that sounds like big band and maybe he turned it into a song concept."
It was a throwback to the stuff Bam and them were doing - which was playing any and everything as long as it fit in. People used to say, 'He can't play the Rolling Stones or the Monkees'. They were looking for whatever would push their personality forward, as long as you don't get trapped. If I'm worried about what other people are saying . . . then I'd lose it. We all kinda beat shop on our own and mostly keep it to ourselves because we don't want to sound too similar. We all try to use stuff that's off the beaten-path. We have never sampled the status quo."
Welcome to SoleSides, where hip-hop consciousness pulsates with complete freedom from past failures and current obstructions. Tibetan thought teaches that rebirth can be achieved by the ethical practice of abandoning unwholesome actions. So in Davis, California, when influx introduces entropy, the needle of the mind revolves without effort on wax. In this world, Darwin is God. Diversion is dead and cerebral prowess is not incidental. You awake like Gregor Samsa and enter the time travel, the infinite beat mining and the lyrical unrest inside the mind of the purist... It is a place where cerebral elevation begets salvation and musical soulvation erases primates, where lyrical procreation eradicates populations disassociated with the thematics of melodica.
In October of '93, 'In/Flux' became early sound sanskrit for Mo' Wax. Out there, novas trumpet and flute materialise and linger - scratched in and out as syncopated extensions of the note before, dissipating back into the peregrination. A drum reconstruction is a temporal interzone where cuts shade the en-snared suspense before baseline hills continue forward. At 360 degrees, you wonder how you got there, piecing together defining moments in the travelogue. "I'd rather not keep doing my little In/Flux fast scratch," says Shadow. "I've put out enough records with scratching, unless I've got something new to say with it or until I think of a concept that makes sense within the structure of the song. 'Hardcore Instrumental Hip-Hop' got that out of my system in a lot of ways."
With inspiration from the Mantronix classic "Hardcore Hip-Hop", the above-mentioned Shadow track is a reanimation of an older song he recorded for Big Beat in '92. Consider the several elements that compose the cut: The Grand Funk Railroad guitar break and steady pounding drums dissolve into a two-minute warning of a cappella scratching of 'You Gotta Come Out Fresh' (1987) by Supreme Force. It is as close to a record speaking actual words using samples than any yet this decade. Lyrics Born explains further anomalies: "It used to not be cool to sample off rap records; if you did some rock shit, everybody was embarrassed. But once you start discriminating - that's when you start going down, pal. Once you write it off just on the strength of writing it off, that's when you start having problems. Progressive producers like Prince Paul changed that."
And yet 'Hardcore Instrumental Hip-Hop', despite its expansive ingredients and departure from the supposed truths, still conjures thoughts of DJ Steinski, Grandmixer D.ST. DJ Cash Money, Jazzy Jay, Charlie Chase and Rock Master Scott. The B-Side, Chief Xcel's 'Fully Charged on Planet X', increases the stakes one up, what with its aural whisperings of Lyrics, oboe phrasing, dripping analogue acid biz, voice box and hip-hop sampling finesse. "Just diggin' through mounds of records to find that sound," answers Chief Xcel.
That fool Asia came out of his mother's stomach covered in lyrx.
Perhaps off the deep-end chart, as hip-hop expansiveness goes, was this Spring's ‘Latyrx’ with it's double dose of self-inflicted 'noise texture'. Contrary to Lauryn Hill, two MCs can share the same space at the same time as Lateef does while Lyrics rambles poignantly underneath. (with exception to SIN, 'dual-MCing' hasn't been done on record, as far as we know). Adds Lateef, "'Latyrx' sounds like a fucking monster. If you listen to the first part, Tom (Lyrics) and I used our voices as instruments and we complement each other - an added range of depth, thought and communication into the music. There are parallel lines." Their lines trace back to the boasts, toasts and dozens signified in African village folklore, which Lyrics does so well, "I walk on water weapons witness baby/haven't you heard/I drag the song through different planes/and left the boundaries blurred/and I taught the Neanderthal to use a rotary phone/I kick the devil in his neck without my rosary on." Whew...
In the summer of 1994, I heard 'Swan Lake' from the Melodica EP, partying by the pool at the Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco. It blew many of us away that day, with its lyrical flexibility, wordplay and its use of one song that was familiar. Donny Hathaway's 'People Make The World Go Around', right? But listen closely and detect which version(s)? Then Gab had the wherewithal to mention, "reminiscing with your sister in the living room den." Most MCs grab their dick to protect their ego - fucking your sister in the living room den a la Fritz the Cat. And styles? Gab will point out nature's nuances in each tree and then croon "every little thing I do is an opportunity to dine on your carcass." Try this: take Gab on 'Lyrical Fathom' and 'Attica Black' and tell us that's the same MC on the same EP.
Another groundbreaking example was 1994's 'What Does Your Soul Look Like'. One could argue that it was conceptualised in the spirit of Marvin Gaye's revolutionary LP What's Going On, which was a thematic record that literally revolved around a singular set of feelings and overriding emotion of a disillusioned post-Vietnam African-American. The first song leads into the second, side one into side two and then the end of the last song, 'Inner City Blues' leads into the beginning of the first song - full circle. There is an exposition of the theme, a development on that theme and finally a recapitulation and back to square one, as is the case in most forms of classical music. Contends Shadow, "The way I look at music, there should be a progression in how you arrange a song. A person should start here, learn something and come full-circle and be dropped off where there were except having learned something, or having found out something through the music."
The 32 minute + 30 seconds What Does Your Soul... had four parts, each one stating the theme, developing that theme and then accompanying it to the following movement, with the last section eventually coming full circle back to sample One. "In my mind, that was my first album," muses the DJ sitting on the floor beneath a turntable. It passed the Chris Veltri Golden Gate Park Tree Test, found its way into Mrs. Tompkins' car stereo and became the best selling Mo' Wax single ever. It, like 'Influx' and 'Entropy' requires high fidelity headphones.
Because many people have confused the essence of hip-hop with smoking blunts and playing Sega, the genesis is forgotten - that B-boy culture started in the parks and community centres within the projects of the South Bronx. It was about finding a jovial outlet for the creativity that existed within the chaos. It was about slitting the inferior with words and records instead of knives. And yet in 1996, hip-hop has arrived 180 degrees, with its constant bickering, drunken misogamy, and other violent faces, with its West Coast vs. East Coast, hip-hop vs. trip-hop, commercial vs. underground, Brooklyn vs. Queens, murder trials and Sprite commercials.
"There's an emphasis nowadays in hip-hop on how you're representing instead of what you're representing," laments Gab.
"Think of the realms you travel to create what hasn't been created - take it to where it hasn't been taken. Art can always be improved upon. It's constant travel, so you can't really trip off it." Example: "Call the rhyme/from the front of your mind/some of the time you find/it's running your mind and/under your mind is eternity." Example two: "That condones my zone to be truly hard/when I leave my physical/and start moving beyond the wind."
"I've heard this a lot and it's always offended me," says Gab, "People will say, 'Anybody can rap.' And that's true, but anybody can sing. But were you meant to sing? A lot of people look at it like a hustle. But there are artists who were meant to be artists. To me music is like travelling - like time travel. When you create something, you bring it from within here."
"When you're feeling the flow, you don't want to mess with it. You just do it. Certain tracks that six months later you're still feeling, those are the ones that you must have something more to say on the subject. With sampling, you're looking for like twelve different ingredients, from who knows where to make your own statement, your own sound. So you go back and spend more time on them. There are creative periods where all I want to do is make beats, and I might make like a dozen beats and then not make any music for four months. Adds, Lyrics Born, with a shake of the head, "Sometimes every human being gets on overload."
"Unity is what we like most/and that's what we boast about, We be toppling the microphone/and we be toastin' it out. That's what we hold most sacred to us, No pop, But mother fuckers don't even understand what we got. It's like everybody together..." - Lateef, Live at Barony.
"James (Lavelle) was really the only person, besides (the late) Funkenklein to give the sound that I tried out on 'The Legitimate Mix' another shot. He said, 'OK, why don't you try and pursue that.' You know, 'I'm down with that'." The conversation then turned to a quasi-roundtable discussion of the independent spirit of SoleSides' music and modus operandi, explains Zen, "There was a time when we all just thought, 'Our shit is so incredible. Why doesn't anyone sit up and take notice?' But once we figured out collectively, after a while, that no one was going to pay us any mind, it became easy - really really easy." Adds Lateef, "We're gonna keep on making music and keep on building. And it's gonna keep on building and that's how we approach it. We're gonna put shit out whether someone wants to help us or not. We're gonna put shit out." The living room gets uncommonly quiet for a brief moment before Lyrics Born relieves all doubt, "Oh, it's coming out!"
"It's hard to do an original composition," states Lyrics Born, one-third of SoleSides' beat production crew. "The trick is you gotta make it happen through samples. If you have a lot of records, then you have a big vocabulary and that many more ways you can say things. Every thought you have has some basis in some other thought. When you listen to things critically, you synthesise everything you listen to. The more unpredictable you get, the more exciting it's gonna be."
"It's only in the '90s that hip-hop has become one set of stories, never any kind of variance of sound or challenging thought process," laments Shadow. "Anything that challenges the structures of hip-hop is considered a threat, which shows how watered-down and conservative hip-hop is. Everybody knows 'trip-hop' is a phrase a writer came up with to meet his deadline instead of spending four sentences trying to really describe it. Fortunately in Britain they've figured out I'm not a part of that. And they don't bother me about it anymore.
"You'll always have an ignorant, over-sanitised way of categorising music because most people don't care. To most people, music is like a background to their lives. For all of us in this room, music is more than that. But we can't go out and convince the rest of the world that it has to be that way. If you listen to what we do, you realise we're not making pop records."
Lakim Shabazz says "Reconstruction is my instruction." on a DJ Shadow sample, that we'll let you listen closely to find for yourself. But it is this statement that sums up the philosophy that drives SoleSides' ideas. Shadow defines musical arrangement as a learning experience. "There's a logical progression and a satisfaction towards the end - just like in most forms of art. I don't make music for people who only listen to hip-hop.
"More than anything, I'm just a fan of hip-hop," says Shadow, summing up the entirety of his crew. "If you listen to a certain form of music long enough, you want it to go somewhere new. I want to make records to challenge people, to get back to this flow that wasn't happening anymore. As I became more displeased with what hip-hop was offering, the more I wanted to make music."
So the next time you die bored stiff just to claim a ground you have no claim to, think twice. Imagine midnight in a perfect world. Imagine one hundred years of solitude, and a gift of endless samples reconstructed by searching soles. Peace out from the Leftside, Davis, California, West Coast, United States, Planet Earth...
SoleSides Artists Discography
Blackalicious (The Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel):
01. Lyric Fathom/Swan Lake, October 1994 (SoleSides 002)
02. Melodica EP Domestic release, August 1995 (SoleSides 003) - Released overseas by Mo’ Wax Recordings UK
DJ Shadow:
01. Reconstruction from the Ground Up, (Mixtapes, 1991)
02. Real Deal (remix)/Lesson 4 (Lifers Group DJ promo only, Hollywood Basic Records 1992)
03. Legitimate Mix [Zimbabwe Legit EP] (Hollywood Basic Records)
04. Entropy EP, February 1993 (SoleSides 001)
05. InFlux/Hindsight, October 1993 (Mo’ Wax Records)
06. Lost and Found (S.F.L.), October 1994 (Mo’ Wax Records)
07. What Does Your Soul Look Like EP, Spring 1995 (Mo’ Wax Records)
08. 89.9 Megamix (w/DJ Krush), Summer 1995 (Mo’ Wax Records)
09. Duality (w/DJ KRUSH) [DJ Krush, Meiso], Fall 1995 (Mo’ Wax Records)
10. Hardcore (Instrumental) Hip-Hop, February 1996 (SoleSides 005) - to be released in conjuction with Mo’ Wax Recordings UK
11. Meiso Remix (w/ DJ Krush and The Roots), March 1996 (Mo’ Wax Records)
Asia Born (a.k.a. Lyrics Born):
01. Send Them, February 1993 (SoleSides 001)
02. Red Ants/Balcony Beach, April 1996 (SoleSides 007)
Chief Xcel:
01. Fully Charged on Planet X, February 1996 (SoleSides 005) - to be released in conjuction with Mo’ Wax Recordings UK)
02. Doing Everyday the Hard Way (for The Watts Prophets), Due Summer 1996 (London Records)
The Gift of Gab:
01. Mixed Feelings (w/ The Angel and Jacky Terrasson), March 1996 (Blue Note Records)
Lateef the Truth Speaker:
01. The Wreckoning/Latryx (w/ Lyrics Born), February 1996 (SoleSides 004)
02. The Quickening, May 1996 (SoleSides 006)
By: CK Smart and Dave Tompkins
From deep within the labs of SoleSides emerges proof. Hip-hop purism is alive…
The global music industry is a stifling machine, a second cousin, twice-removed of legalised racketeering, knavishly administered by a gang of pricey marketing wizards, shyster lawyers and dislocated accountants. Perfidious men and their puppet masters in ivory towers flail constant blah-blah and innumerable untruths while kneeling to the all mighty god of Bozack. Their unholy industry stifles creativity by excluding the creative. And the exclusion of the excluded includes their exclusion from the means. But when you say what you mean and mean what you say, you hear what you know and you know what you hear.
For in the house of the human mind there are many missions, many beats, many twitches and many mics. Many stages and many soundmen. But also many DATs. And many rappers dilute the solution. Delusion becomes the illusion, when reality is quite otherwise. Real hip-hop today does exist, continuing to elevate itself, expanding ever constantly by inquisitive futurists like Dr. Octagon, The Beat Junkies, DJ Spooky, The Invisible Scratch Pickles, DJ Pogo, X-Men, Cut Chemist, Mister Voodoo, Peanut Better Wolf and so on. But how many mics don't get ripped? Many money. Me say many many many.
"My album is 100% samples," declares Josh Davis, with a rare glimmer of pride. "It's an aesthetic that comes from being influenced by an era of hip-hop. Most of the records that inspired me were sample based: Large Professor, Mantronix, De La, Black Sheep. What about the “Big Band B-Boy”? (Mantronix, Music Madness 1987)
"I'm not convinced that's not from a soul record. It may have been a sound that he thought of looping a certain way that sounds like big band and maybe he turned it into a song concept."
It was a throwback to the stuff Bam and them were doing - which was playing any and everything as long as it fit in. People used to say, 'He can't play the Rolling Stones or the Monkees'. They were looking for whatever would push their personality forward, as long as you don't get trapped. If I'm worried about what other people are saying . . . then I'd lose it. We all kinda beat shop on our own and mostly keep it to ourselves because we don't want to sound too similar. We all try to use stuff that's off the beaten-path. We have never sampled the status quo."
Welcome to SoleSides, where hip-hop consciousness pulsates with complete freedom from past failures and current obstructions. Tibetan thought teaches that rebirth can be achieved by the ethical practice of abandoning unwholesome actions. So in Davis, California, when influx introduces entropy, the needle of the mind revolves without effort on wax. In this world, Darwin is God. Diversion is dead and cerebral prowess is not incidental. You awake like Gregor Samsa and enter the time travel, the infinite beat mining and the lyrical unrest inside the mind of the purist... It is a place where cerebral elevation begets salvation and musical soulvation erases primates, where lyrical procreation eradicates populations disassociated with the thematics of melodica.
In October of '93, 'In/Flux' became early sound sanskrit for Mo' Wax. Out there, novas trumpet and flute materialise and linger - scratched in and out as syncopated extensions of the note before, dissipating back into the peregrination. A drum reconstruction is a temporal interzone where cuts shade the en-snared suspense before baseline hills continue forward. At 360 degrees, you wonder how you got there, piecing together defining moments in the travelogue. "I'd rather not keep doing my little In/Flux fast scratch," says Shadow. "I've put out enough records with scratching, unless I've got something new to say with it or until I think of a concept that makes sense within the structure of the song. 'Hardcore Instrumental Hip-Hop' got that out of my system in a lot of ways."
With inspiration from the Mantronix classic "Hardcore Hip-Hop", the above-mentioned Shadow track is a reanimation of an older song he recorded for Big Beat in '92. Consider the several elements that compose the cut: The Grand Funk Railroad guitar break and steady pounding drums dissolve into a two-minute warning of a cappella scratching of 'You Gotta Come Out Fresh' (1987) by Supreme Force. It is as close to a record speaking actual words using samples than any yet this decade. Lyrics Born explains further anomalies: "It used to not be cool to sample off rap records; if you did some rock shit, everybody was embarrassed. But once you start discriminating - that's when you start going down, pal. Once you write it off just on the strength of writing it off, that's when you start having problems. Progressive producers like Prince Paul changed that."
And yet 'Hardcore Instrumental Hip-Hop', despite its expansive ingredients and departure from the supposed truths, still conjures thoughts of DJ Steinski, Grandmixer D.ST. DJ Cash Money, Jazzy Jay, Charlie Chase and Rock Master Scott. The B-Side, Chief Xcel's 'Fully Charged on Planet X', increases the stakes one up, what with its aural whisperings of Lyrics, oboe phrasing, dripping analogue acid biz, voice box and hip-hop sampling finesse. "Just diggin' through mounds of records to find that sound," answers Chief Xcel.
That fool Asia came out of his mother's stomach covered in lyrx.
Perhaps off the deep-end chart, as hip-hop expansiveness goes, was this Spring's ‘Latyrx’ with it's double dose of self-inflicted 'noise texture'. Contrary to Lauryn Hill, two MCs can share the same space at the same time as Lateef does while Lyrics rambles poignantly underneath. (with exception to SIN, 'dual-MCing' hasn't been done on record, as far as we know). Adds Lateef, "'Latyrx' sounds like a fucking monster. If you listen to the first part, Tom (Lyrics) and I used our voices as instruments and we complement each other - an added range of depth, thought and communication into the music. There are parallel lines." Their lines trace back to the boasts, toasts and dozens signified in African village folklore, which Lyrics does so well, "I walk on water weapons witness baby/haven't you heard/I drag the song through different planes/and left the boundaries blurred/and I taught the Neanderthal to use a rotary phone/I kick the devil in his neck without my rosary on." Whew...
In the summer of 1994, I heard 'Swan Lake' from the Melodica EP, partying by the pool at the Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco. It blew many of us away that day, with its lyrical flexibility, wordplay and its use of one song that was familiar. Donny Hathaway's 'People Make The World Go Around', right? But listen closely and detect which version(s)? Then Gab had the wherewithal to mention, "reminiscing with your sister in the living room den." Most MCs grab their dick to protect their ego - fucking your sister in the living room den a la Fritz the Cat. And styles? Gab will point out nature's nuances in each tree and then croon "every little thing I do is an opportunity to dine on your carcass." Try this: take Gab on 'Lyrical Fathom' and 'Attica Black' and tell us that's the same MC on the same EP.
Another groundbreaking example was 1994's 'What Does Your Soul Look Like'. One could argue that it was conceptualised in the spirit of Marvin Gaye's revolutionary LP What's Going On, which was a thematic record that literally revolved around a singular set of feelings and overriding emotion of a disillusioned post-Vietnam African-American. The first song leads into the second, side one into side two and then the end of the last song, 'Inner City Blues' leads into the beginning of the first song - full circle. There is an exposition of the theme, a development on that theme and finally a recapitulation and back to square one, as is the case in most forms of classical music. Contends Shadow, "The way I look at music, there should be a progression in how you arrange a song. A person should start here, learn something and come full-circle and be dropped off where there were except having learned something, or having found out something through the music."
The 32 minute + 30 seconds What Does Your Soul... had four parts, each one stating the theme, developing that theme and then accompanying it to the following movement, with the last section eventually coming full circle back to sample One. "In my mind, that was my first album," muses the DJ sitting on the floor beneath a turntable. It passed the Chris Veltri Golden Gate Park Tree Test, found its way into Mrs. Tompkins' car stereo and became the best selling Mo' Wax single ever. It, like 'Influx' and 'Entropy' requires high fidelity headphones.
Because many people have confused the essence of hip-hop with smoking blunts and playing Sega, the genesis is forgotten - that B-boy culture started in the parks and community centres within the projects of the South Bronx. It was about finding a jovial outlet for the creativity that existed within the chaos. It was about slitting the inferior with words and records instead of knives. And yet in 1996, hip-hop has arrived 180 degrees, with its constant bickering, drunken misogamy, and other violent faces, with its West Coast vs. East Coast, hip-hop vs. trip-hop, commercial vs. underground, Brooklyn vs. Queens, murder trials and Sprite commercials.
"There's an emphasis nowadays in hip-hop on how you're representing instead of what you're representing," laments Gab.
"Think of the realms you travel to create what hasn't been created - take it to where it hasn't been taken. Art can always be improved upon. It's constant travel, so you can't really trip off it." Example: "Call the rhyme/from the front of your mind/some of the time you find/it's running your mind and/under your mind is eternity." Example two: "That condones my zone to be truly hard/when I leave my physical/and start moving beyond the wind."
"I've heard this a lot and it's always offended me," says Gab, "People will say, 'Anybody can rap.' And that's true, but anybody can sing. But were you meant to sing? A lot of people look at it like a hustle. But there are artists who were meant to be artists. To me music is like travelling - like time travel. When you create something, you bring it from within here."
"When you're feeling the flow, you don't want to mess with it. You just do it. Certain tracks that six months later you're still feeling, those are the ones that you must have something more to say on the subject. With sampling, you're looking for like twelve different ingredients, from who knows where to make your own statement, your own sound. So you go back and spend more time on them. There are creative periods where all I want to do is make beats, and I might make like a dozen beats and then not make any music for four months. Adds, Lyrics Born, with a shake of the head, "Sometimes every human being gets on overload."
"Unity is what we like most/and that's what we boast about, We be toppling the microphone/and we be toastin' it out. That's what we hold most sacred to us, No pop, But mother fuckers don't even understand what we got. It's like everybody together..." - Lateef, Live at Barony.
"James (Lavelle) was really the only person, besides (the late) Funkenklein to give the sound that I tried out on 'The Legitimate Mix' another shot. He said, 'OK, why don't you try and pursue that.' You know, 'I'm down with that'." The conversation then turned to a quasi-roundtable discussion of the independent spirit of SoleSides' music and modus operandi, explains Zen, "There was a time when we all just thought, 'Our shit is so incredible. Why doesn't anyone sit up and take notice?' But once we figured out collectively, after a while, that no one was going to pay us any mind, it became easy - really really easy." Adds Lateef, "We're gonna keep on making music and keep on building. And it's gonna keep on building and that's how we approach it. We're gonna put shit out whether someone wants to help us or not. We're gonna put shit out." The living room gets uncommonly quiet for a brief moment before Lyrics Born relieves all doubt, "Oh, it's coming out!"
"It's hard to do an original composition," states Lyrics Born, one-third of SoleSides' beat production crew. "The trick is you gotta make it happen through samples. If you have a lot of records, then you have a big vocabulary and that many more ways you can say things. Every thought you have has some basis in some other thought. When you listen to things critically, you synthesise everything you listen to. The more unpredictable you get, the more exciting it's gonna be."
"It's only in the '90s that hip-hop has become one set of stories, never any kind of variance of sound or challenging thought process," laments Shadow. "Anything that challenges the structures of hip-hop is considered a threat, which shows how watered-down and conservative hip-hop is. Everybody knows 'trip-hop' is a phrase a writer came up with to meet his deadline instead of spending four sentences trying to really describe it. Fortunately in Britain they've figured out I'm not a part of that. And they don't bother me about it anymore.
"You'll always have an ignorant, over-sanitised way of categorising music because most people don't care. To most people, music is like a background to their lives. For all of us in this room, music is more than that. But we can't go out and convince the rest of the world that it has to be that way. If you listen to what we do, you realise we're not making pop records."
Lakim Shabazz says "Reconstruction is my instruction." on a DJ Shadow sample, that we'll let you listen closely to find for yourself. But it is this statement that sums up the philosophy that drives SoleSides' ideas. Shadow defines musical arrangement as a learning experience. "There's a logical progression and a satisfaction towards the end - just like in most forms of art. I don't make music for people who only listen to hip-hop.
"More than anything, I'm just a fan of hip-hop," says Shadow, summing up the entirety of his crew. "If you listen to a certain form of music long enough, you want it to go somewhere new. I want to make records to challenge people, to get back to this flow that wasn't happening anymore. As I became more displeased with what hip-hop was offering, the more I wanted to make music."
So the next time you die bored stiff just to claim a ground you have no claim to, think twice. Imagine midnight in a perfect world. Imagine one hundred years of solitude, and a gift of endless samples reconstructed by searching soles. Peace out from the Leftside, Davis, California, West Coast, United States, Planet Earth...
SoleSides Artists Discography
Blackalicious (The Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel):
01. Lyric Fathom/Swan Lake, October 1994 (SoleSides 002)
02. Melodica EP Domestic release, August 1995 (SoleSides 003) - Released overseas by Mo’ Wax Recordings UK
DJ Shadow:
01. Reconstruction from the Ground Up, (Mixtapes, 1991)
02. Real Deal (remix)/Lesson 4 (Lifers Group DJ promo only, Hollywood Basic Records 1992)
03. Legitimate Mix [Zimbabwe Legit EP] (Hollywood Basic Records)
04. Entropy EP, February 1993 (SoleSides 001)
05. InFlux/Hindsight, October 1993 (Mo’ Wax Records)
06. Lost and Found (S.F.L.), October 1994 (Mo’ Wax Records)
07. What Does Your Soul Look Like EP, Spring 1995 (Mo’ Wax Records)
08. 89.9 Megamix (w/DJ Krush), Summer 1995 (Mo’ Wax Records)
09. Duality (w/DJ KRUSH) [DJ Krush, Meiso], Fall 1995 (Mo’ Wax Records)
10. Hardcore (Instrumental) Hip-Hop, February 1996 (SoleSides 005) - to be released in conjuction with Mo’ Wax Recordings UK
11. Meiso Remix (w/ DJ Krush and The Roots), March 1996 (Mo’ Wax Records)
Asia Born (a.k.a. Lyrics Born):
01. Send Them, February 1993 (SoleSides 001)
02. Red Ants/Balcony Beach, April 1996 (SoleSides 007)
Chief Xcel:
01. Fully Charged on Planet X, February 1996 (SoleSides 005) - to be released in conjuction with Mo’ Wax Recordings UK)
02. Doing Everyday the Hard Way (for The Watts Prophets), Due Summer 1996 (London Records)
The Gift of Gab:
01. Mixed Feelings (w/ The Angel and Jacky Terrasson), March 1996 (Blue Note Records)
Lateef the Truth Speaker:
01. The Wreckoning/Latryx (w/ Lyrics Born), February 1996 (SoleSides 004)
02. The Quickening, May 1996 (SoleSides 006)