From Kent Williams Sent Thu, May 21st 1998, 19:36
Last weekend I produced a 5 track demo for a local guy, MC Angle. You can check the full tracks at http://avalon.net/~sean/jarid_real_audio/ Sound transfer quality to 16k real audio isn't to bad, except for real audio's tendency to take a drum that goes "Krak!" and make it go "Whoosh!" The backing tracks came from 8track cassette (2 tracks), one crusty normal bias cassette (1 track), and hard disk (2 tracks). There is some pronounced hiss on a few of them, that I in left purposely. If you take away too much noise from a cassetteit sucks the life out of the instruments. In fact on the hissiest track, the noise takes on the character of a percussion instrument. Stylistically, Iowa City has it's own strange aesthetic for hip hop music. Samples from old jazz, classical and easy listening records dominate, and the BPMs range around 80bpm. And we love slow breaks -- I'm often accused of making half-speed jungle tracks. And our MCs, since they're living in Iowa, don't have a trace of gangster to them, and since it's a college town, they all come to the mike with literate, colorful vocabularies. I hope you get a bang out of track 4, which is constructed from samples off the first Black Sabbath record. That beat has been famously sampled many times but we didn't care -- it was a tight little track we whipped out in less than hour.