(idm) new hip hop tracks on web page

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.