the night museum

freak like me

made this yesterday. the guitar bit is flasket brinner, an early 70s swedish prog band. adina howard’s “freak like me” came out the same year i graduated high school. so the gang’s all here.

i have to decide if i’m going to keep acapellas like these on the final album version of library science. the goal is to get rappers and singers on stuff, but sometimes they sound so right already, you hate to change it up. we’ll see, i guess.

let the computer take the wheel

so the stuff i’ve been posting lately are demos from an album i’m working on called “library science”. it’s a clarence johnson album. super hip-hop excellence. i want to make the best hip-hop album to ever come out of this town, so that’s a tall order. right now john dope’s got that locked and his shit isn’t even out yet.

but yeah, “library science,” and i’ll tell you why. i used to have a real problem with the internet. i was a compulsive music hoarder. i have a shit-ton of music in my itunes, obsessively tagged, to a degree that can accurately be classified as some next shit. i’m not going to leak out all the details of the technique yet, but i think there’s going to be a tell-all/how-to/manifesto pdf with the album.

now, sure, i know you all know somebody who has even more music that i do, i won’t claim the biggest collection, but i will claim one of the best curated. it’s four monthsish of just ridiculously good music. everybody says that, but those are all people with journey’s whole catalogue and a canonical RUSH covers collection. this ain’t that. this is something to be gazed upon in awe. the collection is really what the album is about. it’s about pointing methodology at a vast ocean of content and working hand-in-mouse with the machine to channel the realness right out of it.

it is also about validating the time that i spent finding music, time that made me feel like i wasting it compulsively, wasted it finding obscure rare grooves and old reggae instrumentals and whatever, stuff i’d never have enough time to actually listen to. i want to feel like the old me, the one about ten years ago was doing something to prepare for the process i’m undertaking now.

also, “hand-in-mouse” sounds dirty when you pull it out of context.

anyway, here’s the latest demo.

LIMB BY LIMB

I’ve always been a big stan for this song, so when I realized this morning the beat I was making was in the same key, I kinda had a little moment of “GORSH I HOPE THESE GO TOGETHER” and then the magic happened and got all over the place.

This was originally going to be a one-hour exercise, but I got a little nuts and ended up doing a 2.5 hr session. That’s a helluva good way to spend a Saturday morning.

So the homie-lover-friend and I made a pact to do 30 day challenges this year, and we’re on our 2nd. This one has all kinds of dorky gamification and ridiculousness, but most importantly, there’s a blogging pact. We both, to achieve maximum points in a week, must blog twice. She’s getting all nervous and doing private posts and the like, but I’m taking this time to take the id out for a drive, and doing one-hour* tracks, like this one here:

*No seriously I made this in like an hour and ten.**

**LOL it shows.