This was the third “beat” that I did for this project. The third “thing” I did was the outro, which is again, me just tapping the platter of my DDJ-200 manipulating some sounds in Ableton.
I was just bugging out making that outro. Plus, after finishing the second beat, and naming it, I was already in the mind state that I was creating the kind of beats that I like to sit around and zone out to. I play these kinds of beats and just sit there and stare into space all the time. So, I essentially wanted to create more of that.
To me, that’s my form of meditation, and it’s a small victory for me because turning my brain off, or even down, is nearly impossible most times. It's one of the challenges I’ve faced in some of the things that I’ve struggled to get better at, like scratching. Because scratching is so meditative, that every time I really try, I just drift off and stop paying attention to what I’m even doing. Sometimes it creates cool moments, but it also gets chaotic quickly. It’s one of the sometimes great/challenging things about my brain.
This song is perfect for the kind of beat that I can have looping in the back for hours while I work. I know because I’m doing that right now, and I almost forgot that it was even on until I typed these very words, because it had me in a trance.
For the drums, I used the Yakiman kit. These have a really ’87 feel to me. I’m going to come back to this kit when I work on this 1986-1987 archive album of mine.
The main sample is the first 12 seconds of the meditation piece a.k.a the outro. I simply played the drum beat for 8 bars, looped it, and then dropped that full outro piece onto its own “audio track”, and it just looped how you hear it without me doing nothing, but simply dropping it to the zero point of the song.
I thought I should add at least one more sound, but I was having a hard time picturing what sound would fit with this. I never would have guessed that a slightly haunting sound of wind being blown over bottles, with a decent dosage of “longest ping pong” delay, would be the perfect addition for anything in particular, but here we are.
I explain the song title in the outro, as this is the Pre-Prise for that sound piece, which is my flip on the idea of a reprise. Technically, in most cases this would be the song, and that outro would be the “Reprise”. However, as people like to remind me, I can be overly literal. I feel like I’ve made strides in that, so this is simply me leaning into that side of me intentionally. So since I created the outro music first, I deemed this must be the Pre-Prise. Even more fitting, which I realized after the fact, based on the title, and the futuristic theme elsewhere on this project, since often when we are introduced to robots in entertainment, they are from the future. So, the punchline here is that this beat appears as track #3 on this project, and serves as a foreshadowing for the outro (track #7), and this was possible because the Robot, lest we forget, also poised in the Lotus Position, is from the future, and was able to make it so.
3Wisemen Entertainment is the brainchild of Kevin Beacham, and is the over-arching brand for his various ventures of the
past and present; Stories About Songs Podcast (Coming Soon!), Time Travel Radio, RedefineHipHop, Redefinition Radio, Caught In The Middle Magazine, etc......more
An ode to the duo’s love of hip-hop; lively lyrical performances, in-your-face record scratching, and booming beats. Bandcamp New & Notable May 15, 2018
