L+T: Talk about the intersection between art and hip-hop. It goes back to the beginning with graffiti, so talk about keeping that relationship alive.
BM: Definitely. In the early stages of hip-hop when shit was fresh, it was a new thing that had people wanting to create, before all of the business got involved and before it became this crazy, billion-dollar industry. The more it became about business, a lot of the art gets missed or put to the side. A lot of the creativity and originality gets pushed to the side or lost. I’m at a point in my career where I feel good to be in a position to do what I want to do creatively and make a living off of it. After doing that for so long, now I want to take it a step further and be one of the cats out here that’s now only doing what he wants to do musically, but also innovating and inspiring other cats to take music and art design a step further, and think outside of the box that we’re used to. As fans, you get used to a certain thing, certain packaging, a certain artists give music to you. When something comes along that’s a little out of the ordinary, it throws you off a little bit. So that’s what I’m about at this point – trying to turn everything upside down.
L+T: Any favorite artists to sample?
BM: I would say the recent single I just dropped, “Sunday’s Best/Monday’s Worst”, those two samples I rock with a lot. The gospel sample at the top, and the soul sample at the end. Of some stuff that’s been out that people probably know, I’d probably say a track like “Losing Out” that I did with Royce Da 5’9, on my Tronic album. Since we’re speaking on favorite artists, the cat Alan Parsons – who I sampled on that track – he’s one of the cats that if I see his name in the record store, or if I see a record by him that I haven’t seen before I would definitely take it to the turntables and check it out because he’s pretty consistent when it comes to finding gems on the albums he put out. He’s definitely one of the cats when it comes to the prog-rock type music.
L+T: How did J. Dilla helped mold your line of thinking as a hip-hop producer?
BM: He’s a producer’s producer. If you make beats – and definitely if you’re a cat that makes beats and your style of production on the sampling side – I feel like almost every cat that has kind of approach when it comes to beat-making looks at J. Dilla as one of the best. Not only is he a talented beatmaker, but the way the cat was 10 steps ahead of everybody all the time was just amazing. He showed you that anything you might have thought was impossible was possible. You can take a style of music, whether it’s rock, reggae, electronic, and flip it and make it your own and make it some funky hip-hop type-shit. That’s what he was good for, like, “Damn, I didn’t even think to go in this section of the record store, but after hearing what he just flipped I need to.” He was that kind of cat, that stuff you wouldn’t think about musically he would do the shit and inspire you to open up your brain, and show all the possibilities of what could be done in hip-hop. There’s not a lot of cats that have done what J. Dilla has done. When you think about hip-hop and live music, cats like The Roots might come to mind; when you think about producers incorporating live music, there wasn’t a lot of cats doing that around the late ’90s, but Dilla came out with an album called Welcome To Detroit where he was incorporating a lot of live instrumentation and crazy, electronic, uptempo shit. At the time, it might have seemed like, “What is this?”, but five years down the line, it’s like, “Oh, I get it now.” He never stayed in the moment or lived in the moment. He was always on to the next, and by the time you as a fan listen to it and love, he’s already on to the next shit. That right there is inspiring, and it puts me in a position when I make music to try to think two steps ahead. Whatever people are enjoying sonically right now, it’s like, “How can I take a little bit of that and flip it and be on to the next that people aren’t really hip to yet?” That’s how he influenced me.
http://lifeandtimes.com/black-milk-speaks-on-art-instrumental-ep-synth-or-soul
Synth Or Soul is available here.
