SOUND/MUSIC.

On your album Hud Dreems, all of the beats are edited tight, none longer than two minutes. Is that a style choice?



Knx: To be honest, I do that because **I really don't think about the listener.** Probably should, but nah, fuck that \[laughs\]. **That's how I want to hear it, to be honest, so that's how long you guys are gonna hear it.**

“I’d start to throw a coffee cup away and he’d tell me to stop. When I looked closer, I’d realize that he had put pennies in them for percussion,” Peanut Butter Wolf says, reminiscing about the days when Madlib turned their collective home’s family room into a makeshift rehearsal space. “He’d make do with what he had. There was an upright bass with just one string and he’d still use it effectively. He was insane on the drums too. I’d wake up to the sound of him playing to jazz records for hours. **He seemed to be doing it because he loved it, not because he necessarily wanted to improve.”**

Madlib doesn’t need any of the trappings of success. He’s content to loom in the background and create alternate cosmologies — aware that it’s always better to be heard than to be seen. After all, he may be the last person left whom we allow to disappear.

Earl sweatshirt promoting Doris 2013

Wu-Tang Clan - Triumph

MAXO KREAM X TYLER, THE CREATOR - CRACC ERA

FENCE JUMP

Alternate cover for <n>Kendrick Lamar</n>'s 2015 album <n>To Pimp a Butterfly</n>. Photo by <n>Barron Claiborne</n>.

As a producer, you can be the guy making five beats a day, hoping something lands somewhere. But you're releasing an album, and establishing yourself as an artist. Was that a conscious decision?





Knx: Honestly, I just kept dropping shit. I didn't have a plan of getting placemats or any kind of shit. Having super rappers rapping on my shit. Those were my intentions really, but there's something about sharing shit that you love. It gives you that same feeling that you get when you've made it. It comes back. Randomly fucking Joey, the shit that he rapped on is from my first ever beat tape ever on Bandcamp, and fucking Kendrick raps on some other shit from Bandcamp. What if I didn't share that shit? That's crazy. It's stupid. It's all up to you. You can't hoard shit. Shit can be refurbished. A seven year old beat, and he rapped on that, then millions of people hear it? What the hell? I don't know the science behind that.

A portrait of musician <n>Miles Davis</n> photographed by <n>Irving Penn</n> for the album <n>Tutu</n>.

<n>GZA</n>, <n>Method Man</n>, and <n>U-God</n> of <n>Wu-Tang Clan</n> in London, 1994. Photo by <n>Eddie Otchere</n>.

Robert Glasper: “Jazz is the mother of hip-hop” | JAZZ NIGHT IN AMERICA

<n>Pharrell Williams</n> for <n>Something In The Water</n>. Photo by <n>Sam Balaban</n>.

Interviewer: Going into your process, you’ve talked in the past about the importance of digging for samples as a beat-maker. What do you look for when you dig for samples? Are you looking for music from a specific genre or era, or is it just what you happen to be listening to at the moment?



Knx: It's literally that. I'm listening to everything. I don't really discriminate. I listen to damn Glen Campbell. It don't really matter. I just grew up listening to everything and – not like being forced to listen to gospel music – but I grew up in church and playing instruments.  **You can sample anything, so I'm listening to everything. I’ll just grab shit from movies a lot of the time: old Blaxploitation, all kinds of shit. There's shit everywhere if you hear it. And nowadays, it's too much fun shit to work with. You can make shit so interesting with Ableton. That's my favorite part.**

OTHERtone with Pharrell, Scott, and Fam-Lay - Kenny Beats

Your dedication to traditional, sample and loop-based based hip-hop production is harder to come by these days. What drew you to that sound?



Knx: It's really close to church for me: the feeling you get when you drop these chord progressions and make them your own. There's a lot of R&amp;B and soul music that came from gospel. I've listened to hip-hop and a lot of R&amp;B songs, like, all those Monica joints—the melody is always driven, so a lot of that shit is comparable to church songs to me. **It gives you the same feeling. Everybody gets that chill down their spine for something.**

Cherry Bomb The Documentary (Full)

An instinctive autodidact, he was aware that it’s easier to defy the rules when you haven’t been officially instructed

<n>Jimi Hendrix</n> performing at the <n>Royal Albert Hall</n> in 1967. Photo by <n>Alec Byrne</n>.