“To what extent does producer and beat maker culture intertwine with wider sound arts practice?”
As a child growing up my biggest influence in all realms of art was the Hip Hop beat scene, from a young age it captivated and held my imagination in a deep chokehold. Another artistic culture that also captivated my emotion and feeling was cinema and in particular the sound for cinema, this then led to me having a deep passion and enthusiasm for film soundtracks and collecting them online and on LP. Deep compositions like Mary’s Theme (Stelvio Cipriani, 1969) and Addio, amore mio (Piero Piccioni, 1969) where pivotal in my development as an artist as they gave me the same feeling I got from the Hip-Hop and Jazz records I knew and loved, but it opened my mind up as a producer as it showed me the ultimate free range of possibilities that could be accomplished when using sound as a tool and vessel to communicate in various different mediums. Another example of this wondrous, mind expanding sonic discovery I had as an inner-city London kid is when I went to the Venice Biennale as a young kid and saw the different interactive sound installations on display, one of which being BLK NWS (Khalil Joseph, 2016), this installation piece was pivotal to my development as an artist as it showed me how sound installation can be used to convey a clear political message, rather than a more abstract one synonymous with a lot of sound installation work. Joseph did this by creating a world within worlds, an afro-surrealist world running parallel to the one we live in, commentating upon ‘current affairs’ within the afro-diasporic world. I thought this concept was great as it was accessible for someone like me, who at the time wasn’t totally privy to the world of sound art installations. Although the installation could have been more immersive sonically, it showed how the power of message and meaning can quite often supersede the need for intricate sonic composition. Being that most of the soundtrack of this installation was based upon Hip-Hop convention, this further bolstered my vision of the potential of Hip Hop and producer culture operating in spaces outside of traditional commercial music consumption.