Cut Chemist - The Audience’s Listening
”They say you get as long as you need to make your first album, but the second one you get a year!” jokes Lucas McFadden a.k.a Cut Chemist. As a well as a heavy international touring schedule, Cut Chemist spent months recording hundreds of songs before choosing the final twelve for his debut album “The Audience’s Listening” released August 2006 on Warner Records.
Cut Chemist is a renowned turntable artist, music producer and record collector extraordinaire. He spent twelve years as a dj and producer for legendary Los Angeles based hip hop outfit Jurassic 5 and five years as a dj for alternative World Music outfit Ozamatli. He has also produced some much sought after mixtapes including two acclaimed collaborations with DJ Shadow, the 1999 ‘Brain Freeze Soundtrack’ and the 2004 ‘Product Placement’ Tour and DVD.
It’s Cut Chemist’s huge archive of vocal and instrumental samples, which form a common theme throughout this album. Introductory track ‘Motivational Speaker’ is a jaunty little tune overlaid with a medley of scratches and vocal samples including for example ‘dj work is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable tasks a person can set for themselves’.
This album showcases the Chemist’s turntable skills combined with those as a producer, using decks, mixers and computers to combine scratchs, samples, vocals, and beats seamlessly together. ‘Spat’ for example innovatively uses scratching over a jazz melody to reproduce a comic telephone conversation!
The album showcases a truly eclectic mix of genres, sounds and tempos fusing together hip hop, soul, jazz with electro and breakbeat.
‘The Garden’ is a Brazilian style dance track, which builds layer after layer of strings, beats and scratches, before the haunting latin vocals and drumbeat really kicks in and the hairs on your neck start to stand on end!
‘What’s The Attitude’ is a tuneful, big beat, drum heavy, hip hop tune with guest ‘Hmynal’ providing some real flowing rhymes, a real sing along party tune. ‘My 1st Big Break’ carries a big beat and funky guitar bassline mixed in with vocal ‘The Robots are Coming!’ before going into a scratch fest.
‘Metrorail’ has a wicked stuttering of drums and vocals as sampled on the Cut Chemist remix of Jem’s ‘They’ mixed into a resonating electro effect. ‘Storm’ has a thumping dance beat with the ‘Mr. Lif’ and ‘Edan’ laying down some speed rapping that gives the track an edgy urban feel.
Inbetween the more dancy tracks there are more down tempo affairs which provide stepping stones between the different tempos and styles. ‘2266 Cambridge’ (featuring Thes One) utilises bongos and melodic strings, whereas ‘The Lift’ resonates with slow synthesizer sounds and ‘Spoon’ is an interesting poetic ditty underpinned with double-bass strings.
The last two tracks tie all these potentially disparate threads together, with ‘Peak in Time’ combining a wide range of soulfunk vocals, drums and trumphets before mixing into the finale that is ‘The Audience is Listening Theme Tune’. The final track is a mix of high hat beats, weird electro effects, as well as a soulful plea to ‘listen to the music’ that mixes in the ‘Listen to This’ lyric from DJ Shadow’s Number Song.
The use of samples, breaks and loops are technically brilliant as one would expect from a Cut Chemist production. However it is the way that such tools are used to combine a varied pace and range of different genres that holds the album together.
However this album is not based solely upon just nefty needle work or fancy mixing, but has a definite musicality throughout, with tracks like ‘The Garden’ and ‘What’s The Altitude’ demonstrating a strong musical element.
The audience certainly is listening.
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September 12th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
rockin review, whetted my appetite for the show on the 12th and no mistakin !