Thursday, January 01, 2015
Guts - Hip Hop After All (2014)
Without hip-hop, Guts wouldn’t be half the producer he is today. Hip-hop as inspiration, a gateway to so many different musical styles, the trigger for a continually expanding musical bulimia, the springboard from which he dived into a bottomless musical well.
Hip-hop – which has been Guts’ true love for the last 25 years, despite its taking futile, gangsta and materialistic paths.
Hip-hop – which in quarter of a century has driven him to spend whole nights with samplers, drum machines, expanders and vinyl, tapping on pads, adjusting the drums and honing his samples.
Hip-hop – which is often done remotely nowadays by sending digital files back and forth. Guts has opted to make it shine like when it was all brand new, decided after three entirely instrumental albums to re-establish contact with rappers, vocalists, jazz players and soul men by packing up his productions and heading across the Atlantic to record them in their home surroundings in New York and California.
Backed up on production by the inexhaustible DJ Fab (Hip Hop Resistance) and supported from Paris by his label Heavenly Sweetness (“A French label spreading colourful music for the soul”), Guts explores a host of styles, flows and atmospheres to build up a mosaic of 16 tracks, each nestling inside the other to form a single concept: Hip Hop After All.
1. Hip Hop First of All
2. Open Wide (feat. Lorine Chia)
3. The Forgotten (Don’t Look Away) (feat. Quelle Chris & Denmark Vessey)
4. Go for Mine (feat. Tanya Morgan)
5. As the World Turns (feat. Rah Digga & Akua Naru)
6. Man Funk (feat. Leron Thomas)
7. A Glimpse of Hope
8. Forever My Love (feat. Grand Puba)
9. It’s Like That (feat. Dillon Cooper)
10. Want It Back (feat. Patrice & The School Voices NYC)
11. Enlighten (feat. Cody Chesnutt & Murs)
12. We Are All Africans
13. Innovation (feat. Masta Ace)
14. Come Alive (feat. Lorine Chia)
15. Looking for the Perfect Rhodes
16. Roses (feat. Leron Thomas)
Guts: Bandcamp | Facebook | SoundCloud | Twitter
Heavenly Sweetness: Facebook | Official | SoundCloud | Twitter | YouTube