Early in 2010, local musician IdiotSavant—real name withheld by request—was listening to hip-hop records by beats-and-samples legends like Madlib and DJ Shadow, and decided it was time to take action.
“Outside of playing in bands [like the John Bobbit Experience], I hadn’t been making my own tunes for a while,” he says. “And it had been even longer since I had done any of my hip-hop stuff, which was how I started. It just struck me to make beats again.”
The tracks on IdiotSavant’s recent debut, Valleys, are intricate sound collages: multilayered assemblages of funky beats, looped instrumental and vocal samples, synth lines and found sounds.
“Valleys is almost entirely made up of vinyl records sampled, cut to hell and rearranged in the MPC [music production center—a combination drum machine and sampler],” explains IdiotSavant. “On some tracks I use synthesizers, some sounds from old video games and some effects processors here and there. Other than that, it’s all MPC and samples.”
In addition to the aforementioned artists, IdiotSavant says he draws inspiration from an array of sources, including “mid-’90s to early-’00s quasi-psychedelic hip-hop.”
He reels off several in rapid-fire list form: “old De La Soul and Wu-Tang, [Beastie Boys album] Paul’s Boutique, J Dilla’s Donuts, Madlib, El-P, rumbling King Tubby bass tones, Most things terrifying, Krautrock, textural noise stuff, comics, low art.”
Valleys melds sounds from disparate aural documents, but IdiotSavant places the final product squarely within the realm of one genre: “I consider it all hip-hop,” he says. “Atmosphere is really important. My favorite records are the ones you can really get lost in, that take you some place else, even if that place isn’t particularly pleasant. Cannibal Ox does that for me, [GZA/Genius’] Liquid Swords does that for me, Donuts does that for me. It’s what I’ve always tried to do, to varying degrees of success.”
Valleys contains 18 tracks that clock in at a modest 33 minutes. The work was engineered and mastered “fantastically” by Matt Jugenheimer and Adam Kozak, respectively. The album is available online for free at http://poorchoicesproductions.tumblr.com.
And now that he’s on a creative roll, the follow-up won’t be far behind.
“I have about nine new tracks for the next record,” says IdiotSavant. “I’m shooting for 30 total, give or take. It’s definitely a little more stressed out and hallucinatory, for lack of better words. It’s not [Mobb Deep’s] Shook Ones, Pt. 2 or anything, but it does its thing. I hope to have it done and out before next year.”
Why did he choose the name IdiotSavant to create with and behind?
“It’s just a bizarre, anachronistic term with a terrible, dehumanizing history,” he says. “It seemed like an appropriate handle.”
