BeatRoute Magazine BC Edition February 2019

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BPM LOOP SESSIONS AN UNDERGROUND INCUBATOR FOR CREATIVE EXPLORATION JOEY LOPEZ CLUBLAND YOUR MONTH MEASURED IN BPMS JOEY LOPEZ Winter isn’t over yet and the cold might make you want to stay in all day, but you’re not going to want to be a homebody forever so get out there and catch some of the electrifying shows that February has to offer. Grab your Valentine’s Day date and impress them with your impeccable tastes at this month’s upcoming shows. BOOMBOX CARTEL February 7th at Celebrities The LA-based electronic dance duo with Latin roots, Boombox Cartel are guaranteed to bring the house down at Celebrities Nightclub with their trap and hip-hop influenced production. Get ready to be danced into a daze by their hypnotizing grooves that is both dramatic and romantic with a touch of head-banging dubstep snuck in there to keep you guessing WTF will come next. Get ready to experience two club DJs on creative steroids. Loop Sessions creates a space that welcomes creatives free of charge and free of ego to learn and create. There are few things left that are found out by way of word of mouth. The internet has provided immediate access to nearly all information known to humans and spontaneous discovery becomes rarer every day. There’s something special about something that is truly underground – unadvertised and not promoted or reposted one hundred times over to gain mass attention. Loop Sessions is just that. An opportunity for raw creative improvisation: once a month a group of 30 producers are brought under a single roof and given the same song to sample. Each producer is then tasked to create a two to three minute beat based on that sample within a three hour time frame. From there, they reveal their creations to each other – something wholly original with no two songs sounding the same. Loop Sessions is a hidden gem, not only just to Vancouver but to places all around the world. Its origins are the brain child of a group of producers from Brazil that sought to bring artists together under the name Deep Brasilia. From there it found its way to Montreal by way of Canadian producer Dr. Mad. Bringing it to Vancouver was practically serendipitous. While recording I M U R’s latest album in Montreal, band member Mikey Blige came across the Loop Sessions that was happening there and immediately sought to bring it back home with him. Unbeknownst to him, Nick Wisdom of producing duo Potatohead People happened to have the exact same idea, “I met up with Dr. Mad on my trip to Montreal and told him that Mikey went to Loop Sessions and how I wished I could have gone. He was like, ‘You guys have to start it in Vancouver. That’s your mission you have to do this.’ Says Wisdom of the beginnings of Loop Sessions Vancouver, “When I came back to Vancouver I was planning on starting [Loop Sessions] with Nick and I didn’t even know he was given this mission. It was kind of perfect timing. And we didn’t even have a space but the owner of Nemesis Café really likes hip-hop and he offered us the space for anything we wanted,” Blige mentions of the synchronicity of the event coming together. According to Wisdom, the mission itself was to create a space that welcomed creatives free of charge, free of ego and free of clout chasing. “The best part of it is you get to see so deep into somebody by what they choose to do with those two hours. Everybody’s vulnerable and none of these beats are masterpieces, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about giving people something to do. I remember the feeling of the first one and being so inspired by 28 photo by Bailey Morgan seeing 30 people making beats, 25 of which I had never seen in my life and now we see them all the time.” “We don’t even want to advertise it because we don’t want too many people coming and resulting in someone being turned away [due to space], so we invite people that we know make music or anyone who was at the past Loop Sessions. There’s already been this great community of people that have naturally gravitated toward it.” Says Blige, “But we want to open it up to more newbies and more women. We have a lot of men come in and we’re wondering how we can change that,” chips in Wisdom about building on the accessibility of the event. The solitary practice of creating beats in one’s own room becomes a social event, putting those who normally shy away from the spotlight centre stage for their peers to witness and admire. “During the month we started this in Vancouver, without any external contact, Loop Sessions Brussels and Loop Sessions Buenos Ares started at the same time. And now there’s a Toronto one, too,” Says Blige, solidifying the collective consciousness behind Loop Sessions and affirming that this is exactly what producers around the world have been craving. “ We hope in the future with a little bit of love we can build something where people are travelling city to city, bringing people from like Loop Sessions Montreal out here and we send people out there and when people go travelling to whichever city they will know there’s a Loop Sessions there. Creating a bigger network and crossing more paths.” says Wisdom, hopeful for the future of turning Loop Sessions into a worldwide networking opportunity, “We really want to establish more public support. What we’re hopeful for in the future is to get more high profile curators, so people who are producing locally will have a bridge to those who are on the international circuit. There’s a huge opportunity there,” Says Blige on the future plans of Loop Sessions. With Vancouver’s DIY venues suffering from the meteoric rise of unaffordable real estate and the gentrification of lower income neighborhoods with great losses happening across the city, something like Loop Sessions is exactly what Vancouver needed. An accessible space, free of charge where artists can create freely and where newcomers to the scene can rub shoulders with local legends. Loop Sessions is held monthly at Nemesis Coffee free of charge and is open to the public. Catch February’s Loop Sessions hosted and curated by DJ Flipout. CHALI 2NA February 14th at The Imperial Oh shit, Chali 2na himself! The OG from the legendary Jurassic 5 is going to be bringing his brand of classic hip-hop to The Imperial on Valentine’s Day. When we say classic hip-hop we mean it and this is the show to be at if you want to spend the most romantic day of the year if you feel like you’re getting funky with one of the grandfathers of the Chicago rap scene. YVES TUMOR February 16th at Celebrities Do you have plans February 16th? Well, forget them. Forget them now! Drop everything and go see Yves Tumor at Celebrities Underground. Coming off of a collaboration with Blood Orange and their incredibly strong album Safe in the Hands of Love, Yves Tumor is the best he’s ever been and you’re going to want to see what he has to offer. Fans of experimental hip-hop and avante garde soundscapes will have field day with this show. JOJI February 22nd at Fortune Sound Club A member of 88Rising and former YouTube sensation Joji has quickly risen in the ranks of the alternative R&B world with his dark, moody style. If Valentine’s Day wasn’t for you and you’re still rocking that single life then lose yourself in Joji’s brooding tracks about sadness and heartbreak. Embrace that inner sad boy and catch what is most definitely going to be an interesting performance. YVES TUMOR February 2019
BPM SHAD THE REVOLUTION WILL BE ENERGIZED ALAN RANTA photos by Justin Broadbent Damn the man, Shad smashes the state on his sonically aggressive and forward-thinking, A Short Story About War. Kenya-born, Canada-raised rapper Shad has been through a lot since he dropped Flying Colours, his third consecutive Polaris Prize short listed album, in 2013. He became a positive face for CBC’s q after Jian Ghomeshi was fired in disgrace, hosted the award-winning documentary series Hip-Hop Evolution, and most recently became a husband and father. If you think parenthood is going to make him soft, you’ll be dead wrong. “I thought that maybe it would make me feel more conservative, just in terms of wanting to be stable,” Shad says over the phone. “But it’s actually made me feel like I have to live out my values even more, like there’s somebody watching. I assumed it would make me get more pragmatic and sensible, but it’s kind of done the opposite. Made me think even more about what it looks like to live out my values every day.” Returning to hip-hop production after a five year gap, A Short Story about a War is arguably his most ambitious work yet. It’s a complex concept album set on a desert planet waging a seemingly ceaseless world war. The album is a staggering, insightful examination of humanity’s attempt to survive the drawn out effects of a desperate capitalist system. “This album is really anti-capitalist, more than I think I even realized when I was making it,” Shad says. “Do I think we’ll survive? I want to say yes, but there are a lot of challenges. I think the biggest challenge is how quickly things change, and it’s difficult for us to get our heads around what to do, frankly. Our institutions are big and slow. Our governments are big and slow. Meanwhile, technology is shaping us really quickly. I don’t know how we are supposed to contend with that. There is something energizing about having a problem to solve, and our generation has a lot of big problems to solve, everything from the environment to inequality. I don’t know if we’ll figure it out, but I do feel energized that we have a task at hand and we have something to do. There’s potential there.” From a purely sonic standpoint, A Short Story about a War is the most aggressive and forwardthinking album Shad has produced, compared to the warmer throwback De La Soul vibes of Flying Colours. With guest appearances from Kaytranada, Lido Pimienta, Eternia and Yukon Blonde, there is as much going on aurally as lyrically, requiring multiple listens to fully appreciate its many flavours. “I wanted it to carry the feelings I wanted people to feel with the album, which to me felt imaginative, apocalyptic, intense, exciting, anxious,” Shad desired. “All that means, for the most part, getting away from the soul samples that I still love, but, for this project, weren’t right... Part of the fun trying to put this together was the task of making it listenable, approachable and manageable, even though it’s dense and intense by nature. I had that idea of interludes going back to the classic hip-hop thing of interludes that feel almost live, like you’re hearing a poet or a storyteller in a room stitching the thing together.” Hitting the road for his first real tour in years, Shad is excited to reconnect with his fans across the country, to see how his challenging new tunes have resonated. It’s not going to be all doom and gloom, though. He’s going to mix it up. “This lineup, as far as the musicians and sounds, is kinda why I went away from live bass and live drums because I wanted to at least make everything sonically consistent with the darker sounds that are on the [new] album,” Shad muses, “So that’s why there’s the synth bass and programmed drums. The tricky thing has been incorporating some of this stuff in with the old stuff, and have it make sense altogether… Some of this stuff is going to a different place emotionally, and then I have to make a turn to some of the other material that I want to do, especially live, because people like it. And it’s fun and that’s the energy I want to give people in a live setting, but it can be a hard turn.” Pushing the aesthetic boundaries of his music and taking the structure and meaning of his lyrics to new heights, A Short Story about a War deserves to be the one to finally claim the Polaris Prize more than anything else he has yet released. In any case, it’s sure to resonate deeply across Canada and beyond. Shad performs Feb. 21 at Fortune Sound (Vancouver) and Feb. 23 at the Capital Ballroom (Victoria). February 2019 29
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BeatRoute Magazine BC Edition February 2019

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