That’s what I’m doing with Tranqill as well. … Contrary to popular belief, it’s really grimy in London. London is one of the grimiest cities in the western world that I’ve been to, as far as…just the overall look on peoples’ faces, you can see that life is pretty hard there. It’s an expensive city. They don’t shoot people that much, they stab people. It takes a lot more to stab somebody. It’s all a negative and unfortunate thing. My homeboy Tranqill sort of portrays that grimy side of the UK that America really doesn’t know about. He doesn’t do Grime, he doesn’t do Dub Step: he does Hip Hop. The sound I carved out for him—which which is what I love to do, I love getting a new artist and carving out a custom sound for him—is like a lo-fi swagger. The BPMs are between 78 and 88, nothing goes any higher than that. It’s very lo-fi, two-bar loops with a lot of heavy live instrumentation over ‘em. If I could sum up his sound, think about Portishead and Wu-Tang [Clan] and Coldplay smashed up together. I’m serious, that’s what the beats sound like.

DX: How do you decide on who you want to work with, aside from just making them different from what people would expect?
Oddisee: It’s a couple things that come into play when I’m deciding who I want to work with. First and foremost is money, I not gon’ lie. I’ma not a “keep it real” underground artist, I live in reality. And this is when people are coming to me; if I come to you, there’s no money involved. Stik Figa and Tranqill don’t pay for beats; that’s something I want to do, so we split the fruits of the labor toward the end. … If you come at me for production, you have to pay me. Once you can pay me, it’s two things that come into play: if you have a sound that you looking for, or if I have to create one from scratch. I deal with both, oftentimes. I’ll have an artist come to me and just say, “I like what you do. Send me a beat CD.” So I send them a beat CD, they pick a couple of joints, and that’s that.

Other artists have something more specific that they want tailored. When we get to that point, normally what I do is say, “Do you have any snippets of what you’re working on already?” Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. … Then I’ll say, “Give me some examples of production that’s already out that would say the sound that you’re looking for.” They send me a couple tracks, who knows what it would be, and then I say, “Okay, I see what you’re kind of going for.” And from that point, I say, “I’m going to give you that, but it’s going to sound totally different.” My goal is to give you something that you don’t already have on your project, but it’s still cohesive, so I’ll extract elements from what you gave me, but I’m not going to go down that same road. What’s the point? You’ve already got that on your project. I make sure it’s cohesive, and I might make my patterns or the BPMs, I can’t really predict it until I do it. I’ll make it sound cohesive, but it’ll be different from what you had. It’s real simple, but difficult. … If it’s the same, then it’s generic and it’s lost in the mix. If it’s too different, it alienating, and people can’t relate to it, so they dismiss it. You have to find that perfect balance in giving people what they’ve heard, in a way they’ve never heard it before.

DX: Your mixtape Oddisee 101 was a free download on your blog. What made you decide to take that approach?
Oddisee: As far as my career, I hit a lot of road bumps as far as people not realizing the amount of work that I’m doing, and that I’m an emcee/producer. For all the stuff that I’ve done, there’s still a lot of people that don’t know me. People that do know me, I say a large portion of them think that all I do is emcee, or that all I do is produce. So again, I’m trying to centralize my fan base. When Foot In The Door came out, it was pretty heavily bootlegged. And it was frustrating, because people would get the credits wrong. … I would see one song on a blog on Bulgaria, saying, “Produced by Oddisee,” and that would be it, but it’s me rhyming on it. Then I see my stuff on a blog in Brazil, and it would say, “Featuring Oddisee,” but it wouldn’t have any production credits. People have no idea what they’re listening to; all they know is that it came from Foot In The Door.

I’m putting two and two together, trying to centralize my fan base. So I thought, if I create something and put it online at a central place for people to download, and I put all the appropriate album credits online, people will know what they’re listening to, and they’ll come here to download it, not to somebody else. What that’ll do is centralize my fan base, and that’ll allow me to tour more, that’ll allow me to network easier. There’s no money left in CD sales, you can only get money online and through touring. Continued on page 3 »